The people making money from Unity-based games are primarily mobile/F2P devs, and smaller indie developers.
They need stability and ease-of-use/very-rapid-development much more than they need performance or the latest shiny high-end graphics features.
I'm not sure if that's cause, effect or marketing. It could be that using Unreal Engine results in a smoother process and is more likely to result in a AAA target game being AAA. It could be that AAA studios area already predisposed to use Unreal Engine. It could be both. It could be that Unreal Engine is just better at marketing to larger studios given their pedigree.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games
Unreal as an engine product is competing with Frostbite and Source Engine (the various engines Star Wars appeared recently) not Unity.
However EA and Respawn won those bids for a variety o reasons, mostly related to the mechanics of royalties and their support commitments.
It’s complicated. There are many forces at work, only somewhat related to engineering, that funnels the engines to one kind of game or another.
I don't know how well it worked out for them overall though, and I don't recall seeing them use Unity again on another game.
In my experience Pathfinder for example suffers from poor perf compared to e.g. Tyranny, but Endless Legend doesn't compared to recent AoW or whatever non-unity game equivalent.
However, Garry has lots of pull in games including towards AAA developers. I did not say that game was AAA but on the notable Unity list that everyone knows about.
Rust is much bigger than most Unity games, so Garry's opinion on this is highly relevant and influential. Facepunch studios and their forums were also a gamedev spot for a long time.
Garry Newman is also someone speaking from shipping experience in another engine that is for AAA studios, Valve Source Engine. Eventhough that was a mod, and yes not a massive budget or team, it has pull at the AAA level in terms of influence as well.
Rust competes with AAA titles on Steam in terms of playtime/playercount all the time, was top 10 for a while and quite often. [1]
The point is Garry's opinion is more valid than most, even at AAA probably about Unity. A developer of a top 10 Steam game has some pull and is someone to listen to, hopefully Unity hears it. Rust is clearly one of the biggest games in terms of playtime/playercount than most Unity games at least on Steam with the popularity only rising since release in 2013.
Rust is AAA level in terms of playtime/playercount with a small team, that is exactly the market Unity wants, in fact it highlights the benefits of Unity clearly. They should listen.
I wasn't saying Garry doesn't have any big games, I was saying that the list of games made using Unity doesn't include many big/AAA games. I also wondered why this might be.
To clarify, I'm not saying there aren't AAA Unity games, just that I didn't immediately see one. Nor am I stating that Rust is not as good as a AAA game, I made my position clear that AAA is more to do with resources. I would even go so far as to say it's more of a marketing term. What I am saying is that is seems like (from the lists I saw) a lot more large and AAA titles are made using Unreal Engine, and I wondered what specifically leads to that.
> The point is Garry's opinion is more valid than most, even at AAA probably about Unity.
I'm not sure why that's the point. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about. This thread was about Unity being better targeted as small/indie/mobile developers, and I was responding in that context.
I never really mentioned AAA and the reply I made about Rust was also saying that they said "Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list" which is true in terms of budget/team size but not playtime/playercount for a few games on the list.
The biggest games in Unity are probably Rust and Kerbal Space Program merely in terms of playercount/playtime and they do compete with AAA on those metrics, not team or budget size. Both teams have complaints about Unity, as everything, as long as those are addressed things progress.
That is the problem though, Unity is chasing AAA/more licenses when their main target is mobile/smaller scale games and doing that simply. That is the reason both Rust and Kerbal started using Unity, simplicity.
Garry picked Rust in 2013 for the simplicity as he says
> "Unity was about that when we first started with it. They hid all the hard stuff in c++ so we didn't have to think about it. The more time has gone on, the more bullshit has crept to the forefront. The've gone from hiding the hard stuff to moving more and more stuff into C#."
With Unity Rust is competing at the level of playercount/playtime with AAA. That is literally the thing Unity wants the most and their selling point. Unity you can have smaller developers, able to make games that can compete with less team, with a focus on simplicity and being the engine team that makes transitions easy. It is also ok if they are hard transitions if there are major improvements. Unity is many times asking you to update to a new system that is the same or sometimes less than what you need in terms of benefit, and then only to be half complete and then changed again.
As Garry said
> "So while other engines have been trying to catch Unity up in terms of developer friendliness, Unity has been going the other way by making itself more unfriendly."
They are losing the simplicity selling point.
Unity can make games that compete, they should be taking these critiques to heart strongly as teams/games like Rust and Kerbal are exactly the target they should be going for along with smaller games/mobile games etc.
Unity has so many internal developers now, that requires alot more communication needs, testing needs and maintenance. It also pulls the company in many directions if there is no clear engineering/product lead at the top and it is all management/business/finance pushing feature based development which gets them into version 2 syndrome or the "second-system effect".
> The second-system effect (also known as second-system syndrome) is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.
If the second-system effect doesn't describe Unity I don't know what does.
Get back to simplicity Unity, let the engineers/product people have power to set this back on course. Stop catering to big developers, they make their own engine for this reason, consistency and simplicity of their own process. Dogfood Unity with an actual game, the problems will be clear today. If you aren't doing that, listen to people like Garry who are.
Someone remind Unity of that.