I'm a daily user of UE but not a game dev, so my perspective might be skewed, but nearly everything in UE targets high end dev (even the clunky parts, haha). The materials and rendering stuff are stellar, but also things like their asset pipeline and content workflows all have a "big project" vibe.

Sometimes the complexity of UE can be overwhelming. For example, if you're just trying to set up an AI-controlled actor to animate differently in some different states, you'll initially be frustrated by the gazillion bits of setup work you have to do. But in every case I've seen, that complexity exists to support the flexibility and richness needed by top of the line games.

Basically, for better and for worse, UE was written by and is used by people who have built, shipped, and supported AAA games.

Personally I think it is because it has terrible performance. Scenes that Unreal seems to be able to render at full frame rates run at a fraction of that in Unity. Even its vaunted 2D system is slow as balls... load times for Graveyard Keeper, as an example, are agonizingly long. And for what? A hundred megabytes at most of 2D pixel-art assets? What is the engine doing with all that time? Certainly not just loading and decompressing shit into RAM.

Reminds me of the unnecessarily long GTA Online loading times that were a result of parsing a giant JSON file. Is it really worth blaming the engine when maybe its the game doing something improper?

Maybe, and I don't know the details. I just have a hard time seeing how something like Graveyard Keeper doesn't load nearly instantly.

"How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%"

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339

Epic has shipped first-party AAA games with Unreal. Unity has not done so. They had a planned release (of a high quality first party title) but have more recently cancelled it.

Unity also had a collaborative open source game project and canned that. And an example multiplayer FPS, but canned it because the UI, scene loading, and networking layers were all implemented using custom code and not the Unity built in equivalents. They had a 4 player multiplayer co-op game demo that they abandoned. Many of their demo projects where they promised to release source code, and they didn't deliver on that (a few of them they did deliver on but specifically under a license that allows no asset or code re-use).

Studios have made some great games with Unity. But the company Unity themselves have no idea how to finish a game, or even make one using stock unity. Even if they can't use current stock unity, they never bring their custom code into the mainline engine releases...

And I'm making these complaints as someone who exclusively uses Unity for their own hobby games. I really ought to give Godot a try, I just have so much personal experience using Unity (and working around their engine) that the idea of learning a new engine is daunting.

I've worked on a few "high end" games, and used to work for Epic.

Epic dogfoods the engine with _real_ games. Fortnite, Paragon, Battle Breakers, Robo Recall are all titles written in UE4, by Epic, which have had active contributions to the engine in their development. Whether you like the game or not doesn't have much of a bearing on the impact the game has on the engine.

They did the same with older games too, and the remnants of games like UT and GoW are very visible in the source of the engine itself.

Also, the incentives are real.

Unity, generally makes money by convincing more people that they could make video games, and keeping up that belief so they keep paying for versions or subscription fees.

Epic only makes money after games have actually shipped.

That's not actually true, the royalty only license for Unreal only started with UE4, and there is still "contact us" licensing available too.

On the unity side, an increasing amount of their revenue comes from "grow solutions" [0] which is basically their ad networks. Game engine development is a funny business

[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-posts-first-profitable-q...

It's not exactly true, but the incentives still align in practice.

"Contact Us" Licensing has always existed as you state, but has often included the possibility of royalties, and even when it doesn't it's always been at the price ranges where shipping a game was more likely than not.

And in-fact, a problem with early Unreal licensing has been Epic's approach to support of "If it's not a problem in an Epic game, it's not our problem" Which has improved dramatically since changing their licensing model.

And regarding Unity, yes, their ad networks are becoming more important, but that still doesn't do as good a job at aligning incentives, but more importantly, Unity has 15+ years of development in a model with unaligned incentives, which when you're talking about technical decisions, those are really important.

And to be clear, I'm not arguing against the point that Epic being a game developer first is an important factor, I think it very much is, however I'm suggesting there are also other contributing factors.