I am saying that only from the point of view of someone who has made and published a lot of games, in roles including developer and director, on a lot of platforms and dealt with a lot of engines. But I really hate making this about me. The outrage-driven discourse that people hitch onto to promote their shit is the worst excess of cultural materialism.

The most succinct explanation for the difference is that Unreal gets your game financed, Unity gets your game made.

> There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.

You're coming at this like a feature box checking sort of deal. There are so many bigger picture things going on with the differences between the two engines. I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things. For example, if you're aspiring to make a top-ranked Steam game, it makes a lot of sense to use Unreal, because those are all multiplayer FPSes; and it also is telling you that you need a team of 10-100 people and at least an $8-$100m budget, because that's how much it costs to "enter" that space and build on Unreal. Your takeaway shouldn't be "for small teams" or whatever, because you're looking at the wrong stage in the pipeline.

And what I am saying is that they absolutely are not designed to do different things any more. That used to be the case, but Unreal has fully eaten Unity’s lunch here in a technical sense. The engine’s roots are in AAA first person, but they have grown it far, far beyond that. It is now a fully capable general purpose engine for anything from 2D puzzlers to AAA FPSes.

There just are not games any more for which Unity offers any legitimate advantages over Unreal. Unity has been incredibly stagnant as an engine for pretty much a decade, while Unreal has expanded its capabilities and feature set to now virtually fully encompass those of Unity. The idea that they are designed for different things is just out of date.

In 2023 I think the only legitimate reason to pick Unity, and this is a very good reason for what it’s worth, is experience with the engine. I say this as someone who published games in Unity in the past and has transitioned to Unreal. They are both general purpose game engines serving the same teams and the same games, with the exception that Unity cannot support truly top end games.

Genuine question, how is Unreal's support for:

- Tilemaps generally

- Tilemap with rule-based brushes

- "Sprite shapes" basically free-form 2D polygon sprite created via a shape editor

- 2D collision with polygon colliders (bonus points if the two can work in tandem)

- 2D lighting

- Snapping things to a grid? Like moving props in a scene on a grid. Or editing a shape to snap to a grid?

Genuine answer (not OP) the easiest way to work with 2d in unreal is to work in 3D and lock an axis, particularly around lighting and collision.

> Snapping things to a grid? Like moving props in a scene on a grid. Or editing a shape to snap to a grid?

Out of the box you have [0]. With about 10 lines of code, or a few blueprint nodes, you can support more advanced snapping.

[0] https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Basics/Actors/Actor...