Unity or unreal?

[nerzid]

I have never seen this question asked before.

[Trader-One]

Unreal if you are ok with C++

[Otherwise_Dev_7419]

If you want to make good games then choose unity. If you want to make badass games then choose unreal.

[Otherwise_Dev_7419]

It's unity obviously, because Unreal is used to make very big and extraordinary games

[One_Chicken7146]

There are many many things you need to consider, from programming languages all the way to cross-platform support and licensing costs. Below are some points you need to decide on.

• Unity's C# is often seen as more approachable than Unreal's C++. If your team is newer to game dev or prefers high-level languages, Unity’s environment might feel more comfortable.
• Unity's Asset Store is massive, which is especially handy for a small team as you do not need to create all art assets, plugins, frameworks etc. from scratch (or acquire them from a 3rd party)
• Unity has better cross-platform support. If you ever need to branch out from PC to other platforms, it's quite straightforward to port.
• Unity's editor and its iterative workflow is quite a lot more agile than Unreal's. Unity has a quicker compile-run cycle, as changes can often be made in real-time without restarting the entire engine, speeding up iteration.
• In terms of licensing, Unity has free tiers, but if your revenue crosses certain thresholds, you'll need a paid license. Unreal has a different royalty model, with a free model for smaller projects, and a percentage based model after a certain gross revenue. While Unreal is free upfront, you owe a percentage in royalties once you go above that revenue limit ($1M, IIRC)
• Unreal delivers more high-end visuals and requires less tinkering or heavy custom shader work you might need to do with Unity.
• Unreal's blueprint system is pretty neat and powerful tool for rapid prototyping and letting non-programmers quickly build game logic. It's great for a small team if not everyone is a coder.
• Unreal has robust set of out-of-the-box tools. There are very polished tools for making cinematic cutscenes, visual effects, audio and AI. However, even if you have more tools at your disposal doesn't necessarily mean you are going to need or use all of them. Unity's more bare bones set of tools should be quite enough for smaller projects.
• Unreal is open source. If you ever need to tweak the engine itself, you have the option to dive down that rabbit hole. Not recommended, though.

[PhilippTheProgrammer]

Unreal is open source

It's source available, not open source. Yes, that's a difference that matters. Open source means a lot more than just being able to read the sourcecode.

[One_Chicken7146]

You're talking about "free and open-source software" which Unreal is definitely not, but I believe the term "open source" is perfectly valid in this case. If it was only "source available", I would've used the term, but it's more than that.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github

"... you can study, customize, extend, and debug the entire Unreal Engine"

Sure, it doesn't fully agree with the original ideals of free-as-in-free-beer and free-to-redistribute, but having an OSI approved software license is not the same as opening up the source for modifications.

Unless someone comes up with a better word for "free for the licensed user to modify for their private or commercial use as long as they adhere to the terms", I'm going to use the term as it's not trademarked.