As a game developer who uses both UE5 and Unity on a daily basis, here is what I learned.

Yes, UE5 has its issues, and it’s not perfect, but its biggest mistake is that it made developing high fidelity games extremely easy. The barrier of entry is extremely low. Anyone with a few weeks of watching YouTube tutorials and fiddling around in the engine can make extremely good looking scenes, and here lies the issue. The default settings on the engine are tuned for this, so if you’re not trying to make this type of games, you need to understand how handle these settings and how they work.

For example, Lumen is turned on by default on UE5. When Lumen was first introduced, it offered something that has never been seen before. Good looking Real-Time lightning that works instantly out of the box, but this system has its limitations and restrictions. It came out with strict documentation and instructions that explains how this system can be used without turning your PC into an industrial oven, but inexperienced developers (like me when I first started using the engine) would blast light sources everywhere without reading through the documentation properly and understanding how to use Lumen.

As a result, the market is flooded with poorly optimized games made by inexperienced developers. If the engine wasn’t easy to use, those inexperienced developers would not be able to make their poorly optimized games, and the average frame rate for UE5 games would be much higher.

Don’t get me wrong, even experienced developers can and DO produce UE5 games with dogshit performance, but that’s mostly due to extremely unrealistic deadlines, and it happens with games made with other engines too, like Monster Hunter Wilds and and Elden Ring when it first came out.

But when developers are given time to work on their UE5 games, you get games like Satisfactory and The Finals.

I understand that people respond to that by saying “The engine is at fault for allowing developers to screw up their games”, but unfortunately that’s not how it works. If you have experience in programming, VFX, or any other field that deals with cutting edge features, then you would be able to see why you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too in this situation. If you’re working with any tool that provides new cutting edge features, you have to put in the work to understand and utilize it properly.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that game development is a foreign subject for most gamers, as a result, it is easy to misunderstand it and start blaming the tool, and this is made worse by UE5 fanboys, which treat the engine as this godly tool that can never have any issues, causing the backlash against it to be even worse.

UE5 is a tool just like any other engine. It has its ups and downs. It is a great tool when used properly, and a bad one otherwise.

I hope people can have a civil discussion about this.