Why isn't Unity being used as much as Unreal Engine 5 to develop realistic-looking games?

As a Unity developer myself I can think of a few reasons: 1- Ray Tracing was added late, and the current implemention is comically slow and the denoiser is very poor. 2- There's still no virtualized geometry system. 3- Making an engine for AAA isn't as profitable believe it or not, the only reason Epic was able to develop UE is because Fortnite is a massive cash cow that subsidizes engine development, Unity has no such cash flow. 4- Unity realizes point (3) so their focus instead is on the lower end instead of AAA, that's where they are very successful at (over 50% of all mobile games, 80% of VR games are made with Unity, and around 40-50% for indie games on steam). 5- Nearly 70% of Unity's revenue comes from Vector AI, which is their Ad business, basically the main way Unity makes money is by selling Ads on Unity games, and Ads primarily exist on mobile games hence why they prioritize mobile. 6- And of course it's not all precalculated genius, you can very much credit their failure in AAA to some monumental fumbles, like how they burned over a billion $ to buy Weta Digitals only to do absolutely nothing with their VFX tech and to lay them off and sell some portions of the business years later. This is not to say they don't have AAA games, some of my personal favorites are: V Rising, No Rest for the Wicked.. and that's about it lol The engine is very much capable of delivering AAA quality in many aspects like graphics, but not all aspects, terrain tools and animations for example are severely lacking.

This was very insightful, thank you 🙏

@RouaniJihad I would like to add that the public API is developed in C#, which is not the most efficient language for achieving high performance. In contrast, C++ is widely regarded as the best and most common language for creating video games. And UE5 provides C++ API like homemade engines.

That's a myth: 1- The core of Unity is C++, the language exposed to devs is C# yes but game builds can be C++ thanks to IL2CPP. 2- Unity does have DOTS and ECS which are made to enable extremely high number of entities without crippling performance, but it's not enabled by default and requires some work to integrate (I hear they're planning to make it the default backend by Unity 6.8).

Unity alienated a lot of people with their licensing fee changes a year ago. Even after the backlash and they walked it back the damage was done. A bunch of developers jumped from Unity because they couldn't handle the possibility they could be retroactively charged years after a game was released because of the policy change. Unreal Engine has its issues but it comes with less risk when Unity's biggest issue is how it's managed as a service.

Their HDRP is fantastic but Unity requires you to set up A LOT more boilerplate to achieve this, look at the Heretic breakdown from a while back Unreal comes with a ton of both game-centric and cinematic machinery built-in that Unity requires you to implement from scratch

Because the company is complete shit.

Surprised at all the people saying Unity is more complex, it’s more like a blank canvas

Every unity game runs like it's being held together by paperclips and hope

Almost none of what you see in this demo is available out of the box in vanilla Unity.

Because Unreal offers a better rendering pipeline overall. Because up until recently Unity kept several fragmented pipelines. Because Unity's leadership offers considerably worse business proposal with their per seat license than Unreal with their from sales threshold. Because high fidelity talent migrated to Unreal, so Unity is left with less devs to recruit from. Should I go on?

One, we haven't seen a game use this version of Unity yet. Two, they lost a LOT of goodwill after they announced changes to pricing (see this part of the Unity Wikipedia article: There's a very clear line between Godot getting big enough for Nvidia to make an RTX fork of the engine, and this controversy.

For indie devs, Unreal Engine 5 is easier to use and provides a lot of free or cheap assets. You know, Epic gives paid assets for free every month, and trust me, some are really good and you can use them in your project. Even if you don't have much experience, you can still create a game.

Because Unity focuses on scalability, while Unreal focuses on photorealism. Unity’s primary goal isn’t photorealism, but scalability; high-quality graphics are simply a part of that scalability.

Unity was pretty amazing for a while. But upper management turned it into a cash shop, yoking every possible penny and improving next to nothing. If I hadn't bought thousands in tools and assets, I'd use something else. Unreal is pushing DLSS so hard though, it's fake quality.

Because HDRP sucks. Unity works great for stylized games with the Universal Render Pipeline. But HDRP is a disaster. Just look at Cities Skylines II.

Short answer is unity isnt as good for massive worlds atm. But the moe to coreclr will help i think as thats blocking some stuff it seems.

Call of Duty Mobile is made with Unity. This is a certificate stating that Unity can build any level at any scale.

Because they tried to raise prices unfairly and tried to take a large percentage of sales from games and people lost trust

Look at tarkov and ask again

Because it's a trash engine... how do you not know that? Are you playing dumb?

licensing fees, their loss of trust with previously introduced runtime fee, too many unfinished subsystems for each thing.

Unity can do realistic-looking games, but these type of games costs to produce. I mean... A LOT. Unity is suitable for small teams or even solo devs, to produce deliverable products in a certain range. Unreal is amazing but time-consuming with a terrible documentation.

I think people tend to associate a give software with certain use cases more than others. I think to how you may associate an Actor with a specific genre of Movie for example. As time goes on, these expectations tend to become self reinforcing in a bit of a feedback loop, people use Unreal for films, which strengthens the association, causing more people the use unreal, strengthening the association... etc etc.. These expectations can be changed, but it takes a lot of time and effort, and Unity just hasnt gotten over this hurdle yet.

Unity has limitations. Unreal Engine is made for AAA games and is capable of running complex tasks. Unity is made mainly for indie games. That's why most people choose Unreal Engine over Unity for AAA games.

Because of previous poor leadership and squandered money.

Unreal makes games that look like movies. Unity makes games that actually get made.

one of the biggest things is the pricing I don't have premium so heres an image

Because it's unreal.

You seriously asking this after they tried to charge ridiculous prices like 2 years ago?? Are you serious dude

Because what you are showing is prerendered.... not in enigine. UE5 is absolutely a more graphically impressive engine by far...

Because devs want their games to look like this

easier initial deployment

I'm not buying another UE5 game.

Because the management are rotten.

Is easier to create your own graphics engine than work with Unity lol

Since Unity’s graphics features are often incomplete and evolve slowly, implementing them is risky; support for these features can be discontinued abruptly or they may remain in a permanent state of limbo.

They hack the engine into something unrecognisable to get these demos to work.