Unreal Engine 5

This ended up being a much longer post than I intended so here is the TLDR. The Unreal Engine currently appears to be the engine of choice for a lot of studios. Likely due to the release of Unreal Engine 5 that comes with Nanite, Lumen and better PCG tools. The Industry is seeing a lot of uncertainty, mass layoffs are common, and there’s fewer jobs to go around. It’s more important than ever that developers make sure they are as valuable as they can be and maximise the opportunities available to them and right now it looks like the best way to do that is to become an expert in Unreal.

It seems at the moment that a lot of studios are using the Unreal engine more and more. This is purely based on my own observations while working in the games industry but looking back maybe 5+ years ago it seemed engine usage was fairly evenly spread between Unreal, Unity, and proprietary/custom in-house engines. Now looking at recent releases, newly announced projects, and job listings across the industry the Unreal Engine seems to stand out as the most frequently used.

I would imagine one of the big reasons for this is down to Unreal Engine 5, which was initially announced in 2020 and was released in 2022. This version of Unreal comes with new tech that has yet to be fully offered by any competitors, including, Nanite, Lumen, and Unreal’s procedural content generation tools (shortened to PCG). Nanite being the virtualised geometry solution that allows for much higher poly counts to be used without the usual performance impact as well as reducing the need to create multiple LODs for every asset. Lumen is the global illumination tech that uses ray tracing and other techniques to create highly detailed lighting again without sacrificing on performance. Then the PCG tools makes it easier to create large environments by setting up rules for automatically placing assets onto a landscape and can allow for great flexibility, for example detailed rivers can be generated along a spline path fairly easily.

Along with the release of Unreal Engine 5 and the new tech it uses I think there’s a few other factors that have likely contributed to this shift in popularity. Unity announced a new change to its fees and licencing agreement that would see developers being charged per game install. Presumably this was an attempt to earn more from free-to-play games. Unity has said that keeping Unity up to date including updating the runtime code that can be pushed out to games already released and sold is expensive and so an install fee can help recoup those costs and allow them to invest more into the engine. The backlash from this was large as many developers especially smaller indie teams would face massive fees from Unity and many simply wouldn’t be able to afford them. Unity later changed the way these fees would work to appease developers but the damage was already done from a PR stand point which has likely seen a lot of existing studios move away from Unity and certainly will make new ones less likely to use it.

It’s no secret that the games industry is going through a bit of turmoil at the moment. Large well funded games that were seen to be guaranteed successes are completely failing in the market, investors are becoming more cautious, many well known studios have been closed which also means many games have been cancelled and a lot of popular IPs have been abandoned (at least temporarily). Yet the market is still saturated, I think something like 50 games a day are released onto Steam and while many of those are small cheap games made by indies there’s also just a lot of options for gamers even at the AAA end. Combined with the popularity of live service games that tends to keep players playing the same handful of games over and over again rather than regularly buying new ones. There’s then the “politics” conversation which I have no inclination to get into in this post but there is a very clear divide in both the market and the industry which has a large impact on any new projects. It’s very easy right now for a game to appear to lean too far one way or the other alienating a huge portion of players and thus losing out on a large number of potential customers and revenue.

A lot of people have also been talking about generative AI models and the effects that they could have on entertainment industries. While that may be a factor in the near future I’ve personally not worked on a project or been aware of any projects from behind the scenes that used AI in any way. We’re certainly not yet at a point where it’s effecting a large number of game developers jobs, either negatively or positively. Though I can see how it may already be effecting decisions made by investors.

With all of the difficulties and uncertainties studios are facing in the games industry right now it’s no surprise then that there’s a push to not just cut costs but to also get more out of the resources already available. It’s then not a surprise that studios are looking to leverage the best tech that they can with the lowest up front costs and choosing to use Unreal for those reasons. Which along with offering a lot out of the box also allows studios to focus on hiring developers who already have experience with Unreal and so don’t have to worry about training up new employees on how to use their proprietary tools. Games like Black Myth Wukong serve as an example of the successes studios can see using Unreal Engine 5. A game that was partly praised for its visual quality, likely a result of tech like Nanite and Lumen.

A lot more could certainly be said about the state of the games industry right now but this post is already much longer than I intended so it’s time to get to the point. The Unreal Engine, specifically the 5th iteration, appears to be the engine of choice for a lot of studios at the moment. It’s always been true of the games industry that you need to consistently study to keep up with the latest tech and any industry wide changes to keep yourself employable. As a games developer I’ve always worked on side projects as a way to keep up with the industry, especially as a work-for-hire dev’ who needs to be able to support other studios with whatever tools they choose to use, and going forward I’ll likely be spending more of my time with Unreal.

With so many layoffs happening so frequently, with many developers out of work, many worried about their job security, with fewer studios hiring, and the usual yearly wave of new developers entering the industry for the first time it can be rough out there. My advice right now to both experienced developers and those looking to get their foot in the door would be to learn Unreal, learn Nanite and Lumen and how to use the PCG tools. It’ll likely open up a lot more opportunities and make you more employable and valuable to studios. At least until the next big tech shift comes along.