There were problems with the Unity engine, that caused many very noticeable game breaking bugs in Subnautica. It literally took the dev's a whopping 2-years, to fix some of them, after their BZ release, as they additionally ported over some BZ content, into the Vanilla Subnautica release.
Having said that, many bugs remain in Subnuatica, that were never fixed to this day, many of which, are caused by the Unity engine. Everybody is using Unreal 5 now, there's a reason for that. Unreal 5 produces the best graphics to date.
Also, ask the developers what they think of Unreal 5. Starship Simulator is being produced mostly by a 1 man team, using Unreal 5. Unlike the 90's era, where all games had to be completely coded from scratch, Unreal 5, allows you to do most of it, in a GUI, using bubble like connection points, where you are not typing in code.
Basically, you don't need a collage degree to use Unreal 5, you just need to take a quick crash course on it, and build up experience using it. Developers love it, cause it works, and is what has been used, to make some really impressive games, over the past 5 years now.
Unity changed its pricing at some point and became a really awful deal for a lot of devs. It was quite a scandal. Basically, if you reached a certain level of sales, you (the developer, as part of your license) would be charged for every installation of your game, not every purchase. So if I'm screwing around trying to get a Unity game to run in Linux, but get through install successfully, every time I try the developer gets charged again as though they'd sold another copy of the game. The backlash was awful, the plan was reverted, and the CEO ended up leaving in disgrace.
...the CEO was John Riccitiello, who had been CEO of EA long enough to be known as evil there.
Actually now that you say that I do remember crazy bugs towards the end of the game on my initial playthrough. Also I think I do recall this Unity controversy too.
Im not an expert in any of this or anything and there are videos on youtube explaining why Unreal engine is likely doing more harm than good. In my opinion Epic are every bit as bad as Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft etc etc.
The one thing I cant stand, and to some degree I have noticed it with the idtech engine games, is the blurring, it comes from TAA on Unreal games and its horrible looking. Oddly the worst blurring ive seen lately was with the new Indiana Jones game. But with Epic, the blurring of TAA is only one part of it, it also creates lag and artifacting. Its cheap and horrendous looking.
(Im going off on a rant now and thinking out loud!!)... Im not sure the actual quality of the games made with the engine live up to all the hype graphically. My son was playing Ghosts of Yotei earlier and its an absolutely amazing looking game made for console, presumably 30fps (maybe a 60fps option im not sure) it looks amazing. Spiderman 2, God of War, The last of Us, these games made by Sony with pretty weak hardware, no DLSS, and they look amazing. I wonder has Unreal achieved such fidelity on console? I genuinely dont know if they have came close to what Sony are doing. Wukong was Unreal and it really looked good to be fair.
Also its greatly worrying that China owns 40% of Epic (yes 40%!!!, I had to doubled check that I thought it was 10%). They are clearly pushing the engine as we see more major developers ditching their own engines for it.
Epic dont want me to post this, Zorin just crashed thankfully I didnt have to type all this again
Went back to x11 again to fix media player problems and noticed that the games worked on it now ok. The only thing is when I scale the desktop at all then the games stop working!
I'm not saying that's not part of it, but aside from geopolitics, bear in mind expense. Developing a graphics engine has never been cheap, and it only gets more expensive the more complex things get. Economically, it doesn't make much sense to develop an in house engine anymore compared to licensing one. A relatively recent example of a smaller studio feeling like they should develop their own engine is Nippon Ichi Software, which developed their own engine for Disgaea 6. There are many reasons that game was terrible, but performance was a big one. It wasn't even doing anything impressive, and it still had serious framerate drops in places with no excuse for them. Financially, unless you absolutely need your own engine or you intend to license your engine to other developers, it's just generally a bad idea.
(Again, I'm not saying you're wrong about China's leverage on the game industry. In the free-to-play markets especially, they're basically dominating the market. There's a mix of their 9:9:6 work and the fact that in the west consolidation is so bad the game industry is practically _____: all the big budget greenlights come from the same small handfuls at the biggest publishers. (The forum's censor objected to the word I used. Consider a lack of genetic branching; that's the idea I was trying to convey.)
I've worked in the industry for 20 years and seen it get worse, watched friends get laid off, and seen them fail to find work for months--and yet my favorite mobile game and my most anticipated game for 2026 are both from Chinese developers and publishers, because they're trying things.)
Yeah Wukong was the best game in years in my opinion. I was actually trying out the Chinese F2P multiplayer games on steam just now and they didnt work at all for me on Zorin. I know on windows those same games have multiple network connections, not just one, or perhaps two that a typical game would have, but maybe between 4 and 6 different services..
You are 100% correct Unity and Unreal are great and Epic made a good move making the engine free for everyone. Im not at all convinced however its as good that its made out to be in any other way. Though the good point was already made that Unreal is easy to use and learn.
I have seen online just earlier that CD project red have abandoned their engine to use unreal now too. Thatll be for the new Witcher and Cyberpunk games. These are big games and itll be very interesting to see what Cyberpunk will look like with it.
Anyhow, nice little chat and interesting. China is really the opposite of what the western open source movement would be about. The two could surely never coexist. In fact I believe that kernel level access is the norm for Tencent games.
I suppose triple A gaming is dead now anyway regardless. Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda. All these big ones have been bought out and fell away. Probably Rockstar, Sony and From Software still make great games.
Some will. Umamusume does via its Windows client, Blue Archive will despite it having an anti-cheat (it's user mode so it's not an automatic fail), Girls Frontline will with the Steam version but not the standalone IIRC. Waydroid may enable some of the Android based ones, but I don't use it. I've used Genymotion to play Arknights (my favorite by far), but it requires some trickery to make work there. Genshin Impact will play using Proton-GE 8-31, but not new versions of Proton. Zenless Zone Zero may still play; I haven't touched it in months. The setting annoys the hell out of me even though I love the combat.
This one disappoints me, despite what I said before. RedEngine was REALLY good, but they believe they can do a better job customizing Unreal Engine.
We'll have to agree to disagree there. <_< I've never liked a Rockstar game, Sony's hit or miss for me, and From... I can't speak to their new effort, but Shadow of the Erdtree was SO MUCH WORSE than Elden Ring. >_< Also I hate most of their franchises. <_<
Fractional scaling was on but at its default. I think I was able to increase fractional scaling when not playing games last night. But just now I turned it off, set scalling to 200% and all the old problems came back.
thankfully I didnt have to type all this again 