4 ms·

As with all things, there's a balance and a place for technical trade offs to be made. The first entry on the list, Activision/Blizzard, built Hearthstone in U

As with all things, there's a balance and a place for technical trade offs to be made. The first entry on the list, Activision/Blizzard, built Hearthstone in Unity. A better case study would look at what games are successful, and then look at what engines they use. One way to look at things, is who in recent years won the (imo) biggest indie game award, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize: - A Short Hike: Unity - Return of the Obra Dinn: Unity - Night in the Woods: Unity - Quadrilateral Cowboy: id Tech 4 - Her Story: Unity - Outer Wilds: Unity - Papers, Please: custom using OpenFL/Haxe - Cart Life: Adventure Game Studio I admittedly started looking because I knew Obra Din was Unity, so there's some bias in category selection. That brings us to 2013. That 5/8 Unity, and 7/8 using an engine. The remaining 1/8 (Papers, Please) was developed by Lukas Pope, who later made Return of the Obra Dinn in Unity. This is a list chosen by game developers, but I would think that would skew the list towards impressive custom things. I do agree with the spirit of the post: You don't have to use an engine. Nothing about a game engine is magical. There's lots of success stories on both sides.

joveian 6y ago
I am disabled and have played a bunch of games (DRM-free only, via GOG or Humble Bundle) and I can confirm that Unity games are extremely common, including on tiny 2d games, visual novels, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if over 5 of 8 games in the past decade (or at least the last 8 years) used Unity. Interestingly, from the Wikipedia page it seems that Unity was a result of "our game didn't do well but we made awesome tools". They now have 2000+ employees according to Wikipedia. The employee numbers on some of these companies is misleading. Nintendo does not just make video games, but the employee count covers everyone. CD Projekt employee count includes GOG and is somehow mostly the developer side, but GOG still has 172 employees (but not a single employee over 50, and only 2 in all of CD Projekt :/, also for anyone else wondering while I'm looking at the stats, GOG is a bit under and the rest of CD Projekt a bit over 25% women). It looks like Valve does both development and Steam with 360ish employees. Also publishers often do quite a bit of QA and such for games they publish (even if it often doesn't seem like it :/), so comparing publishers with studios that have outside publishers is also not getting the full picture. Also worth noting the open source RenPy that a number of visual novels use.

joveian 6y ago

I am disabled and have played a bunch of games (DRM-free only, via GOG or Humble Bundle) and I can confirm that Unity games are extremely common, including on tiny 2d games, visual novels, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if over 5 of 8 games in the past decade (or at least the last 8 years) used Unity. Interestingly, from the Wikipedia page it seems that Unity was a result of "our game didn't do well but we made awesome tools". They now have 2000+ employees according to Wikipedia. The employee numbers on some of these companies is misleading. Nintendo does not just make video games, but the employee count covers everyone. CD Projekt employee count includes GOG and is somehow mostly the developer side, but GOG still has 172 employees (but not a single employee over 50, and only 2 in all of CD Projekt :/, also for anyone else wondering while I'm looking at the stats, GOG is a bit under and the rest of CD Projekt a bit over 25% women). It looks like Valve does both development and Steam with 360ish employees. Also publishers often do quite a bit of QA and such for games they publish (even if it often doesn't seem like it :/), so comparing publishers with studios that have outside publishers is also not getting the full picture. Also worth noting the open source RenPy that a number of visual novels use.