For a while we pretty much only had UDK (Unreal 3). Unity sort of invented the idea of an omni-platform game engine that's affordable and accessible for indies. Then Unreal slightly shifted its strategy to compete with that rising market, and Crytek... jumped in too.
I think Unity is too valuable to low-medium end indies to go anywhere (you really don't need most of these new features if you aren't going for a photorealistic look anyway), but we could see a partitioning of the market as Unity takes over the low-mid and Unreal takes over the high-end. Unity actually no longer has the (partially) realtime global illumination they were so proud of just a couple years ago, because of licensing woes: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/07/03/enlighten-will-be-repla...
You aren't wrong about features, but the fact it's now free until $1 million USD in sales means by the time you own Epic a cent you've made a LOT of money, in Indie terms. Depending on how tight you think your budget will be that could be important.
Plenty of proprietary engines are in use today. And you've got FOSS options like Godot and Blender. UE's definitely the biggest, but other options aren't going away any time soon.
Amazon is getting in the engine game as well, with Lumberyard.
And there is always the possibility of other studios making their proprietary engine available if there is a profit opportunity. RAGE and Anvil come to mind.
Dota 2 Reborn is the first game on it, full release was in September 2015. Also Dota 3 was a joke over 7.0.0 patch which had changed all of the core mechanics in the game, but to be fair it had breaked the chains from WC3 map mechanics.
It's okay. I forgot for a second that memes and internet humor are frowned upon here. I guess that's okay. The signal to noise ratio of HN is astounding (in a positive way) as a result.
Both Unity and Unreal Engine offer their source code on Github...
Both engines have bugs, and one of the biggest complaints about Unreal Engine is that any feature not used by Fortnite is half-baked until Fortnite uses it. With Unity, the biggest complaints are about the relatively transitory lifetimes of some of their biggest-marketed features, like rendering pipelines or networking code.
Indeed. However, they do offer a commercial license to big developers/publishers will full source access. Substantially cheaper than the non-royalty, commercial Epic license too (but at the AAA level they're both rounding errors).
Other Bethesda studios can still use them. I remember Arkane got ahold of id tech 5 for Dishonored 2, and then renamed it "Void Engine" and added a bunch of bugs.
Unity doesn't really overlap with Unreal. Unreal is big and cutting edge for AAA titles. Unity is much more simplified. The path of least resistance is usually pretty clear for someone starting a project.
For a while there they really tried to overlap. Unity's been making a huge graphics push over the last five years - it actually had realtime GI before Unreal did, and wasted no time telling the whole world about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk8gpz0o5TU
More recently it's been making a lot of noise about its new scriptable render pipeline and shader graph. Of course these are still playing catch-up with Unreal, but they're doing an admirable job.
Meanwhile Unreal totally changed its pricing model ~5 years ago to be much more similar to Unity's and affordable for indies/individuals, as well as adding native support for mobile platforms, etc.
For some customers there may be a clear choice, but for now at least there's also a ton of overlap between their markets. We'll see where things go in the future.
Crytek has financial worries. Plus it's the most difficult to use, because it's almost all C++.
Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug issues (and no source code).
Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios, and has source code included.
If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they'll dominate the market.