UNITY AND OTHER ENGINES

Although it is true that one can find many of the features in Unity being offered by other engines, the crucial differences come from two main sources: community and ethics.
Unity has a highly engaged group of users and its forums are bursting with information and troubleshoot solutions. Another important trait bound to its community is the Unity Assets Store, that provides a space where users can sell or share their creations-3D modeling of characters, backgrounds, mods etc- with each other for free.

But the definite plus for independent developers and small studios is Unity’s no-royalties policy. Games using Unity don’t owe the engine anything and have total control over their games’ earnings. This might seem like a given considering the engine is free, to begin with, but that is not always the case.

Unreal -one of Unity’s main competitors- claims 5% of all profits made by a game using their technology. Even in-game purchases are considered part of Unreal’ s share. This attitude led to a considerable shunning by smaller studios that depend on their earnings to continue in the market.

CryEngine, on the other hand, aligns with Unity by refusing to charge royalties. The case of CryEngine is a bit more complicated, though. On its heyday, it was one of the top options for game-development but has since fallen from the grace due to its poor documentation and resources.

The situation has reached the point where there have been rumors about the survival of CryTek - and consequently, CryEngine- which discourage game developers from adopting it even further.

Other problems with the engine which are frequently brought up in discussion boards and game-media is its slow updates and overall clumsy user-experience, that alienates those who aren’t already seasoned in game-development.

We put together the following chart for a quick visualization of our data regarding the three: