Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.
Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.