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[Celcius]

Tales of Arise just came out and it's the first game in the series to use Unreal Engine 4. It looks and plays incredible, but I can't help but notice how many games in my current collection from this generation also run on the same engine:

Tales of Arise
Street Fighter 4
Tekken 7
Granblue Fantasy Versus
Borderlands 3
Guilty Gear Strive
Fighting EX Layer
Soul Calibur 6
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade

and there are many more games this gen that also use UE4.
It's a very flexible engine and allows for developers to make games in any genre, any style, the performance is great, etc...
However, this also means that we see less developers using and creating their own engines like previous generations. Do you see it as a good thing for the industry for so many devs to use the same engine? Do you think that the same thing will happen once Unreal Engine 5 comes out? Any thoughts on how Unreal Engine has become so popular? Unreal Engine 3 was awesome too, but one thing I've noticed about UE4 is how many more Japanese developers are utilizing it this time around compared to UE3 and the previous gen.

 

[EverydayBeast]

Unreal Engine is starting to come into its own, developers celebrate it and take pride in Unreal Engine. One of the conversations is a big game like Mass Effect 5 using UE.

 

[elliot5]

Custom solutions are expensive. Typically cheaper / easier to outsource that or use "As a Service" things for big business. UE4 and Unity and so on are Software and Infrastructure as a Service businesses and because they are free for hobbyists, it makes talent acquisition easier to get and train.

 

[killatopak]

Usually come down to money and time.

Time to be the more significant part as time spent developing the game directly correlates to the money spent on it.

Gone were the days when majority of every game had their own custom engine built for that specific game as engines are now more complicated than ever and require increasingly long time to create.

 

[T-Cake]

It's the golden rule of development - try to re-use code that has already been written. Only write new code for something that is not readily available.

 

[ZywyPL]

When PS4/XB1 launched UE4 was still in its infancy, with most games using UE3-3.5, while UE4 seems to seriously take off just ~3 years ago, because when the gen started many studios were trying to get away from licensing engines on per title basis, hence now Ubi has Snowdrop, EA has Frostbite etc., but smaller studios or those who failed to create their own high-quality alternative had to eventually go back to UE.

Epic changing their licensing policy to a much, much more developer friendly also adds to that, but they did so exactly because they saw devs' exodus in search for alternatives, the engine is basically free to use nowadays.

And at the end of the day we only benefit from the outcome of those events, because we now have many games with top-notch quality visuals, even from tiny indie studios, or even from single devs, and on top of that 60FPS has became easily achievable.

 

[SantaC]

UE4 has a lot of shortcomings like pop-ins, blurry textures and some mediocre loadtimes. UE5 cant get here soon enough.

 

[Beer Baelly]

Unreal Engine is starting to come into its own, developers celebrate it and take pride in Unreal Engine. One of the conversations is a big game like Mass Effect 5 using UE.

Did you forget all the UE3 games two generations ago?