About 15 years ago I started using the Gamebryo game engine. This was after a few years of testing other tools, including Dassault Systèmes’ Virtools and a few open source options. Back then, Unreal was not available for indie developers, unless you had spare cash in the 6-digits range. Gamebryo had a pretty decent reputation and a number of high-profile success titles were based on the engine. Most notably, Prince of Persia 3D and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, among many others. Nevertheless, Gamebryo required a high degree of technical maintenance; in the end, it was basically a collection of graphic libraries with a level editor. Without a C++ coder on your side, there was little you could do with it. The licensing was also very limiting: You could only license Gamebryo for a specific title, and if you wanted to change the title’s name, the whole license agreement had to be revised. All of this meant an additional bottleneck in the fast-paced field of interactive media production. Gamebryo was great for developers that used to build their own custom engines, by supplying all the crucial components and graphic libraries, but for design-driven productions it was troublesome.
When Unreal became free to use in 2014/15, it was a revolution. You could call it the beginning of a new era. With it came accessible visual scripting; an amazing material editor; and a rich, sophisticated and mature tool-set plus support for pretty much every platform.
The fact is, we are in a historical major shift towards real-time graphics that will disrupt a number of industries, including the Media & Entertainment, Design, Healthcare Visualizations and Enterprise XR, to name a few. And Unreal is spearheading this revolution. In a way, you could compare this revolution with the introduction of the PC-driven Desktop-Publishing in the early ’90s, when the entire publishing industry was turned upside down, when new job-descriptions and completely different production techniques revolutionized the printed word, from pre-press to editorial workflows. This means we will see new opportunities in this fast-growing sector. Just recently, Epic Games posted some new facts. The numbers show: Real-time 3D is the fastest-growing segment within 3D graphics, demand for Unreal Engine skills is at an all-time high, and the highest salary premiums go to jobs requesting Unreal Engine skills. It’s a good time to be a Unreal Engine developer.