Even though the Unity game engine has been a huge competitor, it's still undeniable that Unreal Engine has been, by far, the most popular game engine for video games, particularly the big-budget ones. And its market share is only increasing by the year, as game studio after game studio is abandoning their own game engines (and sometimes even Unity) to move to Unreal Engine. Even game studios that have developed their own game engines for decades (such as CD Projekt RED, which has been using their own custom engine in most of their games, including Cyberpunk 2077) are one by one moving to Unreal Engine.
The motivation is understandable, of course: Why spend enormous amounts of time, effort and money to develop, optimize and add new features to a custom game engine, when you can get all of that and much more from an existing one? Particularly one that doesn't even cost anything up front! (Indeed, Unreal Engine is free to use by anybody without an up front payment. It's only when your game exceeds a certain number of sales that Epic Games will start taking a cut from those extra sales. And that limit is huge.) It only makes economic sense to use an engine that already provides you with all the bells and whistles without you having to do anything about it.
There's a big danger in this, though.
And I'm not talking about Unreal Engine 5 being a piece of unoptimized crap that makes all games extremely heavy to run even on high end PC hardware. That, of course, is a problem as well, but it's not the danger I'm talking about.
The danger is that thousands and thousands of major game studios are giving an enormous amount of power to one single company: Epic Games.
Unreal Engine may be free in the monetary sense. However, it's still very much under strict license agreements. You can only use the software exactly within the limits that Epic Games dictates, and nothing else. Epic Games reserves the right to rescind your usage license whenever they want, for whatever reason they want.
Which, of course, gives them an astonishing amount of power.
Suppose you are a big game studio that has been developing a huge triple-A game for 5 years with a budget of over 100 million dollars... and suddenly Epic Games decides that nuh-uh, you don't get to use their engine anymore, because of something they don't like. Tough luck. You can't legally use their engine anymore. The entire base of your entire game was suddenly pulled from you, and now you have nothing.
That is, in fact, one of the most devious things about the engine being free: You didn't pay for it, which gives them more freedom to decide how you can use it, or for how long. It's ingenious, really. What sounds like extraordinarily fair and customer-friendly on the surface hides an astonishing power-grab just beneath the surface.
And this is not just theoretical. It can already be seen, right at this moment. Indeed, Epic Games have insane conditions on the use of their engine.
Particularly, you can't use certain words in the code that you write in the engine. And you might already guess where this is going. Indeed, these forbidden words include things like "slave", "master", "blacklist" and "whitelist".
As far as I know, so far Epic Games is only putting restrictions on the game's code itself (that Unreal Engine compiles and runs), which isn't visible to the end user. As far as I know, they aren't putting these restrictions on the contents of the game itself, visible to the user.
Not yet.
And that's the scary thing. There's nothing stopping them from doing that in the near future. "Your content does not comply with our standards. You can't use our engine legally anymore."
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