September 2023 did something to the indie game development world that doesn't fully undo itself.
Unity announced something called the Runtime Fee. This is a charge for each time a game is installed. It would also apply to games that were already out. A lot of people were upset about this because they did not agree to it when they started using Unity for their projects. The people who were upset were developers who had built their careers and studios using Unity. They had also. Sold products using Unity.
The reaction to this was immediate and very loud. Unity changed its mind about the fee a few weeks later.. The problem was that Unity had damaged the trust of its users. This is a kind of damage that's not easy to fix.
Some developers started looking at something called Unreal. These were developers who had not considered using Unreal. Some studios were in the middle of making games with Unity. They started to think about switching to Unreal. They wanted to know how much it would cost to switch compared to what it might cost if they stayed with Unity. Unity might change its pricing again. The studios wanted to be prepared.
Unreal Engine was an option for these developers. The company that made Unreal Engine, Epic had been making it better for years. They were trying to make it easier for small independent developers to use. So Unreal Engine was ready, for the developers who were looking for an option.
This is the context for why indie studios are choosing Unreal in numbers that would have seemed unlikely three years ago. Not because Unity became bad overnight. Because the Runtime Fee incident revealed something about the risk profile of platform dependency that developers hadn't fully priced in before - and Unreal's model started looking different when viewed through that lens. For any mobile game development company evaluating engine choices right now, understanding what's actually driving this shift matters more than the surface-level narrative.
The Business Model Difference That Actually Matters
Unreal Engine is free until your game makes $1 million in lifetime gross revenue. After that, Epic takes a 5% royalty. That's it. No per-install fees. No runtime charges. No retroactive changes to the model applied to games you already shipped.
Unity's current pricing — post-Runtime Fee reversal — involves subscription tiers and a revenue share model that's more complex than Unreal's and carries the institutional memory of what Unity tried to do in 2023. The subscription model isn't inherently bad. The complexity isn't inherently bad. The memory is the problem.
When you're choosing an engine for a project that might take two or three years to build, you're making a bet not just on the technology but on the company behind it. Unreal's model is simple enough that you can model your worst-case costs from the beginning with confidence. Epic has been consistent about it. That consistency has value that's hard to quantify but easy to feel when you're a small studio trying to make financial projections on a thin budget.
What Unreal 5 Actually Brought to Indie Development
For a time Unreal was not a good choice for small indie studios. The engine was super powerful. It was made for big teams with lots of resources. The way to make things work in Unreal was complicated. It was hard to learn. The computer needed to be really strong to make it work. Most AAA studios and big mid-tier developers used Unreal 4. Indie developers usually used Unity or Godot.
Unreal 5 changed some of that in a way.
Nanite is Unreals way of making 3D models work better. It means artists can use detailed models without having to make simpler versions. The engine handles the complexity automatically. For studios, without experts to make models work this removes a big problem.
Lumen is Unreals lighting system. It makes lighting look real and change in time. For a team this means they don't have to redo lighting every time they change a scene.
Blueprints is Unreals way of making games without writing code. Its been around. Now its good enough that teams can make games without writing C++. For studios where everyone does many things being able to try out ideas in Blueprints before deciding what needs to be written in C++ makes development go faster.
None of this means Unreal is easy to use. It still takes a lot to learn. The engine is still complicated.. Now Unreal can be used by serious indie developers, not just AAA studios.
The Mobile Reality Check
Here's where the honest version of this conversation has to diverge from the enthusiast narrative.
Unreal is not Unity on mobile. Not yet. Probably not for a while.
Unity's mobile story is mature in ways that matter for developers targeting iOS and Android as primary platforms. The build pipeline is smoother. The performance optimization tools for mobile hardware are more developed. The ecosystem of mobile-specific plugins — ad networks, analytics, in-app purchase integrations, platform-specific SDKs — is deeper and better maintained. Mobile game development on Unity has fifteen years of accumulated tooling and community knowledge behind it.
Unreal on mobile is really good. It is getting even better. Epic has put a lot of work into making it run well on devices in the latest versions. Some games that use Unreal are available on mobile. They are pretty popular.
Making games with Unreal on mobile is not as easy as it should be. It takes a time to build the game and you need to know a lot about how to make it run fast. The tools that are for mobile are not as good as the ones that Unity has.
A lot of people are starting to use Unreal to make games for computers and consoles smaller studios. This is because Unreal is really good at the things that these platforms need.. For people who are only making games for mobile devices Unity is still a better choice, in many ways that really matter.
A mobile game development company evaluating this choice needs to be clear about its target platforms before treating the broader industry shift toward Unreal as automatically relevant to its situation. Platform context changes the calculation substantially.
Godot Is Part of This Story Too
It would be incomplete to talk about studios leaving Unity without mentioning where some of them went — and it wasn't all to Unreal.
Godot, the open-source engine, saw a surge in interest during and after the Runtime Fee controversy that was measurable and sustained. For 2D games and smaller 3D projects, Godot is a genuinely serious option in 2026 in a way it wasn't five years ago. The GDScript language has improved. The community has grown. The engine is MIT licensed — no royalties, no subscription, no company that can change the terms.
Some developers who evaluated Unreal after leaving Unity concluded that Unreal was the right answer for their specific project requirements. Others concluded that Godot was the right answer — that they didn't need Unreal's visual fidelity and would rather have the simplicity and the licensing certainty of an open-source engine.
The actual landscape isn't "Unity versus Unreal." It's a more fragmented market than it was in 2022, with Unreal, Godot, and a handful of specialized engines each claiming studios that would previously have defaulted to Unity.
The Skills Gap Nobody Is Talking About Loudly Enough
Choosing Unreal when your team knows Unity isn't free.
The C++ versus C# gap is real. Unity developers who know C# are not automatically productive in Unreal's C++ codebase, and while Blueprints reduce the immediate C++ exposure, any serious Unreal project will eventually require C++ work. Studios that switch without accounting for this transition cost — in time, in training, in slower velocity during the learning curve — underestimate what the switch actually involves.
The same is true for the art pipeline. Unreal's asset workflow is different from Unity's in ways that affect every artist on the team, not just the engineers. The material editor, the level design tools, the animation rigging requirements — teams that have built muscle memory in Unity's tools need to build it again in Unreal's, and that takes time that projects don't always have budget for.
This doesn't mean the switch isn't worth it. For many studios it clearly is. But the studios that switch successfully are the ones that planned for the transition cost honestly rather than treating "we'll learn Unreal while making the game" as a viable project plan.
What's Actually Driving the Decision Well
The studios making this choice thoughtfully are asking a specific set of questions that produce clearer answers than the general "Unreal vs Unity" framing.
What's the target platform — PC, console, mobile, or all three? The answer materially changes the calculus. What's the visual ambition of the project and does it actually require what Unreal 5 offers, or would a simpler engine serve it better? What does the team actually know and how long does the studio have runway to absorb a learning curve? What's the five-year risk profile of each option — licensing terms, company stability, ecosystem health?
Studios that answer these questions and land on Unreal are making a defensible decision. Studios that switch to Unreal because the industry narrative has shifted and Unity had a bad year in 2023 are making a more fragile one.
The Runtime Fee incident accelerated a shift that was already beginning. Unreal 5 had genuinely improved the engine's accessibility for smaller teams. Epic's business model had always been more legible than Unity's subscription tiers. The controversy made developers who hadn't been paying attention to these things pay attention to them all at once.
The result is a more competitive engine market than existed three years ago, which is probably good for developers even if the transition costs are real. The studios navigating this well are the ones making the choice based on their specific project, their specific team, and their specific platform targets — not based on which engine won the Twitter argument in 2023.
Working with an experienced mobile game development company like Hyperlink InfoSystem means the engine choice gets made based on what the project actually needs — with the development depth to deliver on whichever platform and engine that decision points toward.
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