Does the engine a game uses factor into your decision to buy it or not?

No. You can make just about any engine do just about anything, especially if you’ve got low-level access to it. If this question is implying something about Unreal, just level set your expectations for the performance things that usually come along with that, but it’s not a foregone conclusion either.

The game engine should not be a factor in my opinion, but sometimes I have some feelings. In the end ultimately the game itself and how fun it is is the most important factor.

• Unreal Engine 5: This engine has such a poor reception for me, that whenever I see it I dislike the game before even having a chance to play. Its not fair I know, but its also not my fault that I think like that. Often games with this engine have stutter issues, require lot of resources and for whatever reason, most AAA games launching with this engine are in a bad state. In the end I will buy a game if its good, obviously, but the engine has a little deciding factor to look deeper or not… even if its just a little factor.
• Unity: I personally don’t like Unity anymore for the bullshit they did. But if I am honest, if the game is good then I do not care if its in Unity.
• Godot: I really want to like games made with this Open Source engine. But if I am honest again, I would not buy a bad game even if its made with this engine.
• RPG Maker: I am a fan of oldschool RPG Maker, so I don’t mind that. But whenever I see made with RPG Maker (or suspect it), the value of the game goes dramatically down for me.
• any custom engine: I highly respect good custom engines, made specifically for the game or company. They often feel and look different, so its actually a factor. Or at least it will make me curious and look deeper into the game.

I would say indirectly, if the game engine does not work on Linux then I’m not interested.

If it’s anything other than unreal engine then no. If it’s UE then I will wait and then read about issues. If I see the same lazy bs then I’ll pass.

If a games is made in UE5 I will definitely double check if the game can even run on low end hardware. And even if a game can run they often look like dogshit on low settings. Like I tried Exit 8 and it ran like shit on my low end PC. And that is a game that just takes place in a hallway.

At this point I almost entirely write off UE5 games. I assume they’re smudgy upscaled underperforming dogshit until proven otherwise. Unreal Engine 4? Cool, no problems. Unreal Engine 5? Fuuuuuuckkkk no.

Personally yes, but I have a good reason I think. I am a Godot gamedev, so I feel a sort of kinship towards other Godot games. Like I really want to support them for whatever reason haha.

I found that games I don’t like often use a particular engine, however I haven’t been in a position where I thought the game looked awesome but didn’t get it specifically because of the engine

Yes, sort of. I absolutely hate the visual artifacts from TAA and from upscaling, which are both much more commonly used in UE5 games.

I’m also much more likely to try custom-engine games, just because I think people making their own engines is pretty cool ! I have only implemented very basic stuff myself, but it was very interesting to do !

Kinda, if it uses an open source game engine then it’s a plus.

Yes, because of some shit the company pulled I’m no longer interested in games made in Unity.

UE isn’t a deal breaker, but so many games built on it just look like wet plastic and run like shit that I’m immediately suspicious. I’d rather play a game that has flat shading and less detailed textures with some actual personality and performance.

After getting burned by the Dead Space Remake shader stutter i am very wary of UE games and check the reviews.

Yes. I heavily favour Godot.

Increasingly yes, Unity is spyware and UE5 games all play, look and feel the same.

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Nah. Good games can be made on any engine. So can bad games.

If I see it’s Unreal 5, I fully expect it to look like shit and perform weird, so it has some weight on my decision.

No. Although Unity seems to be run by scumfucks who want to be evil but had to backtrack due to the massive backlash they got. Which means they’re just waiting to try again.

It has a huge impact for me, most notably unreal engine because of how poorly most games made with it run, and it visually looking very soft or blurry in some games. So it’s something I check before looking at buying a game.

It can if the engine makes the game run poorly or not at all (I wouldn’t buy it) or if the engine is exceptionally well regarded and runs great it might make me a bit more inclined to buy the game.

If it’s an engine famous for being janky, it might also make me delay buying the game until devs or modders fix it.

Also, if the engine is known for being mod friendly, that would probably make me more inclined to consider buying the game.

In the indirect sense that an engine might impact a game’s visual appearance, hardware compatibility, or performance, sure. But I don’t care about the engine specifically as an engine. That’s just an implementation detail. It’s just “does the game look appealing” or “does the game run well on my hardware”?

There are some cases where I can look at an engine and know that it’s very likely that some feature that I want is or isn’t there. For example, the (open-source) Twine engine supports interactive fiction multiple-choice Web-based games, usually written in a language called Sugarcube.

There’s a similar proprietary engine and language, Choicescript, which runs in a proprietary viewer. This is used by Choice of Games LLC, which has published a large number of commercial text-based games.

The developers of the Choicescript engine decided that an “undo/go back/save” feature would be undesirable, probably because it reduced the gravity of a player making choices; they basically require a player to play the game in “ironman mode”, where if anything happens that the player doesn’t like, the player has to go back and play a new game from scratch to avoid it. The Twine developers decided that “undo/go back/save” was a good idea and enabled it by default (and even if a game disables it, there are typically ways to modify a Twine game to re-enable this feature). I very strongly disagree with “undo” being disabled; I feel that it’s not respectful of my time, so when I purchase a Choicescript game, I know that I’m probably going to have to live with this particular decision that I do not like.

I don’t think that has ever been a purchasing factor for me.

Sometimes I won’t buy a game made in Unity. Sometimes I will. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There’s a whole number of THQ games I never bother to get, because most THQ games feel too similiar to each other.

Probably the closest thing would be Rockstar games. GTA 5 feels alright, but in so many of their other games I do not like the feel of the physics and mechanics. Hated Manhunt, terrible game. Was forgiving of the older GTA games growing up because they were pioneering and fun despite the broken mechanics. But they have not aged well.

All I really care about is native Linux support. Nearly every major engine can support Linux these days and if the dev provided a build I should hope it works. But I know some engines are better/more consistent at it. If it’s something like Godot or Ren’Py I can pretty much expect the port to be perfect.

I only buy games made with foss stuff like Godot, pyrite, babylon, haxe and sdl and these days.

I don’t need timmy getting more money for his bullshit, and after Unity went full on fuckwit with their idiotic ideas for runtime fees they have zero trust, even though they eventually canned Riccitello and rolled back that crazy, I simply don’t have faith in them to do the right thing when presented with moral quandaries.

I only have limited resources, so I’m not going to throw money at applications supporting bullshit. Oh, and no AI garbage is built into these options.

UE5 on handhelds is a red flag, but I will check some reviews and performance tests before buying.

No, I couldn’t care less what engine devs use. This is like choosing to not buy a cake because the baker used a Le Crueset spatula instead of a Tefal one. Literally doesn’t matter as long as the game (and cake) is good.

in nearly all cases me knowing the engine of a game is complete happenstance.

I do assume things based on performance based on the engine, but that’s more for moments like “new game is coming this fall, using some engine “, before tech specs are out. I find a lot of games that care to announce an engine in any way tend to be the heavier resource hogs, because they’re advertising the high fidelity of something-or-other.

But that’s not really a condemnation on any games. I do often avoid the high resource games, but that’s because I have an older PC, not because of any actual prejudice against an engine itself.

Unity makes me hesitate due to their past aggressive data collection issues. Now sure how it is at the moment, but in the past it really, really wanted all your data.

Unity games give me pause, what with the opt-out rather then opt-in data collection and that there’s so many games lazily thrown together with the default assets.

It’s a tiny factor in most cases but it’s there. I am prejudiced against Bethesda’s janky engine no matter how much they polish that turd it’s still a turd in so many ways, and I also consider Unreal Engine a cautionary flag to remind me I need to check if the game’s performance is horrific. Not really UE’s fault itself, but developers love that they can easily turn on all the AAA eye-candy features without having any of the knowledge or understanding of how to optimize their game (or frankly the budget) to support those performance-intensive features properly.

The only time I notice is when it is pointed out that they are reusing an engine for a game sequel and the prior game was a bit clunky or had bugs. More of a concern about it carrying forward parts that I didn’t like than an inherent dislike of the engine itself. Really more of an issue about how the studio uses the engine.

Mostly in sandbox games. This is where I’m going to interact with the environment the most, and I wanna know it feels good.

Also, I appreciate destructibility in shooter games.

For the most part no. Exceptions being like if some high budget game came out built with Godot, that’d be something I’d consider as a showcase for open source game engines. Same with other lesser known ones like Bevy or O3DE. Once any becomes fairly common, the novelty for me wears off like 2D games made in Godot. It was the same for me and Blender Open Movies ~15 years ago

Honestly, yes.

Aside from performance issues, UE5 based-games by majority seem to follow this washed out color palette approach that I don’t like. Its not inherently the engine though as I know Expedition 33 used UE5 and its very vibrant. Its just an artistic direction those games seem to take, I guess.

In the past, CryEngine due to performance. Kingdom Come: Deliverance on release really was buggy and felt like a typical CryEngine game. I can’t for sure say that it was the engine’s fault again because Prey didn’t seem to have those issues, but historically that engine has always been a mess.

From a political standpoint, yes, it does, to an extent. I strive to use free software, but most games are made using proprietary engines, which is just a consequence of the state of that industry. Blender changed the landscape of animation production, there is no reason Godot can’t do the same for game development.
A second reason would be the concentration of wealth and power we see in big game engine developers such as Unity and Unreal. Millionaire (billionaire?) CEOs, anti-consumer terms of use, etc. These are good reasons to lobby in favor of FOSS alternatives, and to pirate games published by dipshits (such as, I don’t know, Krafton).

Nope.

No not at all.

No, maybe it’s because im older and never really got into the trends of caring about stuff like that. I just can’t see how the engine should matter. Either way to me if the game sucks and somehow it was due to limitations then thats still on the game since they picked to go with it to begin with.

Not a deciding factor but it certainly tips the scale, usually in a positive light when it has relevancy.

Unity nowadays usually just works on Linux, despite usually feeling somewhat detached from any environments. Games made on RPG Maker, Scumm or to a lesser degree, Ren’Py, are super portable thanks to wrappers made for them. RPG Maker and Unity both also make it pretty obvious when a game was cheaply made. Unreal Engine’s graphics to me are anywhere between an ugly plastic/rubber appearance (but I could list some games I recommend in spite of that) to straight up and literally nauseating. Game Maker and Godot/Redot I’ve never had any major issues, so spotting them warrants a “nice, I guess” at most. And so on.

Yes, although it is not just about the engine. For AAA story games (think of something like Resident Evil) I couldn’t care less, but anything small scale with great modding potential gameplay-wise, I avoid engines that compile to bytecode like Unreal because they make it insanly painful to create mods. I prefer something that I can easily decompile to look at the souce code like Godot and Unity.

But as I said, that is not just an engine issue, since you can provide official mod support on Unreal or make it harder to mod on other engines using stuff like obfuscation or IL2CPP. But in general, especially on most small-scale Indie games, just looking at the used engine is enough to determine modability and therefore influence my decision.

It can, yeah.

If the deployment cycle started before Unity pulled their shit, I wont hold it against them for finishing with it.

People need to invest in Godot now. Either in just learning it or as a finical supporter.

Otherwise, I’m always interested if someone does something in GZ/LZ/UZDoom or cooks up their own engine. Hrot has no business being as good as it is being made in Pascal by one person.

i’d say yes to a degree, games with a custom engine usually seem to be better optimised than those made with some standard engine

Yes.

I have a grudge against Phyre Engine and Artemis Engine. So not those. I have no issues with other engines.

Custom physics based pixels or voxels engines are a plus to me :)

Honestly? I like to think it does. I dislike unreal 5 and if I could I would avoid games developed/running on it, but at the end of the day the game itself is what sells me on the idea of buying it or not, the engine isn’t the reason why a game will look like shit, people are making incredible things on cube dash or whatever that game is called, it’s the developer that decides how good a game looks and runs. Yes the engine can definitely help the dev in those factors.

Having said that, I do have a game that I will not pay a single cent for if it is on an engine. If elder scrolls 6 is on the same engine as Skyrim, fallout 4, 76 and whatever that space flop was called, I will either never play it or at worst pirate it and never give them a single cent. That engine was held together with duck tape and prayers before it was “upgraded the first time, nevermind by the time that Skyrim came out! And this year it’ll be 15 years since Skyrim came out, it’s time to let go of it and develop a new engine or customize an already out there one so that we can finally be free of most of the bugs and limitations of that pre 2000 engine (the creation engine is a fork of gamebryo, which was launched in 1997, so yes, it is a pre 2000s engine)! There are PLENTY of other problems with bethesda but the engine problems are such a blatant and needed change that I will not trust their next game unless they show that they are seriously trying to fix the issues that they have ignored for dar too long (combat, proper RPG choices instead of just accepting every single quest thrown at you and all of them being linear, no actual choices, no consequences for choices, extremely repetitive quests where they’re all get h quests that inflate the game time by just having you travel to he other side of the map and back (but then you can fast travel there anyway and now you are no longer immersed) and so many other problems that I cannot even be bothered to remember RN)

I forgot that this was about game engines and ended up ranting about ESO and bethesda, but honestly, the real problem with the game’s engine isn’t which one is used, it’s almost always who is using and how

No.

But it certainly has some strong indirect effects on my buying decisions.

No. For example, I’ve seen a lot of games use Unreal, and almost all of them ran perfectly fine. It’s almost always the dev or publisher at fault for a shitty game. Usually the publisher, in the case of AAA games.

I think I’d only do that if I knew there was something seriously wrong with the engine that would ruin the experience.

Nevermind, I forgot I bought one game because of its engine. I bought this bionic commando game for 2 euros because I wanted to see how it feels. The same engine was used for payday 1 and 2.

More important is if the game looks and runs well.

Definitely; I’ll never buy another Star Engine game as long as I live*

I lost interest in Starfield the moment I heard it was (still) using Creation engine and looks like I was right. 🤷‍♂️

Absolutely. I hate unity and to a lesser extent godot because they struggle so hard on hardware they have no business struggling on.

Yeah the buggy engine in fallout new Vegas, Morrowind, etc Bethesda games was basically another character in the games. Infinity engine and reboot games I’ve played a few just because they use it (some of icewind Dale, bg1/2, etc). I’ve played some scummvm games like Indiana Jones and broken sword because they were on the platform too which had a few really good games like Sam and max and day of the tentacle. kinda like finding other bands on a record label/publisher or other similar books to read advertised at the end of some paperbacks.