put your best 5 games engines or 6 best games engines (for you)!
Your question is based on the fallacy that game engines are that important. Fact is that game engines are tools. You don’t use a hammer to saw wood, you use a saw. Likewise, game engines are fit for different tasks. Some engines like Source are fit for first-person shooters, some are fit for small grid-based puzzles (Bitsy). Game Maker is fit for sprite-based 2D games. So is Construct 3, but more targeted towards non-programmers.
Under this analogy, you know what Unity and Unreal look like?
Hence why I’m not really fond of either. I find them way too broad and general-purpose.
what cry engine?
see he has only 6 games in itch.io: https://itch.io/games/made-with-cryengine
well to be fair, when I was young I loved the idea of using every available game engine. I used a different game engine for each game I used to make :D
hahaha maybe, but commiting to a single game engine is scary specially if you end up choosing an engine you regret later in life. depending on the engine you choose defines what type of games you end up making and learning along the way, people who end up starting game dev with unity end up making most of their games in 3D and are used to using free assets. while someone who uses gamemaker (like me) ends up making most of our games in 2D and I can never get used to using free assets. long story short the game engine you choose to commit to defines how you grow as a game developer.
also as for @Zack Breg's behaviour toward other peoples choice of engine... I think thats a normal fanboy reaction, any other game engine he doesnt like/use is "bad" and the engines he uses are "best".
I tend to go with Unity+Playmaker for 3d, Construct for 2D.
But I'm coming into this from an art background, 2d/3d art is my main strength, not code.
I'm not great with code.
And I'll second the commenter who pointed out that well-supported, often-updated engines with a decent user community are important.
Unity has the single biggest userbase of any game engine, about 50% of game developers worldwide use it, it's simply not going to just go away any time soon. And Unreal is the #2 biggest userbase [almost 30%] and likewise will be around a long while.
I've used really niche engines before - years ago, in the 2000s - and had a lot of ambitious projects fail utterly, just simply unravel, because the engine devs stopped updating the engine! For example, Adventure Maker, which hasn't been updated in over a decade. I made no less than three games using it, and they only run on Windows XP or older-than-XP Windows, that is if they were even released (two of them I gave up on after hundreds of hours' work because I realized the engine was doomed. I still have the graphics assets but all the interaction would need to be redone from scratch in a new engine and I couldn't escape the sinking feeling of, it's just not worth it now. I also tried using Gamesalad on a couple of projects, and that didn't end well either BTW.
If I'm going to recommend just one engine, it's Unity. It's what I settled on anyway.
Huge, and I mean huge, userbase of well over half a million people now, that can answer almost any question you pose, massive flexibility, can be used to make 2d and 3d games, for a ton of platforms. Main downside of Unity currently is it doesn't scale well to large teams the way Unreal can, but that is something that Unity Technologies is very actively working on. It's kind of an irrelevant problem for indies anyway. And as for the query, can you make good quality games with Unity, ie the 'image problem' Unity faces, I think you can and the list of Unity-made games on Wikipedia demonstrates this wide-ranging potential for a ton of solid stuff in many genres. Just that most of the best games built in Unity, people don't realize that they are Unity-made games because the devs cut out the Unity branding. Unity can also be optimized very well, it's reasonably efficient and lean, as evidenced by the sheer number of visually stunning yet smoothly-running mobile titles developed in it (like 'The Room' series, 'Monument Valley', series, 'Alto's Adventure', 'Temple Run 2' and many other examples of Unity games that somehow still look good while running on a potato, so to speak)
Unreal is the second really great choice. It's clearly better for certain types of game [eg 3d fps or third person] and very scalable for larger teams. It also has a superb community and a ton of features. And it is quite efficient as 3d engines go, nicely optimized. The projects done with it often look amazing.
BTW: my presence on Itch.IO is https://matthornb.itch.io/ and I'm working on a few new indie games but not released just yet.
Mostly 'Myst-likes' [first person puzzle/adventure] as that plays well to my strengths.
I do however, have a TON of stock media assets there also, already, royalty-free for gamedevs. A few free ones, mostly paid, but even the paid stuff is not expensive. 2000+ asset files [overlays and decals, seamless photography-based texture maps, video VFX elements based on real-world high-speed video, and a lot of 3d asset files too across various categories.]
That stock media stuff is all bundled together for $1 every now and then (90% off) like April 2-4 [Easter sale, coming up very soon] and the $1 pricing also includes early preorders of any indie games I make and release on Itch during the next couple of years.