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Indie Developer Defends Unreal Engine: "Bad Performance Is Result of Bad Development Practices"

"I'm personally so sick and tired [of] game influencer cringe."

Deep Worlds

Unreal Engine is everywhere these days, with even big companies moving from their proprietary engines to Epic's, like CDPR did with The Witcher 4.

This, however, doesn't mean that players are happy about it. Many blame Unreal Engine for the many optimization issues they experience in games like Mafia: The Old Country, for example. But is it really UE's fault?

Eric "Aheyrs" Rajot, the director of the upcoming indie shooter Beautiful Light, doesn't think so. In his recent X/Twitter post, he claimed that "bad performance is mostly the result of bad development practices rather than an engine flaw" and mentioned The Finals, Marvel Rivals, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Fortnite, and ARC Raiders as examples of well-optimized games on UE.

Deep Worlds

Replying to a tweet by Synth Potato, who is "sick and tired of Unreal Engine 5 games running like crap," Rajot said he's "personally so sick and tired [of] game influencer cringe who share misinformed (or ragebait?) [thoughts] for click on Twitter."

He believes Epic Games is doing a lot to provide excellent optimization and documentation for developers, and the problem is in the time and budget given to them to complete the game.

"UE5 or 'lazy dev' isn't the issue. First, there is no 'lazy dev', working in video game industry is super hard, and the amount of work you need to provide is insane."

He said that while Lumen and Nanite in Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 weren't ready at the launch, it's not exclusively Epic's issue: the same raw start happened with CryEngine, "and guess what? 10 years after everybody praised CryEngine with the release [of] Kingdom Come."

"Optimisation for engine takes years, a lot of years, and Epic has already nearly doubled performance since UE 5.0 (we are currently with UE 5.6)."

"So don't stop complaining about performance, because performance, and I will always advocate for that, is super important, and every game should put effort into it. Be vocal about it because that allows us, game [developers], to [tell publishers that] performance is crucial for a game’s success, but that can only work if you are properly educated. Blame the right thing if you really want something to change."

We'll see how optimized Beautiful Light is when it launches in December of 2026.

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Comments 4

  • Anonymous user

    This is gaslighting at its best... UE5 is incredibly difficult to optimize, and ANY honest UE dev will tell you the documentation for anything beyond the absolute basics is horrible. But sure, it's the game developers fault that Epic made it so insanely difficult to produce an optimized game with their engine.

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·3 days ago·
  • Anonymous user

    Unfortunately for this argument the whole selling point and design of UE is to enable bad practices and shortcuts without completely making the game unplayable

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·6 days ago·
  • Anonymous user

    how did this get an article? half the games listed either have problems or look god awful. what a terrible, terrible tweet and article.

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    Anonymous user

    ·6 days ago·
  • Anonymous user

    Bah, player's average IQ is 60. You can write billions of x, truthsocial, reddit etc posts. Nothing will change.

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·6 days ago·

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