ENGINE SWAP SHOP H
Upon hearing about a new service for converting Unity games to Unreal, we fired off a few questions to Pingle Studio’s Eugene Martynenko about how it came about and what can be achieved
igh profile organisations within the games industry shoot themselves in the foot from time to time, but few have so spectacularly blown its own toes off like Unity. With its
initially reviled and since revised Runtime Fee policy, Unity has forced developers to question the tools they use for future projects. With its Unity to Unreal Engine Transferring Service, Pingle Studio thinks it’s not too late to reconsider current projects either.
How did Pingle’s Unity to Unreal Engine Transferring Service come about, assuming it wasn’t as a result of Unity’s abortive Runtime Fee announcement back in September? Eugene Martynenko: In the past, there have been multiple requests from different partners interested in what it would cost to transfer their projects from Unity to Unreal Engine. In general, the answer was that “it will cost the same as development from scratch” because you can’t magically transfer projects from one engine to another - you have to recreate it. But this is not the answer everyone expected, so we decided to investigate how we could reduce the cost of such a process by automatisation and best-practices to propose it as a service for our clients.
What was your reaction when you heard about Unity’s announcement? EM: When I heard the announcement about changes to Unity’s payment plans, it gave the impression that Unity
24 | MCV/DEVELOP October/November 2023
was having financial trouble and this was their way to increase revenue from users of their engine. Also, that this cost would affect every developer regardless of whether they make services or games. As a developer, I was of course concerned about the potential
financial impact of Unity’s payment plan changes on the entire developer community. It seemed like these changes might lead to increased costs for using the engine, which could affect both large studios and indie developers alike. However, as the creator of tools, I thought that this could bring new products to the marketplace and make tools that assist in the transition of existing projects to Unreal Engine popular. Directly after the
announcement from Unity, we definitely saw an increased number of such requests. Another thing that we noticed is that more and more developers of Unity plugins started to adapt them for use with other engines, including Unreal Engine. It would be possible to automate and simplify the transfer of levels, specifically all objects along with their settings, from one engine to another. This would create a more familiar environment for developers and encourage them to make the transition.
How does the Unity to Unreal Engine Transferring Service fundamentally work? EM: With utilities that help with transitioning to another game engine, it’s not as straightforward as a one-click solution. It’s a
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