No. You can make just about any engine do just about anything, especially if you’ve got low-level access to it. If this question is implying something about Unreal, just level set your expectations for the performance things that usually come along with that, but it’s not a foregone conclusion either.

I found that games I don’t like often use a particular engine, however I haven’t been in a position where I thought the game looked awesome but didn’t get it specifically because of the engine

No.

But it certainly has some strong indirect effects on my buying decisions.

For the most part no. Exceptions being like if some high budget game came out built with Godot, that’d be something I’d consider as a showcase for open source game engines. Same with other lesser known ones like Bevy or O3DE. Once any becomes fairly common, the novelty for me wears off like 2D games made in Godot. It was the same for me and Blender Open Movies ~15 years ago

If it’s anything other than unreal engine then no. If it’s UE then I will wait and then read about issues. If I see the same lazy bs then I’ll pass.

It can if the engine makes the game run poorly or not at all (I wouldn’t buy it) or if the engine is exceptionally well regarded and runs great it might make me a bit more inclined to buy the game.

If it’s an engine famous for being janky, it might also make me delay buying the game until devs or modders fix it.

Also, if the engine is known for being mod friendly, that would probably make me more inclined to consider buying the game.

From a political standpoint, yes, it does, to an extent. I strive to use free software, but most games are made using proprietary engines, which is just a consequence of the state of that industry. Blender changed the landscape of animation production, there is no reason Godot can’t do the same for game development.
A second reason would be the concentration of wealth and power we see in big game engine developers such as Unity and Unreal. Millionaire (billionaire?) CEOs, anti-consumer terms of use, etc. These are good reasons to lobby in favor of FOSS alternatives, and to pirate games published by dipshits (such as, I don’t know, Krafton).

UE5 on handhelds is a red flag, but I will check some reviews and performance tests before buying.

No not at all.

UE5 for me. There was only a brief time that I couldn’t play those games. It was when intel was having that voltage degradation issue on their i9 processors. UE5 games crashed so much if you had the degradation (I did). I had to hold off on any of those games until I got a new CPU. Now I only am mildly suspicious of UE5 games because they tend to either run flawlessly or be terribly optimized, no real inbetween. I check reviews first on them.

The game engine should not be a factor in my opinion, but sometimes I have some feelings. In the end ultimately the game itself and how fun it is is the most important factor.

• Unreal Engine 5: This engine has such a poor reception for me, that whenever I see it I dislike the game before even having a chance to play. Its not fair I know, but its also not my fault that I think like that. Often games with this engine have stutter issues, require lot of resources and for whatever reason, most AAA games launching with this engine are in a bad state. In the end I will buy a game if its good, obviously, but the engine has a little deciding factor to look deeper or not… even if its just a little factor.
• Unity: I personally don’t like Unity anymore for the bullshit they did. But if I am honest, if the game is good then I do not care if its in Unity.
• Godot: I really want to like games made with this Open Source engine. But if I am honest again, I would not buy a bad game even if its made with this engine.
• RPG Maker: I am a fan of oldschool RPG Maker, so I don’t mind that. But whenever I see made with RPG Maker (or suspect it), the value of the game goes dramatically down for me.
• any custom engine: I highly respect good custom engines, made specifically for the game or company. They often feel and look different, so its actually a factor. Or at least it will make me curious and look deeper into the game.

UE isn’t a deal breaker, but so many games built on it just look like wet plastic and run like shit that I’m immediately suspicious. I’d rather play a game that has flat shading and less detailed textures with some actual personality and performance.

No. Although Unity seems to be run by scumfucks who want to be evil but had to backtrack due to the massive backlash they got. Which means they’re just waiting to try again.

It’s a tiny factor in most cases but it’s there. I am prejudiced against Bethesda’s janky engine no matter how much they polish that turd it’s still a turd in so many ways, and I also consider Unreal Engine a cautionary flag to remind me I need to check if the game’s performance is horrific. Not really UE’s fault itself, but developers love that they can easily turn on all the AAA eye-candy features without having any of the knowledge or understanding of how to optimize their game (or frankly the budget) to support those performance-intensive features properly.

I do assume things based on performance based on the engine, but that’s more for moments like "new game is coming this fall, using some engine ", before tech specs are out. I find a lot of games that care to announce an engine in any way tend to be the heavier resource hogs, because they’re advertising the high fidelity of something-or-other.

But that’s not really a condemnation on any games. I do often avoid the high resource games, but that’s because I have an older PC, not because of any actual prejudice against an engine itself.

In the indirect sense that an engine might impact a game’s visual appearance, hardware compatibility, or performance, sure. But I don’t care about the engine specifically as an engine. That’s just an implementation detail. It’s just “does the game look appealing” or “does the game run well on my hardware”?

There are some cases where I can look at an engine and know that it’s very likely that some feature that I want is or isn’t there. For example, the (open-source) Twine engine supports interactive fiction multiple-choice Web-based games, usually written in a language called Sugarcube.

There’s a similar proprietary engine and language, Choicescript, which runs in a proprietary viewer. This is used by Choice of Games LLC, which has published a large number of commercial text-based games.

The developers of the Choicescript engine decided that an “undo/go back/save” feature would be undesirable, probably because it reduced the gravity of a player making choices; they basically require a player to play the game in “ironman mode”, where if anything happens that the player doesn’t like, the player has to go back and play a new game from scratch to avoid it. The Twine developers decided that “undo/go back/save” was a good idea and enabled it by default (and even if a game disables it, there are typically ways to modify a Twine game to re-enable this feature). I very strongly disagree with “undo” being disabled; I feel that it’s not respectful of my time, so when I purchase a Choicescript game, I know that I’m probably going to have to live with this particular decision that I do not like.

Nah. Good games can be made on any engine. So can bad games.

No. For example, I’ve seen a lot of games use Unreal, and almost all of them ran perfectly fine. It’s almost always the dev or publisher at fault for a shitty game. Usually the publisher, in the case of AAA games.

If a games is made in UE5 I will definitely double check if the game can even run on low end hardware. And even if a game can run they often look like dogshit on low settings. Like I tried Exit 8 and it ran like shit on my low end PC. And that is a game that just takes place in a hallway.

Unity makes me hesitate due to their past aggressive data collection issues. Now sure how it is at the moment, but in the past it really, really wanted all your data.

in nearly all cases me knowing the engine of a game is complete happenstance.

More important is if the game looks and runs well.

I lost interest in Starfield the moment I heard it was (still) using Creation engine and looks like I was right. 🤷‍♂️

Yes. I heavily favour Godot.

Personally yes, but I have a good reason I think. I am a Godot gamedev, so I feel a sort of kinship towards other Godot games. Like I really want to support them for whatever reason haha.

No, maybe it’s because im older and never really got into the trends of caring about stuff like that. I just can’t see how the engine should matter. Either way to me if the game sucks and somehow it was due to limitations then thats still on the game since they picked to go with it to begin with.

I think I’d only do that if I knew there was something seriously wrong with the engine that would ruin the experience.

Nevermind, I forgot I bought one game because of its engine. I bought this bionic commando game for 2 euros because I wanted to see how it feels. The same engine was used for payday 1 and 2.

Unity games give me pause, what with the opt-out rather then opt-in data collection and that there’s so many games lazily thrown together with the default assets.

I would say indirectly, if the game engine does not work on Linux then I’m not interested.

I have a grudge against Phyre Engine and Artemis Engine. So not those. I have no issues with other engines.

Custom physics based pixels or voxels engines are a plus to me :)

At this point I almost entirely write off UE5 games. I assume they’re smudgy upscaled underperforming dogshit until proven otherwise. Unreal Engine 4? Cool, no problems. Unreal Engine 5? Fuuuuuuckkkk no.

Yeah the buggy engine in fallout new Vegas, Morrowind, etc Bethesda games was basically another character in the games. Infinity engine and reboot games I’ve played a few just because they use it (some of icewind Dale, bg1/2, etc). I’ve played some scummvm games like Indiana Jones and broken sword because they were on the platform too which had a few really good games like Sam and max and day of the tentacle. kinda like finding other bands on a record label/publisher or other similar books to read advertised at the end of some paperbacks.

Yes.

Nope.

Honestly? I like to think it does. I dislike unreal 5 and if I could I would avoid games developed/running on it, but at the end of the day the game itself is what sells me on the idea of buying it or not, the engine isn’t the reason why a game will look like shit, people are making incredible things on cube dash or whatever that game is called, it’s the developer that decides how good a game looks and runs. Yes the engine can definitely help the dev in those factors.

Having said that, I do have a game that I will not pay a single cent for if it is on an engine. If elder scrolls 6 is on the same engine as Skyrim, fallout 4, 76 and whatever that space flop was called, I will either never play it or at worst pirate it and never give them a single cent. That engine was held together with duck tape and prayers before it was "upgraded the first time, nevermind by the time that Skyrim came out! And this year it’ll be 15 years since Skyrim came out, it’s time to let go of it and develop a new engine or customize an already out there one so that we can finally be free of most of the bugs and limitations of that pre 2000 engine (the creation engine is a fork of gamebryo, which was launched in 1997, so yes, it is a pre 2000s engine)! There are PLENTY of other problems with bethesda but the engine problems are such a blatant and needed change that I will not trust their next game unless they show that they are seriously trying to fix the issues that they have ignored for dar too long (combat, proper RPG choices instead of just accepting every single quest thrown at you and all of them being linear, no actual choices, no consequences for choices, extremely repetitive quests where they’re all get h quests that inflate the game time by just having you travel to he other side of the map and back (but then you can fast travel there anyway and now you are no longer immersed) and so many other problems that I cannot even be bothered to remember RN)

I forgot that this was about game engines and ended up ranting about ESO and bethesda, but honestly, the real problem with the game’s engine isn’t which one is used, it’s almost always who is using and how