I think Unity is a better choice for a smaller team, Unreal is also great. I have played around with both, but I do have more experience with Unity personally, and I think that its marketplace is am amazing resource, allowing you to get ready-made subsystems for your game on the cheap.
I started working on meep around 7 years ago, back then it was a mixture of learning 3d as well as making a game, it started out as an engine for a tower defense game. I was working as a JS developer, so it was also a great tool to learn new JS tech that was coming out with HTML5.
When I started working on Might is Right, I intended it to be an online co-op game, that idea was scrapped along the way. However, I envisioned it being played in a browser, with no download required. Thinking of enabling people to play it on just about any device. I looked around for a good WebGL game engine, and the pickings were really sparse. Unity had some alpha-level support with severely reduced feature set and barely any updates, there was Playcanvas that was basically a toy at the time and was missing majority of the features that I needed. So I decided to develop meep further and build Might is Right on that.
As a business decision it was really misguided; I found out later, when trying to market the game that the most complex thing about game development is not the actual development, but the marketing. Having an amazing HTML5 game is basically irrelevant if you don’t have a platform to sell it on. I approached various web-game distribution platforms with it, but they either offered me something laughable, like 100$ one-off payment or monetization schemes that I didn’t care for. Such as in-game ads. I quickly learned that the world simply is not ready for pay-to-own web games.
I think that whatever game you’re making, if you’re spending a lot of time building systems and engine parts - you’re in the wrong business. Large companies can afford to do that and even then they don’t. That’s why there are a ton of game middle-ware companies out there with everything from physics, particles, sound and AI to tooling. I don’t regret my path to this point, as it has been super fun, but if you’re starting out with the goal of making actual games - I don’t recommend it.
Thanks for that, your comments really had a huge impact for the better. The full release will probably be in a couple of months.