Game engine for indie studio and career, what to choose?

Question

Game development

Good day to all. I write in advance that there will be a lot of text and I expect intelligible answers from people who really understand what they write and why they give advice.
And so let's start, I already created a topic earlier, but did not receive a normal answer. I am 28 years old , I am a designer in an advertising agency, I draw all sorts of flyers, booklets, make logos, etc., I don’t want to offend other designers, but I began to understand that this is not mine. I have long dreamed of going into the game development industry, I don’t really know why I didn’t dare and why I didn’t leave for a long time, but at the moment I decided to completely abandon design and go only to my dream. The alignment is this, since I am 28 years old , I set a goal for myself, up to 30 years , that is, in 2 yearsto study the game engine, at least by 60-70 percent , but many will say it is impossible, etc., but I will drop everything and do my best to study the engine. After studying, I plan to create my own indie studio and make a game. The game is already there, well, more precisely, the development document for the game is 50-60 percent ready . The plan was that I would make a design document, study the chosen engine, then look for a 3D modeler, artist, and together we would try to bring the game from the design document to fruition.
Now the crux of the matter. What game engine can you choose from the ones I provided, and these are: Unreal Engine 4, Unity3D, CryEngine, Blender . I noted only these, since I have a disposition that these engines can easily cope with games like MMOs, and the network part of the engines is well developed. But there is another question, but as far as I know, UE4 became free and only after the game exceeds $ 3000 will I have to pay them 5% of the profits. Looks like a nice plush. I honestly don’t know anything about Unity3D and CryEngine , I would like to hear something intelligible from you. I won’t talk about Blender , since everyone knows perfectly well that it is completely free, but you don’t seem to get far with it either. So it looks like there are only three giants left.
So, what is better to choose indie studios, so as not to get burned in the future, not to burn out because of the engine. And the most important thing is that even if I fail to make a game, so that the 2 years spent on studying the engine do not go to waste, so that with this knowledge I can get a job in the game industry and continue to study the engine and enjoy what I love.
In general, here is such a story :) I am waiting for answers, dear colleagues ...

Answer 1

Unreal and CryEngine have been focused on large studios all their lives, some progress towards indie began only in the last year, when almost half of all new games began to be made on the unit. Scripts on the pros aggravate the matter, a spherical script in a vacuum on the pros is more expensive to write and maintain than on a sharp. Yes, there may be a performance advantage, but in order to hit this bar, you need to either write very badly or have a huge world with a sea of ​​\u200b\u200bwhistles. In addition, the unit has an Asset Store with a bunch of plugins and ready-made projects that save a lot of time. Marketplace is not even close to filling. In general, the unit has good prospects: Microsoft opens the .Net source , and the unit is moving to IL2CPP technology.
It was all about the engine, in addition to that, you need to take into account other areas that you will have to learn in two years: game development, team management, monetization, marketing. Starting to make games with MMOs is suicide, you better not. There are a million options for implementing each mechanic, and you can understand which option you need only in practice. To do this, you need to get your hands on small crafts, make prototypes, participate in game jams. The skill of completing games is very important and difficult to master.
When you get to the point where you can beat a platformer in a day, then suddenly it turns out that with a partner you can’t do it twice as fast or twice as cool, because you don’t have processes. For example, you will polish the game level, and at this time the partner also decided to change something, and you have two versions of the same level that you need to do something with. Or one of you will constantly be idle until the other one finishes. Etc. It can easily take a year to grind and adjust the process.
Finally, there is still the financial side of development, without which it will not work to make games for a long time. The statistics in this area are deplorable: only a very small part of all the games created pay off, and those that pay off do not make developers millionaires. You can’t forget about this, especially if you want to introduce monetization into the game itself. There are many stories when the initial assumptions of the developers did not come true, they started to twist the monetization and eventually killed the gameplay.
Based on all this, I would advise you to quickly go all the way to the store on the smallest possible scale, and then build up momentum. I repeat, you don't need to start with MMO, your abstract design is most likely wrong in many places, start with simpler things.

Answer 2

Blender is not made for games to be made on it, so discard it right away.
Unity + C# is easier to learn than UE4/CryEngine + C++. And in general, I think it will be faster to write games on it. The cost of this is relatively low performance. So if cool graphics are not planned in your game, then you can stop at Unity. If planned, then choose between the last two. I don't know which one is better, but personally I would prefer UE4 at least for open source.
As for the prices for engines - it's easy to google, you can find it yourself, I won't even paint it.

Answer 3

Espleth:
As a programmer:
"Unity + C# is easier to learn than UE4/CryEngine + C++." - so misinformation. did you come up with it yourself or did you look at the tests, where does the unit give 140 fps, does the unit give 125-135 fps and on this basis the unit is slower? funny. that is, how the code is written has already ceased to play a role? so according to this logic, all engines would be made on asma or on a direct engine then.
"Blender is not made to make games on it" - however, this does not bother some people at all. weird huh?
"Personally, I would prefer UE4 at least for being open source." - again an illogical thought - provided that the game is commercial, all the necessary sources will be provided to you by any giants of the building engine for an appropriate fee and signing a license, up to support and recompilation of the dlls you need for you if some part of the sources cannot be provided. in contrast to this thought, it also says that if he can figure out the source codes for 9k files - I'm afraid he won't care what engine to use. he can figure it out himself.