Increasingly yes, Unity is spyware and UE5 games all play, look and feel the same.

Yes, because of some shit the company pulled I'm no longer interested in games made in Unity.

It has a huge impact for me, most notably unreal engine because of how poorly most games made with it run, and it visually looking very soft or blurry in some games. So it's something I check before looking at buying a game.

If the deployment cycle started before Unity pulled their shit, I wont hold it against them for finishing with it.

People need to invest in Godot now. Either in just learning it or as a finical supporter.

Otherwise, I'm always interested if someone does something in GZ/LZ/UZDoom or cooks up their own engine. Hrot has no business being as good as it is being made in Pascal by one person.

I don't think that has ever been a purchasing factor for me.

I only buy games made with foss stuff like Godot, pyrite, babylon, haxe and sdl and these days.

I don't need timmy getting more money for his bullshit, and after Unity went full on fuckwit with their idiotic ideas for runtime fees they have zero trust, even though they eventually canned Riccitello and rolled back that crazy, I simply don't have faith in them to do the right thing when presented with moral quandaries.

I only have limited resources, so I'm not going to throw money at applications supporting bullshit. Oh, and no AI garbage is built into these options.

Yes, although it is not just about the engine. For AAA story games (think of something like Resident Evil) I couldn't care less, but anything small scale with great modding potential gameplay-wise, I avoid engines that compile to bytecode like Unreal because they make it insanly painful to create mods. I prefer something that I can easily decompile to look at the souce code like Godot and Unity.

But as I said, that is not just an engine issue, since you can provide official mod support on Unreal or make it harder to mod on other engines using stuff like obfuscation or IL2CPP. But in general, especially on most small-scale Indie games, just looking at the used engine is enough to determine modability and therefore influence my decision.

No, I couldn’t care less what engine devs use. This is like choosing to not buy a cake because the baker used a Le Crueset spatula instead of a Tefal one. Literally doesn’t matter as long as the game (and cake) is good.

Not a deciding factor but it certainly tips the scale, usually in a positive light when it has relevancy.

Unity nowadays usually just works on Linux, despite usually feeling somewhat detached from any environments. Games made on RPG Maker, Scumm or to a lesser degree, Ren'Py, are super portable thanks to wrappers made for them. RPG Maker and Unity both also make it pretty obvious when a game was cheaply made. Unreal Engine's graphics to me are anywhere between an ugly plastic/rubber appearance (but I could list some games I recommend in spite of that) to straight up and literally nauseating. Game Maker and Godot/Redot I've never had any major issues, so spotting them warrants a "nice, I guess" at most. And so on.

Mostly in sandbox games. This is where I'm going to interact with the environment the most, and I wanna know it feels good.

Also, I appreciate destructibility in shooter games.

Definitely; I'll never buy another Star Engine game as long as I live*

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If I see it's Unreal 5, I fully expect it to look like shit and perform weird, so it has some weight on my decision.

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

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

Yes, sort of. I absolutely hate the visual artifacts from TAA and from upscaling, which are both much more commonly used in UE5 games.

I'm also much more likely to try custom-engine games, just because I think people making their own engines is pretty cool ! I have only implemented very basic stuff myself, but it was very interesting to do !

Kinda, if it uses an open source game engine then it's a plus.

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.

Yes. I heavily favour Godot.

After getting burned by the Dead Space Remake shader stutter i am very wary of UE games and check the reviews.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nope.

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.