none technical factors

when you want to choose a game engine, you should compare many factors. the most important factors are technical ones. what physics engine does the engine use? how fast iteration time is? what about asset importing? how much customizable is the engine? these questions and many others must be answered if you want to understand if a game engine is good or not. but hey there are factors that they are not technical but they are important in development. i think you should review everything from personality of engine developers to their vision and their openness.. i can easily say guys at UT are the coolest guys in the game engine industry. i am sure that they don't sell the engine to Google and don't kill the useres ideas for more money. they always do what you want because they are passionates about what they do. the other factor is the amount of democracy. not more not less, does developers listen to you? a more important factor is community. how helpful the community is? what tools are available? for example unity answers is a unique tool for unity. all of your questions will be answered in less than 2 days and most of them will be answered in less than 10 hours. having a gallery for user created assets is a good thing too. unity don't have this. they made unify scripting wiki but there is not a place for models and textures. I think they should make a asset site for user made assets. i don't want to talk much about unity much in this post but i can not control myself. :) the number of developers is another important factor. an engine with more than 50 developers can make many features in a year. what about 3 guys? many of the engines just have 1 or 2 developers. you might say: "unity had a small number of developers at first too." yes! you can make a good product in a room smaller than a closet and with less than 3 passionate developers but 50 guys can do a 10 times bigger job if they can not make a 30 times bigger. big game studios and publishers are another factor, if EA or activision or ubisoft use something it means it's better than their own tech or they just don't see any reason to develop something that is available.