When comparing RPG Maker VX Ace vs Unity, the Slant community recommends RPG Maker VX Ace for most people. In the question“What are the best game engines for point & click adventure games?” RPG Maker VX Ace is ranked 35th while Unity is ranked 48th. The most important reason people chose RPG Maker VX Ace is:
Built for ease of use to get your game made quickly!
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick and easy to learn
Built for ease of use to get your game made quickly!
Pro Plenty of premade assets to get you started
Super high quality art assets get you making a game quickly without it looking terrible.
Pro Steam support
Get a ton of great assets for the community by the community through Steam’s Workshop support.
Pro Large community
Never a shortage of user tutorials, assets, or support.
Pro Simple scripting implementation
Quickly script simple events with a few clicks. This powerful part of the editor allows you to get through the tedious amount of content for quests and other in game sequences quickly.
Pro Creating maps is simple
Choose a tileset and get to mapping! Supported tiles will connect automatically to help you speed through the mapping process. Setting events on tiles is easy to do and populating your world with NPC’s and other items is easy to do.
Pro Uses Ruby as a scripting language
Need more power for things like battle systems, plugins, or awesome effects? RPG Maker uses Ruby along with its own library to bring you the tools you need to stand out.
Pro Powerful Database for everything you need
Everything you make is done through this powerful expansive database. You customize every character, weapon, enemy, and skill through this and so much more to make a designer's life easier.
Pro Ton of customization options
Create things quickly with things like the character customizer or the experience curve editor. RPG Maker is made to let you change every single thing in your game swiftly and simply.
Pro Relatively cheap
Although not free it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to get RPG Maker VX Ace. You can buy RPG Maker for $69.99 or get a free trial to see if it’s right for you.

Pro Great community support
Unity is bolstered by a huge, helpful community via its official forums, wiki, Unity Answers, and Unity Asset Store; plus the most-subscribed subreddit of any game engine.
Pro OUYA support
Pro Over 20 platforms
Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more.
Pro Versatile
Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique.
Pro Well structured
Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describes orders of execution, or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For example It is not uncommon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for example to never read this doc.
Pro Very optimized
Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards.
Pro Lots of assets can be found in the Asset Store
For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
Pro Works with 3rd party IDEs
You can use any C# IDE for it, but the ones tested which have Unity integration are:
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- MonoDevelop
- Visual Studio Code (much faster than VS, but a bit harder to set up for Unity development)
- JetBrains Rider (very fast, has lots of functionality and best Unity integration, but it is not free)
Pro Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model
Pro Has a great animation system
Unity provides a great state machine animation system called Mechanim allowing to separate animation from the model and assign the same animoations to different models.
Pro Powerful standard shaders
The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR.
Pro Allows for rapid prototyping
Unity's modular system and usability allows for quickly developing a prototype of an idea. It has features like drag & drop editing, shaders, animation and other systems already in place to allow diving right into developing a game.
Pro Easy learning curve
The way the editor is structured, by setting scripts on objects, and the use of a high-level language, C#, makes it easy to learn.
Pro Can create custom forms and tools
Pro Very popular
Unity is a proven game engine. It is used by a wide range of developers - from small indies to triple-A companies such as Microsoft, Paradox, Square Enix and Sega.
Pro Lots of resources to learn from
Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise.
Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available.
Pro Great editor
The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
This allows it to be more powerful than other, simpler drag-and-drop engines such as Game Maker Studio, although it can take a bit more experience to learn the workflow.
Pro As of Unity 5 all engine features are free for everyone
As long as the company makes $100k or less, Unity's free version can be used to release games without purchasing the pro version.
Pro Supports 2D and 3D
With Unity knowledge of just one engine is needed to be able to create both 2D and 3D games.
Pro Great community
Great Community support through Forums and Unity Answers.
Pro Provides access to a huge list of assets through Asset Store
There's an Asset Store, providing free and paid assets (including components). It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
Cons
Con Windows only development
With the ability to only work and deploy on Windows RPG Maker misses a major opportunity to create awesome RPG’s that anyone can play.
Con Multi-user development can be a hassle
RPG Maker was not really intended for multi-user support. There are a few tactics but for those of you who are used to with multi-user development may get annoyed.
Con Isometric not out of the box
Want to make a tactics game? Well you’re going to have to do some extra work to get those awesome isometric tiles in your game.
Con RPG Maker stigma
There is a major stigma with using RPG Maker since it does have such a low bar to entry. If you do use this engine just make sure your game is so awesome that no one will care what it was made in.
Con Only one tileset per map
While a tileset in RPG Maker can encompass many files it also can be a hassle if you want to use multiple tilesets on a map. You can switch tilesets through code for multi-world game though.

Con No native editor for Linux
Though it builds for Linux, the Unity Editor runs only on Windows and Mac. Some users have successfully run the Windows version on Linux via Wine.
