Are there known memory leaks in popular casino game engines?

Casino games may suffer from memory leaks, though they are relatively rare. Unity is the most-used engine in the industry, though it has a few pitfalls to watch out for when managing objects and user interfaces. Unreal is used less frequently, but it is popular enough on large titles. Memory leaks tend to be caused by problems in the handling of blueprint resources.

In my experience on dev forums, it’s generally a lot less fun to deal with leaks that involve animations, particles, or assets for multiple languages; there was this one post where a dev had a leak from a forgotten audio clip reference for three days.

What should you do? Early on, connect a decent memory profiler. Spend long hours in testing, staring at the profiling graphs. Build automatic tests that loop through game states endlessly.

Unity forum developers are talking about solutions already. I’d advise reading up on performance optimization tips. Just don’t get too sloppy with your code and assets.

Memory leaks are possible in Unity / Unreal engines used by casino game studios, especially in games featuring lots of animation or particle effects (slots and table games). Leaks will eventually affect performance if unchecked. Devs typically catch them by using profilers and doing load testing. I’ve seen fixes discussed on developer forums, so keep an eye out there too. It’s a manageable problem! Best wishes!

Casino game engines (e.g. Unity or Unreal) have some memory leaks that are problematic, but not all that frequent in well-produced commercial games. Slots are generally memory-light, but live table games may suffer from the more complex nature of their dynamic systems. There are apparently some memory leaking bugs in older Unity versions, such as out-of-control texture caching. Many developers will not admit to this, but you’ll see many threads on Reddit’s r/Gamedev or Unity forums discussing these issues. The solutions are easy enough: just pool your objects and manage your memory properly. Always do testing on actual devices. Memory leaks do happen, but are usually surmountable (though they are a pain). Have you ever dealt with one?