Unreal engine now cost only royalites

[madmarx]

Hello everyone,

Apparently unreal engine is now free during development, and you pay when you release 5% royalites (still too much for certain companies). At 10€ per month before, it was almost free though.
Anyway, it is a hard world for game-engine commercial staff.

Just wondering, when will epic game pay us to use it ?

[Kojack]

Just wondering, when will epic game pay us to use it ?

Probably when Unity comes close to the current deal.

[c6burns]

Just wondering, when will epic game pay us to use it ?

That happened 2 weeks ago
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/epic- ... dev-grants

[Klaim]

Frankly, as long as there is royalties involved, it's still a no-no for me. Royalties means life-time. I want to pay my tools once.

[hydexon]

Since our development group discovered UE4 is free now (for development), we are debating to discard our WIP OGRE engine in favour of UE4, because the "fancy-looking" game...

Well i think i should to start to contribute to the new Ogitor instead...

[cybereality]

I was a subscriber for UE4 already, but this just sweetens the deal.

I don't consider 5% to be that much, especially when you realize that Valve/Apple or whatever is getting 30% right off the bat.

When that percentage becomes significant, it would mean your game was a huge success, in which case you should be happy and be willing to give back something.

Also think that maybe without a full-service game engine you may have taken much longer to finish your game (or not finished at all). I think it's a good deal.

[c6burns]

Assuming you have absolutely no preference between UE4 and Unity (this is a good example because its the classic % revenue vs per-seat license matchup) ... you just take your projected revenue and compare 5% of that to your per-seat licenses for all your seats.

So for projected revenue of $100,000 with 1 seat:
UE4 takes $5,000
Unity takes $4,500 (assuming you need the mobile licenses)

If you have more than 1 seat for the same projected revenue, then UE4 wins in terms of total expenses (assuming your projection turns out to be correct). If you project a large revenue with a low amounts of seats, Unity will be the clear winner. Personally I prefer Unity's tools, but it might just be because I am much more familiar with them. The simplicity of the per-seat license fee also appeals to me since it can't go up even if your title ends up being explosively popular (though one can argue ... this is not a situation in which you will be finding too much to complain about).

The only consideration I left out is that your distribution fees and taxes come out after UE4's cut and not before. So if you gross $100k you will probably only see 1/2 of that end up in your account. So now its $5k out of $50k which might not matter to some, but it might matter to others.

[Klaim]

I don't consider 5% to be that much, especially when you realize that Valve/Apple or whatever is getting 30% right off the bat.

That is not at all comparable. A deal for distributing, promoting your game is a deal with limits in time. As soon as you are not happy for that deal (with Steam or any other shop) you can stop using it and not pay for it.
Royalties are different and projected on the lifetime of a project it can be a real pain.

But I guess that my experience with debt makes me very cautious of these kinds of deals. While most people see this as an opportunity, it really feels to me like taking another debt.

[Kojack]

Autodesk are releasing a game engine called Stingray.
I wonder how this will compete with UE4 and Unity?
I have a feeling this won't be a free or cheap engine, but it probably comes with Autodesk's Beast and Scaleform.
(Unity already has Beast built in. Unreal used to have Scaleform, but dropped it for UE4)

[hydexon]

Autodesk are releasing a game engine called Stingray.

Stringray is the new brand of the Bitsquid Engine, which Autodesk brought the developer company. I have my throughts will be discontinued any time soon

[Zonder]

Autodesk are releasing a game engine called Stingray.
I wonder how this will compete with UE4 and Unity?
I have a feeling this won't be a free or cheap engine, but it probably comes with Autodesk's Beast and Scaleform.
(Unity already has Beast built in. Unreal used to have Scaleform, but dropped it for UE4)

Based off bitsquid what they acquired http://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/bitsquid here is there blog http://bitsquid.blogspot.co.uk/

[Klaim]

Now unity5 is fixed price and released.

[Kojack]

Now unity5 is fixed price and released.

Apparently it's also all engine features in the free version, the pro version is instead distinguished by including things like cloud building, performance reporting, analytics, etc.

[Kojack]

Yet another one: valve just announced that Source 2 will be free.
Hmm, anybody want to guess on the next one?
- Id tech
- havok (whatever their engine was called)

[c6burns]

Havok's engine they aquired, called Vision Engine, and then they integrated all their components into it ... I don't see Havok making all their stuff free any time soon. Their licensing is all per-component per-project. They might explore a % revenue model though ... not sure what they are cooking up. They are kinda weird because I don't get a sense from them that they need to be in the rat race. Big name studios come to them for the various components and plug them into their in-house tech.

Unigine can't be doing too well with all this going on. Last I checked their offering was cheaper than Havok (assuming you want vision + physics + script + animation at the very least, which you probably do), but still pretty expensive. You'd have to be closing in on the $1M net revenue mark to make Unigine's per-product license worth it.

[cybereality]

Unity 5 and Source 2 for free? Things are getting crazy.

[Kojack]

Maybe C4?

Source 2 is going to be very interesting. Source had some insane lighting stuff for it's time (the triple radiance basis vectors instead of surface normals, cubic map light probes, etc), I can't wait to see what it's capable of. I don't really like their editor though, I was more of a fan of Unreal due to it's subtractive and additive modelling, compared to Hammer's additive brushes (resizing a room is easier when you resize a single brush that cuts from a solid world, instead of moving multiple wall brushes). None can match the coolness of Build engine though.

Havok has a history of some things going free, but that's because they were sponsored. Intel paid them to make Havok Physics and Animation components free.
(I really want to like Havok, but Havok keeps getting in the way of that)

[cybereality]

Just encountered a pretty silly bug in UE4 that makes it so you can't reimport an asset (model, texture, etc.) unless your project is in the default "C:\Users\YourName\Documents\Unreal Projects". Kind of a fundamental feature, you know, to be able to update your artwork...

Seems someone else reported the bug a year ago, and it still wasn't fixed. So I am digging into the source code now to see if I can fix it. That's the big advantage of having source code available.

[c6burns]

(I really want to like Havok, but Havok keeps getting in the way of that)

Man, I hear that! I adore their tech, but I can't justify its cost compared to Unity 5. And they are in such a weird place with Project Anarchy + Intel sponsorship making some of their stuff free, but only select components and/or select platforms.

[Thyrion]

unreal engine, unity, and now source engine for free .....

that makes the game market harder than ever. If not super shit.
The only one rubbing their hands, are the royalty/abo earners, letting others work,test and advertise for them.

apart from this, the unreal engine/editor is a resource eater. Just tried unity3d because my graphicscard cooler is crying even in an empty unreal scene....

[Klaim]

Yeah looks like there will be a flood of shitty games, but actually it's a good thing for the medium and it means that there will be a big "remarkable" barrier getting stronger through time, so it's ok to me.


However, I think on the long term it would be so much better if it was very easy to "compose" your own game-specific engine with languages like C++. It would make almost any editor obsolete (in an ideal world).

By the way, nobody ever tried to make a composable game engine kind of standard interface so that people can combine some systems associated to ui tools and the result would be an editor and a game engine, customized for your needs?

[Thyrion]

By the way, nobody ever tried to make a composable game engine kind of standard interface so that people can combine some systems associated to ui tools and the result would be an editor and a game engine, customized for your needs?

you mean i can pick parts like i want :
- bullet,physx or havok for phyiscs
- ogre,irrlicht,unreal or unity for rendering
- sdl, sfml for input
- raknet,enet for network
- protobuffers, flatbuffer, captnproto for serialization
etc.
and just have to compile them?

why do you not make something like that? need!

p.m. but i don't want to pay something.

[Thyrion]

wow, next hightlight
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/nvidi ... developers

[Klaim]

By the way, nobody ever tried to make a composable game engine kind of standard interface so that people can combine some systems associated to ui tools and the result would be an editor and a game engine, customized for your needs?

you mean i can pick parts like i want :
- bullet,physx or havok for phyiscs
- ogre,irrlicht,unreal or unity for rendering
- sdl, sfml for input
- raknet,enet for network
- protobuffers, flatbuffer, captnproto for serialization
etc.
and just have to compile them?

why do you not make something like that? need!

p.m. but i don't want to pay something.

No, I meant :
- with a specific api skeleton where libraries plugs together without you (the user) having to do it - currently you have to use a lot of glue code to plug things togethers;
- with a kind of empty editor skeleton which would automatically load modules associated with the libraries (edition widgets, component types, etc.);
- no dependency hell;
- these apis ould be wrappers over the actual libs;

I do what you said already and have been doing this for years. It's ideal on paper but hardcore and time consuming in practice because not a lot of libraries try to be actually modular enough to be easy to setup in any kind of context, and even if they did, the lack of dominant/robust dependency tool in the C++ ecosystem makes it very difficult to work with (combined with no dominant build system, no CMake is not yet dominant unfortunately).

[Kojack]

wow, next hightlight
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/nvidi ... developers

That page makes it sound a bit like PhysX is open for UE4 developers, but Nvidia have open sourced PhysX 3.3 for everyone.
http://physxinfo.com/news/12526/physx-s ... -for-free/

(You need to register with Nvidia Gameworks to get access to the github for it)

I read recently that Opcode 2 is on the way (the sequel to collision only library that was pretty popular years ago, by Pierre Terdiman). It's going to be included in Physx 3.4 (Pierre worked on Novodex / PhysX)

I wish Nvidia would get a better naming scheme. They have the shield (hand held game system), the shield (tablet) and the shield (console). There's the shield controller that can work with the shield and the shield, but not the shield because that shield already is a controller. Using a shield controller to control a shield that is a controller would just be making this whole naming clusterf*** even more confusing.


I'd be interested in coding for the Shield console, except it's android. No thanks. (I like android, I just don't want to code for it, I'd prefer a real linux distro or something, like on the Open Pandora.