Get Unreal Engine 4... For 19 Bucks?!?

[Shamus Young]

Get Unreal Engine 4... For 19 Bucks?!?

With a monthly access model for Epic's Unreal Engine 4 - access to which will set you back about the cost of a WoW sub and a cup of coffee each month - it's officially time to see what people will do with it.

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[Shamus Young]

I think your forgot the "by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users" part of the agreement for releasing a game. That's gross, not nett. So that's 5% of full retail price. It's not back-breaking but if your profit margins are tight it could squeeze your end cut of revenue after everyone else has taken their share.

Paragraph four: "To be clear, they also get a cut of the profits if you ever use it to make a commercial game, but that's a topic for another time."

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

I guess my main fear about the UE4 is that it and its tools set could become TOO ubiquitous, leading design in a certain direction.

Shamus purposely didn't get into it, but other big engines are starting to do this too, noticeably CryTek with their once outlandishly protective CryEngine 3. 3D modeling aside, the rendering engine included in it is enough to make any developer think long and hard. Let the competition begin

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Too bad you missed this last month.
I feel like almost all you talked about was already said in the replies to the inital news, right here on these fine Escapist forums...

 

[Pyrian]

I think your forgot the "by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users" part of the agreement for releasing a game. That's gross, not nett. So that's 5% of full retail price. It's not back-breaking but if your profit margins are tight it could squeeze your end cut of revenue after everyone else has taken their share.

Paragraph four: "To be clear, they also get a cut of the profits if you ever use it to make a commercial game, but that's a topic for another time."

Still, a cut of the gross is distinct from a cut of the profits - especially if there are no profits.

 

[Elijah Newton]

Didn't you always used to get the Unreal editor with the earlier incarnations of Unreal? (I don't recall if the first Unreal had it, but UT and UT3 certainly did) That was great but with that as a one-time standard what is the improvement over this subscription model? Kudos for pointing out it's about the same price as an MMO, though.

Also, is there anything like documentation shipping with this? While the UT version of UnrealEd was fairly intuitive I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to generate landscapes in UT3's version - the complexity has ramped up more than a bit.

Ultimately, though, kudos to Unreal for trying to get their product into as many people's hands as possible. Hope this approach pays off for them.

 

[Falterfire]

As somebody who has been working with Unity and really enjoying it, is there any specific reason for me to jump ship to Unreal and start learning those systems? (Besides the general benefits that always come with learning new tech and thus having access to more options for how to execute things)

 

[Darkness665]

This was not unexpected. Unreal Engine 4 is not picking up much in the low end as you stated because it is/was perceived as being for AAA games. But the low end market has been severely trounced by Unity. Which is easy to get, simple to use and has a horrific pricing scheme. Consider that apple is one of the best places (or one of the likeliest places - let's not get hung up on apple itself) their reasonable price for enabling Unity on iOS is cheap enough. However, add in their 25% gross and apple's 30% you end up with 45% to pay for everything. Unity did soften the deal by not charging for the first $100k. This lets a one man shop get their feet back under them before the 55% cut starts in.

The level of product is reasonable and the odds are high you might have to cough up for some other middle ware. What I am waiting for is what will happen in the middle ware market. Not that I care personally but it is interesting to watch these changes over the last four to five years. How the next year settles in the Indie market between Unity, UE4 and home grown Shamus wannabes all wrestle with how to make a game, make a living and not die of starvation while attempting it.

Good article again Shamus. Thanks.

 

[Weaver]

As someone who is paying for the subscription, I think it's totally worth it. The engine is robust, fully featured and never ceases to impress me. The community is growing rapidly and the developer support for questions and bug reports is very good.

I have no qualms with paying their fee for such a good engine.

As a programmer, the fact that you get the entire source code with the engine, something Unity will only give you on B2B deals on the order of $100k and that previous Unreal licensing structures cost around $750k is really amazing.

The 5% net fee might seem like a lot, but if it means the difference between having your game realized and not, I see it as a worthwhile expenditure.

 

[duchaked]

it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I have some friends working in Unity, and some other stuff for the more advanced folk. wonder what they'd think about Unreal 4 about now

 

[Hiramas]

I am not a dev, but i'd like to think that i am clever enough to realize the HUGE amount of everything it takes to make a game. Nevertheless i am really excited about the UE4 engine for the gaming community. The Tech Demos look awesome and the developer-videos showing of the content creation and control features is understandable even for the laymen. It may not jumpstart a new age of indie, but taking into account that people really like sharing their work and how successful the creative commons concept is i really hope that over time there will be a mid to high end quality - low cost amount of assets for the Engine. As I said, i dont expect it to explode, but over time, this concept could have incredible results. And he haven't even talked about the fact, that this engine has native PS4, Xbox and Linux(SteamOS) support! Never were quality ports on all system so near!

 

[Amaror]

This was not unexpected. Unreal Engine 4 is not picking up much in the low end as you stated because it is/was perceived as being for AAA games. But the low end market has been severely trounced by Unity. Which is easy to get, simple to use and has a horrific pricing scheme. Consider that apple is one of the best places (or one of the likeliest places - let's not get hung up on apple itself) their reasonable price for enabling Unity on iOS is cheap enough. However, add in their 25% gross and apple's 30% you end up with 45% to pay for everything. Unity did soften the deal by not charging for the first $100k. This lets a one man shop get their feet back under them before the 55% cut starts in.

May i ask were you found the Cut information about unity.
I saw nothing of the sorts. They don't allow you to publish games with the free version of unity, if your company has a value greater than 100k, but i saw nothing about 25% cuts.
In the contrary, on the faq page i saw this:

Are there royalties or a per-title fee?
No, Unity does not charge on a per title basis and you do not pay royalties or pay revenue share, even for games and applications made with the free version.

 

[Not Lord Atkin]

here's the thing that I'd like to know: will the drop in price when licensing an engine coupled with its insane accessibility also reduce the cost of developing AAA titles? Because engines seem to be the number one money sink in the industry these days.

What I'm asking is: what potential does this have of saving the AAA industry from collapsing onto itself due to the ridiculous production costs?

 

[J Tyran]

Simple economics really, a penny a piece from many quickly outweighs a pound a piece from the few. Especially as they are taking a cut of the profits too, imagine if some of the games using this blow up the way some of the indie games have done they will make way more than selling an expensive engine to the lesser number of developers that can afford it. Helping to grow the industry is part of the "long game" too, if even more indie and smaller developer games are looking and playing like AAA games it can only bring more gamers into the fold as they are attracted by great looking games for great prices.

 

[NLS]

Didn't you always used to get the Unreal editor with the earlier incarnations of Unreal? (I don't recall if the first Unreal had it, but UT and UT3 certainly did) That was great but with that as a one-time standard what is the improvement over this subscription model? Kudos for pointing out it's about the same price as an MMO, though.

The editor that shipped with the previous Unreal games (and some third party games based on Unreal engine), could only be used to create maps and mods for the game it shipped with. Meaning, you couldn't freely distribute a "standalone" version of your mod, as it would require the base game to run. Neither could you sell it, or have a dig at the source code. They later changed this somewhat, with the freely available standalone UDK, which is pretty much the UnrealED with some free samples and assets included. Projects made with UDK could be freely distributed without the base game, but not be sold without a specific licensing deal.
With this new model, you're free to distribute and sell your project, plus you get the source code. It's pretty much full access to what large developers had to pay large sums of money for back in the days.

 

[carpathic]

I think your forgot the "by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users" part of the agreement for releasing a game. That's gross, not nett. So that's 5% of full retail price. It's not back-breaking but if your profit margins are tight it could squeeze your end cut of revenue after everyone else has taken their share.

EDIT; i looked but but hard enough. I have been corrected.

Although I will never make a game and am likely not able to really evaluate this, I have to say it still seems like a good deal. This gives you access to top level (or at least decent...a lot of good games seem to use Unreal) technology, and the ability to have a common development platform.

Shamus' analogy to the Microsoft Office of Game Engines is an apt one. Word Perfect was an excellent word processor (arguably much, much better than Word) but the omnipresence of Office created a common platform that allowed easier communication. The cost was large, but in the end things work a little easier for everyone.

Not my strongest argument, but 5% to have access to excellent quality tools seems fairly decent, and for Epic to give up this sort of tech, even if it is devalued now is still a pretty brave thing to do.