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

[Shamus Young]

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.

This information is WRONG, there is no % cut from unity. Unity free is free, and you can publish whatever without paying them a single dollar on the Pc or on an iOS/android device, if you get unity PRO you can pay a ~75 dollars per month subscription, OR the complete ~1500 dollars for pc (+another 1500 for iOS pro or Android pro) again without ANY further publishing payment.

The UDK (unreal 3)license does take 25% of gross profits when you made MORE THAN 50k. And Cry Engine used to take 20% of any profit, but CryTech changed that model already ( it is now 10 dollars a month ).

On our studio we decided to go with Unity for now, simply because the 5% royalty fees for Unreal seems like a bad precedent. I'd rather pay a few thousand once or a more expensive subscription than that... Royalties simply for using an engine.. no ...it seems wrong.
Technically Unreal 4 from my experience, works quite well but is sluggish as hell. It requires 8gb of ram for it just to run at all. But it takes a toll on the most powerful of setups. It may be a matter of iteration and optimization, but at this point it is a huge resource hog.
It is great to use C++ and to have the complete source code, instead of Unreal Script which I'm not a big fan of. But we haven't really found anything in Unreal 4 that you cant do with Unity + a few plugins. And the flexibility and agility of the engine, is simply more important for us.

Tempting though.. very tempting.

 

[Pinky's Brain]

Over the years I have lost a lot of respect for Tim Sweeney and Epic ... but this is ballsy. A lot of non open source developers would rather die than hand out their precious like this.

 

[toms]

Over the years I have lost a lot of respect for Tim Sweeney and Epic ... but this is ballsy. A lot of non open source developers would rather die than hand out their precious like this.

They aren't exactly handing it out.
It's still a closed source product, you still need a license to use it; they have merely lowered the barrier of entry in order to stay competitive.

 

[Pinky's Brain]

It's not OSI open source, but I can take a look at the most recent source code for the price of a large pizza ...

 

[thom_cat_]

I'm a developer currently using Unity and have paid the full price for the pro version outright, I find this much more appealing than any subscription model. I also much prefer not having to worry about future loss of income from shipping my title. I have no worries about Unity asking for a percentage cut of the money I make.

But really, UE4 is amazing, it's got a heck of a lot of sweet juicy tech in it; but it's missing things that I need, it has almost zero 2D support and isn't structured for many types of games that I am wanting to create.
It's awesome that engines are getting cheaper and becoming more open source, because as much of the indie development community feels, it's less about holding onto your techniques and more about helping people to realise their ideas. Programming and art can be bought, good quality ideas are less realised. Letting someone create a game without needing to make their own engine is a big step towards that.