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Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

unrealengine.com

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Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#21

Post by sillysaurus3 »

mattzito wrote: post #9
pdeva1 wrote: post #4

the $19 paywall complicates all things. complicates distrbution. their github repo cannot be public. etc. If you going for indies, why not just go all in and make it free to start. The money they make is on the 5% not $19

If I had to guess, it's designed as a threshold barrier so they don't have to deal with trying to track down thousands of "projects" where the developer is someone who had big plans to build a game but got bored a week in. At least now, presumably the $19 at least covers the operating costs of tracking all the people you might need to be collecting license revenue from.

Actually, they only care about 5% of the big successes, just like any good investors. Or at least that's what they should be caring about.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#22

Post by seivan »

arethuza wrote: post #8

It says "paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users" not "5% of profit". I'd be rather surprised if they asked for 5% of profits due to Hollywood Accounting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Sorry my bad. Fixed. Thanks for catching that.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#24

Post by Fuxy »

adventured wrote: post #11
pdeva1 wrote: post #4

the $19 paywall complicates all things. complicates distrbution. their github repo cannot be public. etc. If you going for indies, why not just go all in and make it free to start. The money they make is on the 5% not $19

They likely realize what they're doing. I'd wager it's a friction fee. Markets often have fees just to add friction to eliminate some problems that derive from completely free access. They clearly don't care about the $19, it's meaningless except for one plausible purpose.

It's not $19 it's $19/month that's a large friction fee.

They would be making money even when the game is in development.

Say your game takes 1 year to make well you have just spent over $200 and still haven't made any money.

That's an unnecessary burden on indie developers.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#25

Post by brokenparser »

Tloewald wrote: post #5

The 5% is a bit misleading too because it's 5% of "sticker price" (what they call "gross revenue" which means purchase price not including sales tax). So for a $10 iTunes game they get $0.50 (5% of what Apple gets) and not $0.35 (5% of what you get). This is particularly bad for retail games where you're getting 30% or less of retail price (and that's hardly pure profit). Unity, in comparison, costs more per month (o…

Thanks for pointing this out, I thought they could only serve 20 customers with this scheme.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#27

Post by demoncore »

arethuza wrote: post #8

It says "paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users" not "5% of profit". I'd be rather surprised if they asked for 5% of profits due to Hollywood Accounting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Or just regular accounting. Profit is taxed, so every company will always try at the end of financial year to sink profit into something that'll deliver future revenue to defer tax and fuel growth. Unless you have shareholders who expect/demand a dividend like MSFT has, this is usually the best approach. Several very large businesses even thumb their noses at their shareholders demands and reinvest profit for revenue growth, like AMZN, and get very little credit from shareholders for how tax efficient their decision is.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#28

Post by potatolicious »

pdeva1 wrote: post #16
mattzito wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to guess, it's designed as a threshold barrier so they don't have to deal with trying to track down thousands of "projects" where the developer is someone who had big plans to build a game but got bored a week in. At least now, presumably the $19 at least covers the operating costs of tracking all the people you might need to be collecting license revenue from.

well thats the whole point of opening it to the community. that 'failed project' developer will himself gain a lot of experience that he can freely share. I dont think they care about hunting down extremely tiny devs and even $19 doesnt cover that cost.

The key thing to understand about game development is that everyone wants to be a game developer, in the same way everyone wants to be a rock star, or a famous actor.

It's a prestige profession, which means most self-professed practitioners of it don't actually practice at all.

Put plainly, that "failed project" developer is in all likelihood not a developer at all. That "failed project" developer likely has never written a line of code in his/her life. That "failed project" developer is much more likely to be some schmuck with starry-eyed naivete about game dev and thinks the UDK is some magical unicorn that will carry them to fame and fortune.

That won't stop said "developer" from flooding the forums with inane questions that anyone who has written code before would have figured out already. They are noise in the system, and as far as game dev goes they outnumber the people who actually know what they're doing.

There are tire kickers (people who are technically proficient but don't really want to license your software), and then there are tire kickers (people with little/no technical ability who have played many games and imagine themselves capable of making them, and downloaded your SDK on the assumption that they can point and click their way to success). The latter group generates a stupid amount of customer support load.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#29

Post by Jare »

odonnellryan wrote: post #10
bobx11 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20 is just the tire kicker filter... all those people who would never actually ship a game (most devs) are not going to waste the time of the unreal engine team with their beginner requests.

Then again, just promoting the community would inevitably help many companies involved by generating programmers and other enthusiasts.

To target passionate enthusiasts while retaining control, they could have waved the initial $19 fee to anyone who signs up only during GDC week. IIRC Unity did something similar a couple of years ago with their 3.5 non-Pro mobile plugins, shortly before releasing Unity 4, and the experiment eventually convinced them to provide free non-Pro licenses across the board (consoles excluded of course).

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#30

Post by Jare »

brokenparser wrote: post #23
dimillian wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to pay the subscription, then they add you to their private repository.

Do they accept pull requests?

I would imagine that is the plan in some way. From their legal FAQ:

"Through GitHub you can access UE4 C++ source code from Epic and also see code contributions from other developers across the community. We have lots in store for this channel, and we're looking for feedback on what you'd like to see here as well."

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