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Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

unrealengine.com

141–150 of 168 posts

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#141
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5% of Minecraft, LoL, Candy Crush is pretty good moneymaker. If you catch early the next indie breakout hit ... you could look at millions down the road. You also make sure that any indie is well acquainted in the engine - so if the studios get aquihired ... you have your own free sale force on the inside. Although I would really like Unity or Carmack to make an engine that is potent enough to threaten UE. The unreal…

I think some of the replies here are missing the point. 5% could be huge, sure. You would think it would absolutely dwarf the $20. So why risk missing the next Minecraft for a measly $20?

If there are enough teenagers like me, that dreamed of making there own game and researched game engines only to find that there weren't really any available for (almost) free, that could potentially be a nice enough additional revenue stream. I.e. amateur programmers, that want to play with an engine and probably will never release a commercial game.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#142
post #63

This could be huge for indies who want to use something other than Unity. $19 per month is a very low barrier to entry. And 5% isn't much compared to every other AAA engine. And access to source code for this price? Damn. I'm still going to stick to my open source tools (for now), but this just put Unreal Engine on my radar...

Out of curiosity what open source tools are you currently using?

His comment is dead (?), he answered with a link to maratis3d.org

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#143

"You can cancel your subscription at any time and keep using the engine, though without monthly updates." If you are really tight on cash then I guess that you can check the change log and only pay the 20$ for the month for crucial updates. Paying for product updates is usually a big red flag for me but since it got down from several tens of thousands of dollars up front then this is not such a bad deal.

The idea of cancelling until right before launch day came to mind. :-)

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#144
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come to think of it, you could wrap it around a thin wrapper program and provide that as a product for a nominal fee over which you'd have to pay 5%, then develop your game over the wrapper. What is to stop anyone from doing this? Maybe the license says your product must be licensed the same way, so if the end user mods your game and sells it they too have to pay 5%.

License says if you sell your game for 10 dollars on the app store and Apple takes 30% cut of that Epic is taking 5% of 10 dollars and not 5% of 7 dollars.

Seems you are right:

"When releasing a product using UE4, you're signing up to pay Epic 5% of gross product revenue from users, regardless of what company collects the revenue. That means: If your game makes $10 on the App Store, Apple may pay you $7, but you'd pay Epic $0.50 (5% of $10)."

Still, you'd have to legally define end customer because you could have, as I pointed out, much more complex cases. I didn't search much, but couldn't find the actual fine print license to see how they did it, but they probably did it well and ironclad and don't need legal advice from a guy with no formal legal education. I stand humbled.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#145
post #50

The difference between AAA and indie games is blurring. If I was EA & Ubisoft, I'd be concerned. Consumer are/will benefit from this movement.

The difference between AAA and indie is several hundred full-time content creators and millions of dollars worth of marketing.

One area Epic win here is that by making their AAA-grade engine affordable to individuals they'll end up with a lot of budding game developers self-trained in Unreal. This creates a sort of lock-in: AAA studios are more likely to chose Unreal because it's easier to hire people with Unreal experience.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#146

This can't be good for Unity...

People don't just suddenly drop their prices dramatically for no reason; this move is directly as a result of how well Unity is doing; and how big name studios like Blizzard are taking it up.

...but hey, I would be 100% not surprised to see the guys from Unity pull a similar 'cheaper but with profit share' for pro licenses.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#147
post #36

Everyone seems pretty focused on the pricing - I thought the inclusion of an asset-marketplace directly into the editing environment was brilliant. You could imagine Adobe following suit very shortly here withs something similar and invalidate all those graphic/template/icon/texture/animation sites. You just open the "marketplace" inside of Photoshop and browse around for the assets you might want. Same would go for…

Creative Market has a photoshop plugin that lets you do this with their platform. https://creativemarket.com/adobe-extension

Not for long, Autodesk just bought them today. Looks like the marketplace-for-assets is starting.

https://creativemarket.com/blog/2014/03/19/building-the-worl...

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#148
I haven't used Unreal but I have shipped AAA games. To those who have used Unreal 4 is this really something an indie would want to use?

My impression is Unreal is designed to make giant games, not small ones. True?

My impression is Unreal is not nearly as iterative as Unity which lets you change code as it's running. True?

Also Unity targets more platforms?

Of course it's great the Unreal is accessible. Appearently Crytek now has an even better deal. But, I just wonder is Unreal really suited to indie development and quick prototyping or is it more designed for large teams who don't care as much about iteration time and expect to spend way more time getting started

Since I haven't used Unreal I have no idea. Please enlighten me

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#149
post #85
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but you can't get a Linux editor (yet).

I saw that Icculus was already cloning the repo... only a matter of time I hope .

If Icculus pulls it off, then I'm 100% switching. I'm currently building my engine for an atmospheric survival horror game, and I would throw it all away if the Unreal editor worked on Linux.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#150

I haven't used Unreal but I have shipped AAA games. To those who have used Unreal 4 is this really something an indie would want to use? My impression is Unreal is designed to make giant games, not small ones. True? My impression is Unreal is not nearly as iterative as Unity which lets you change code as it's running. True? Also Unity targets more platforms? Of course it's great the Unreal is accessible. Appearently…

I would love to see answers to this comment from people that have used it.
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