Headline abuse. The quote is "free for content developers."
Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
131–138 of 138 posts
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#132The thing that boggles my mind is how there seems to be concern about this concept of charging 5% (like Unreal 4 does). In my mind (not a game developer - tell me if I'm way off here), the framework gives you about 90% of the work up front (10s of thousands of man hours). Then, once you finish your game and it's a success (sales-wise), you pay only 5% of your revenue. This seems like a wonderful deal, right?
IMHO, 5% works great for indies and small devs. It lowers the downside risk of an unprofitable game and only gets expensive after you can afford it. It does not work well for large-budget AAA games. In those setups, only a small percentage of revenue goes to the developer after paying back publishers, marketing and distribution. Taking 5 out of that is a huge hit. That's why Epic explicitly expects large budget games…
The 5% Epic takes is from of the gross product revenue rather than the net. In an age where some AAA games can sell a few million copies and still not turn a profit, Epic is smart enough to pick the model that avoids losing out to Hollywood accounting.
I don't know enough about the games industry to know whether 5% of the gross is an overly large chunk to spend on the engine developer. It does sound reasonable to me, but if not, the onus would be on the dev, not Epic, to find some leverage to renegotiate a better deal.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#133Unreal, Unity and now Source within just a few days from each other... It looks like the game engine market is commoditizing rapidly.
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Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#134I'm interested in knowing if Source 2 will only be targeting PC and Steam Machines, or if Valve has plans for Xbox/PlayStation/Wii and iOS/Android/Windows Phone.
hopefully mac also, I think all of valve first party titles run on mac so I would hope they wouldn't drop it for source 2(and mythical HL3)
Due to the new steam machines running on linux there's a high probability for the games to work for os x as well. I think (can't find the reference right now) that gabe newell really want games to be able to run on all major pc os's.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#135The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history. First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine. HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has als…
> Ogre 3D I recently chose to give up on Ogre3D as I was completely frustrated by my inability to make it run on mac. It's also way too big (I don't know if OOP is a reason for that, but I still tend to dislike OOP nevertheless). For example it doesn't seem that you can choose to not use the scene graph. I loved that engine at some point, but as time passed, I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to either buil…
i think the true best thing is to just build your own engine from the ground up in openGL. it's labor intensive. and it's not what you should do if you want to make a game. but, every graphics programmer has an engine. and it is never finished. it's a lifetime project that you can continously keep building, refactoring, and adding onto to learn new things.
the only real way to learn programming is by doing. no amount of reading can really burn knowledge into your brain. by implementing things like model->world->camera space transforms, quaternion rotation, shadow mapping, lightmaps, deferred rendering, etc yourself, you will end up intuitively understanding them.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developing the engine (even if it is mostly incremental enhancments from the games released over the years) must have taken up signifficant resources lately. If the engine is "done" now, there should be people available to work on new titles.
Chances are, they are developing the engine alongside a new game built on that engine. That is after-all how most game engines are built.
That would be the "mostly incremental enhancments from the games released".
Releasing something publicly makes a huge difference.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ogre 3D I recently chose to give up on Ogre3D as I was completely frustrated by my inability to make it run on mac. It's also way too big (I don't know if OOP is a reason for that, but I still tend to dislike OOP nevertheless). For example it doesn't seem that you can choose to not use the scene graph. I loved that engine at some point, but as time passed, I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to either buil…
>a minimal engine with plain helper functions that let you use, understand and talk to OpenGL You can try http://libcinder.org , http://www.openframeworks.cc or http://www.sfml-dev.org
those are not 3D
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#138Check out Project Reality for a great example of a very engaging game that will benefit from game engine licensing like this. Current version is BF2 based and some of the best squad based gameplay I have experienced.
Very interesting that I find this here! I was on the PR2 team for awhile before things stagnated. I don't think the team at this point over at realitymod.com would benefit from anything happening at EA in regards to BF2's license. A lot has changed and things are moving very slowly nowadays. You might want to check out Squad (joinsquad.com)
I did take a look at some Squad footage that was released from the team months ago, looking forward to its release.