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Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

unrealengine.com

131–140 of 168 posts

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#131
post #59

I'll say it, THANK YOU! I've used UE at previous jobs, and while I'm not gonna say it is the best ever engine, allowing this piece of software in the hands of indies for 19 bucks a month is a bargain. I will probably not use it as I left the games industry, but compared to other commercial offerings out there, the 19 bucks a month plus the 5% is a bargain if any team is doing high end graphics games. You can bitch ab…

How does one even get into game design? I have an idea in my head that I want to get out but it gets more & more complex as I think about it.

By making games. There are lots of engines and frameworks these days to cater to people who want to create a game, but don't want to or can't do it from the ground up. Game Maker Studio and of course Unity come to mind.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#132

"5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users." As others have pointed out, that is a huge amount, that is probably 25 - 30% of your "profit". The accounting is pretty easy though. Units * SRP * 0.05 == royalty. That said, it is a lot simpler than investing $25 - $30K up front while building the game, only to have it go poof because the market or your designer flaked out. Figure 3 year development at $20/month t…

Not so fast. Retailers' gross is SRP*Units. Dev's gross is what the next link in the supply chain pays him. That is still true in today's distribution model since Apple/Play/Steam store take some cut of the retail price and pays you the rest. One could even argue that you developing and you selling are two distinct companies and that gross is what dev you makes (actually they are quite distinct business functions, so…

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%.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#133
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get a new private repo which you can't make public. It works pretty well.

And I can turn around, make a new public repo then push the code right back up.

And your repo will get a takedown notice... So what?

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so fast. Retailers' gross is SRP*Units. Dev's gross is what the next link in the supply chain pays him. That is still true in today's distribution model since Apple/Play/Steam store take some cut of the retail price and pays you the rest. One could even argue that you developing and you selling are two distinct companies and that gross is what dev you makes (actually they are quite distinct business functions, so…

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.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so fast. Retailers' gross is SRP*Units. Dev's gross is what the next link in the supply chain pays him. That is still true in today's distribution model since Apple/Play/Steam store take some cut of the retail price and pays you the rest. One could even argue that you developing and you selling are two distinct companies and that gross is what dev you makes (actually they are quite distinct business functions, so…

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%.

> What is to stop anyone from doing this?

Being the guy who gets to spend tens to hundreds of thousands in legal fees to convince jury they aren't just trying to cheat someone out of their royalty.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#136
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?

http://maratis3d.org

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#137
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.

[deleted]

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#138
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…

I've been saying there will be a huge middle man market for assets for years. A whole studio specializing in different models for boxes - every era, every state of decay, every material. A studio dedicated to the most realistic rain effects possible - at the lowest price and graphics overhead. You don't have to worry about the "Wilhelm Scream" of boxes or rain effects though because there will be a lot of choice, a l…

Daz Studio is all about this: http://www.daz3d.com/

Their (free) app is 90% geared toward using content purchased from their store (not free).

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#139

"5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users." As others have pointed out, that is a huge amount, that is probably 25 - 30% of your "profit". The accounting is pretty easy though. Units * SRP * 0.05 == royalty. That said, it is a lot simpler than investing $25 - $30K up front while building the game, only to have it go poof because the market or your designer flaked out. Figure 3 year development at $20/month t…

Not so fast. Retailers' gross is SRP*Units. Dev's gross is what the next link in the supply chain pays him. That is still true in today's distribution model since Apple/Play/Steam store take some cut of the retail price and pays you the rest. One could even argue that you developing and you selling are two distinct companies and that gross is what dev you makes (actually they are quite distinct business functions, so…

Unreal redefined "gross revenue" in the EULA for Unreal 4 Engine, so they are not using the standard meaning that's used everywhere else in the world. Their definition of "gross revenue" is actually something similar to "total retail sales."

It's a dick move on their part. They could, and should, have used a different term to avoid the confusion.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#140
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…

I've been saying there will be a huge middle man market for assets for years. A whole studio specializing in different models for boxes - every era, every state of decay, every material. A studio dedicated to the most realistic rain effects possible - at the lowest price and graphics overhead. You don't have to worry about the "Wilhelm Scream" of boxes or rain effects though because there will be a lot of choice, a l…

The market might exist, but I predict it won't be nearly as large as you're suggesting unless there is a departure from Unity's model. In Unity's asset store, the real money-makers are editor plugins. Given the effort put into some of the visual assets on the site, I can't imagine pure one-time sales are anywhere near profitable enough to sustain a business. A small indie shop that churns out a diverse array of content, maybe.

Perhaps Unreal will introduce some new ideas there such as a first-come, first-licensing or bidding model. Another idea might be a royalty system.

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