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Game Engine Marketing Models Compared
death00 writes: "GameDev has an interesting story about the success of Garage Games Torque engine (the engine behind Tribes 2). I especially find it interesting to see the number of developers working on high-quality games based on the Torque engine. The basic premise is that Garage Games gives a full license of the Torque engine to a team for a project for $100 USD per developer. The only caveat is that you must publish any finished works through Garage Games. Perhaps id software might consider doing this with the Quake III engine once the Doom III engine comes out. From my understanding, the Quake III engine currently licenses for significantly ($250,000 USD) more than that. Instead of waiting 2 more years and GPL'ing the full source, why not license it for cheap after Doom III comes out, then GPL later?"
How is this a good question? It's simple.
why not license it for cheap after Doom III comes out, then GPL later?
Easy, they want to make money from it! If they can charge $250,000 and sell copies of it, there's clearly demand for that product and as a result id gets money (again, this is their goal). It's not like id gets anything from other companies licensing their software OTHER than money.
Of course, the price tag puts it out of hobyist's reach, but we all know that, eventually, we'll be allowed to look at the source for free.
Go Id!
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
$250,000? Sounds like they made enough money already. I can think of at least 4 games that use the Q3 engine...that's quite a chunk of cash.
ID software is in business to make money.
Unless of course by "GPL Later" you mean 15 years from now when quake3 will seem like pacman compared to other games.
--me
id is in the business of making games, not publishing them. Activision publishes them. It takes a whole different expertise to get games on the shelf and sell them than it does to come up with new technology. id's business, which it excels at, is the technology, and if they wanted to be in the publishing business I'm sure they already would be.
So don't expect to get a commercial Q3 source code license for $100 any time soon.
Next thing you know the RIAA is going to start asking consumers to start paying for music...the bastards!
"The basic premise is that Garage Games gives a full license of the Torque engine to a team for a project for $100 USD per developer. The only caveat is that you must publish any finished works through Garage Games."
I don't think id publishes their own games. Doesn't activision do that? So rather than taking a percent on profits that Garage Games seems to be doing, id is taking the lump before, which seems like the better route as your pretty much guaranteed that lump, even if the game tanks.
Perhaps a very cheap non GPL license on Quake 3 would still compete too much for licensing with Doom3 that gpl'd code wouldn't. In addition I doubt iD wants to mess with marketing a bunch of previous engine games while trying to work with the new one. I think they'd rather wait a bit longer release the code GPL'd and not have mess with it any more.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
This license would seem more suited to id's business model than the GPL and should be considered as a replacement. Not only would iD open up a new revenue stream for older game engines, but also the community would continue to learn and benefit from the open sourced system (while being able to produce non-commercial titles without restriction).
If anything, opening the source while employing this licensing scheme would be more make the code more useful to the community by allowing for commercial titles to be released using the code (the GPL's requirement that all derivative works be licensed under the GPL makes commercial development unfeasible).
The only worry, from iD's perspective is that licensing older engines would cannibalize the lucrative sales of the most recent engine.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
This is pretty much an advertisement, which in turn points to what's pretty much a press release. Nice post guys! Go ahead, mod my ass down. You know this story eats it.
I'm the project manager of Crystal Space so my opinion on that 3D engine doesn't really count :-)
...
However I think that you should at least take a look at it. It is now becoming VERY mature and the API has stabilized about 95%. Several projects are now using it with great success.
Crystal Space is an Open Source and portable 3D Engine licensed under LGPL. It runs on GNU/Linux, Windows, MacOS/X,
Crystal Space has lots of features. In latest release (beta release) we also have support for shaders (bump mapping, per pixel lighting, things like that) and many other new things.
Crystal Space also has a VERY active user community and an IRC room that you can visit (#CrystalSpace on the OpenProjects network).
The url is http://crystal.sf.net
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
I played T2 a few times and I couldn't really evaluate the graphics/engine quality to any extent because the game was so horrible. From an aesthetic point of view (I don't care about gigatexels or polys or whatnot) how pretty was the T2 engine compared to, say, SOF2/Wolf/JK2/Q3A?
But other games used the Wolfenstien Engine, and a couple of games used the Doom engine, and a bunch used the Quake/Quake II engine.
Still, there's a lot of useful engines and tools out there for the taking. My favorite (unreleased) engine is the OSX-centric Dim3, which looks like it's going to be a fantastic tool for rapid prototyping. Imagine the workflow benefits of prototyping assets and gameplay without having to stall the pipe waiting for development.
I don't see how you can call this a success. The article says that there's hundreds of game projects based on their engine. id Software makes more money selling just ONE Quake3 license.
Maybe they'll make more once some of these games ship, but I doubt it, considering how small of a percentage of games are profitable.
Actually, the suggestion makes sense.
1. THe value of the Quake III engine will drop dramatically when the Doom III engine comes out.
2. id would get an easy way to increase their market share as a publisher. What better way than to tempt gamers with a free (or nearly free) engine?
3. Would keep the company who made Tribes from doing the above. Which would you rather use - QIII or tribes engine? Which sounds more prestigous on the promo?
4. Would be a great talent "minor-league" - virtually give the engine to anyone and it will encourage new up-and-coming developer teams, who will work with id.
All in all, there would be a number of advantages for id. QIII won't be worth as much in a year or so, why not do it?
Admittedly, I doubt they will. Companies have a kneejerk reaction to giving anything away, especially something they're selling for $250,000 now.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
So the chose this alternate model. The $100/developer model will probably not work too well for iD, who offer the services of John Carmack for a day to all lisencees, as well as a lot of email support, etc. Would it be worth it for JC to make a trip to teach 4 developers to use the engine, get $400 in return, and then have the game cancelled in developement?
Besides, iD doesn't really do publishing. They publish through GT Interactive as far as I recall, so this revenue stream is not viable at all.
Ñ'
Remember, the Torque engine is based on the Tribes 2 engine, but includes many more fixes and tweaks. IMHO, The Torque engine is right up there with Q3, and in some cases better. When is the last time you have seen the Q3 engine render true outdoor scenes, complete with terrian, and not enclosed in a "box"?
The torque engine also has amazing networking code. Even if you hated the Tribes games, they have always had the best networking code out of any multiplayer game out there.
GG have also been contracted out to finish the final Tribes 2 patch. Apparently they are getting something other than money in return for doing the patch. Perhaps rights to use certain code from the Tribes 2 engine (Sierra made them take out some code from Tribes 2).
Rumors are that GG has been contracted out to do the next Tribes PC game as well.
I think the price differential buys you one very important thing: support.
Do you think Garage Games is going to help every $100 USD developer out there, much less address any bugs/changes initiated by that developer?
I know developers who licensed the Unreal and Quake engines got direct support from the developers, as well as successive version with bug changes and feature additions.
Bang!
There's the starting gun. You've got two weeks, on your own. Tell you what, we'll cut you some slack. How about three weeks, then.
Slightly more seriously, how about positioning the Q3 engine against some others for features and performance. How about Crystal Space, for instance?
ID should GPL out the 3D engine for a pittance to developers, and demand royalties when it's published!
They don't get the lump sum of 250K, but let them take a nice 10%-20% of every game published, and they'll be alright.
-----
I sig, therefore I was.
iD Software aren't publishers, and they've shown no interest in becoming publishers. iD Software is essentially John Carmack, and that means iD Software is all about the Engine. Period.
Secondly, they've already licenced the Quake III Engine to who knows how many developers, if they turn around and start selling the thing for $100, the lawsuits will come flying fast and furious.
Third, there's no WAY Carmack will ever consider releasing the code to the engine until all of his licencees have released their games based on that engine. He's said as much on numerous occasions.
Fourth, that $250,000 get's you alot more than the engine. It get's you access to Carmack, and as I recall, he (and iD Software) will help them implement up to two engine features exclusive to their product.
Fifth, there's no need to do it at all, you already have all kinds of tools released to do major modification work with the engine. The only thing you don't have is the engine source code, which apparently does have value, since they can charge $250,000 for it, and they're not having any trouble selling that.
Sixth, they've already got a great talent "minor-league", it's in all the Mod Developers, and level designers already working with the QuakeIII Engine, and the Tools already released, and it's been working pretty well for them, and other developers too, for that matter.
So there is no compelling reason for them to make this about face on the engine licencing issue, what they are doing now, serves them quite well.
Welcome to the Real World... where professional programmers have to fill out all kinds of paperwork and attend all kinds of meetings.
Just getting the features of such an engine approved takes months when you are doing it for a large corporation. Even a small company would require enough paperwork to take up a week or 2. Lets say these programmers make $80,000 a year.
The first month is all in "feel good" meetings and move-ins and proceedures and such.
Lets say that this company is using ISO 9000, ok...
Requirements. The clients (in this case the company) meet and gather the artists/programmers/so forth. They discuss what the game should do, physics, characters, so forth... to the degree that it will affect the engine. They go to buttloads of meetings for a couple of months.
Specifications. The file formats, the colors, the network protocols... This happens AFTER requirements, and since it's a group write, it takes a while too.
Design/Implement. Yeah, this would be quick and easy, but you need documentation for everything. You need to get everything approved by higher ups.
Re-Implement. Artist A needs feature B that wasn't mentioned in the requirements or specs.
Document. Before anybody can use it effectively, you need them to know what it is. This takes a long time.
Just the MEETINGS required to start programming take more than a week if you're going to sell it. Now, if you're in your house and know exactly how you want EVERYTHING before you start, a week is probably more than fair. Profesional programmers in the environments that ID is selling to? You can't write an engine for what they're selling that for.
There are other engines like Genesis3D which is open source and free.
Destiny3D is in development (suppose to be going to beta in the next few months) but is only $40 and is being written to compete with things like Quake 3 and Doom 3. Of course I'm a bit one sided due to being on the development team.
Whaaaa??? And give up the "$250,000 XCOPY"???
Then I'd have to give up my 10 Ferarris and 7 Vipers and 17 C5's and my 8000 square foot house where I live alone (well just me and the bevy of chicks I keep around).
How can you even ask that of me????
I'd like to license the Quake III engine because it rocks, but I'm too much of a cheap bastard to do so. Maybe if I post that on /. id will magically change their economic model for me.
pooptruck
Often the free software development model is criticized for simply rebuilding what has been done already. And I feel that the release of the Quake engines and DooM engines have exemplified this very inadequacy.
I had hoped that we would see some really brilliant things come out of the GPL releases of these codebases, and, in reality some very good, cleaned-up clients have been developed. I certainly enjoy the mouselook, higher resolutions, and enhanced levels that have been developed from the DooM engine (see DooMWorld to see the kind of stuff that's out there). The improved QuakeWorld client I'm aware of is pretty nice. And Q^2 has a good Quake 2 client.
But these are just the obvious extensions of what was already done. The community now has (for the most part) all the source and tools that went into making Half-Life, the most successful game to come out of all of these codebases. Yet, to my knowledge, no project has arisen from the community to mold the next such game. How about another story-driven game that people would compare to Deus Ex? Or an all-out action game in the same vein as Soldier of Fortune? Or how about a freaking free software teamplay game that we compare to Counterstrike so that Linux users can play a team-oriented online FPS using free software only and not rely on WINE or WINEX? Or meld two free software projects and connect a Z-machine interpreter with the Quake engine and make a text-command driven story with a 3D view of the action?
These are things that would demonstrate just how momentous and visionary the release of the Quake source under the GPL was. Yet, all the community has managed to come up with is Quake++.
People slam my posts for being negative lately. That I'm ripping on people that have done good work. That's fine, I've got the skin for it. (Try USENET...) I admit that some really find refactoring and coding has gone into redoing the Linux Quake clients. But really, I hear plenty of bitching about how Linux (and other free OS) don't have good games and don't get the attention of the big game companies. Yet, when empowered to do new and exciting things and to make your own games, the group is content to simply recompile Quake for the Zaurus and call it a day. That's good work, for sure, but it's not the kind of work that's going to move free software forward and make it the kind of interesting world that non-free software people take a real interest in.
Again, I'm not making a judgment about the quality of the work that has been done. It's great. But now that you have the best raw materials from John Carmack, can we see real creativity out of the free software gaming world? (FWIW, I think CrystalSpace has done a good job of attracting some interesting new development.)
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
I can't wait until school starts and you have to go back to class. Your statements are juvenile dick-waving, and completely false.
I'm sure you have implemented a next-generation game engine that is better than Carmack's. So let's see it. Oh, and where is your Ferrari?
Im currently part of a dev team and we are planning on making a game using the d3 engine when it comes out, we were originally thinking of purchasing the q3 engine to use for the game but decided to put it off.
This is why ID can charge 250k for their enging. First of all you are not required to publish the game with ID which is all the better because if you were forced to do that then it would be difficult for a game development company to break into the industry. Second you are not buying license to the engine you bought the entire engine. This means any changes you make in the engine do not have to be given to ID when your done and after all of your development if a company wants to license out their new modified engine to other companies they have the full rights to do so. ID allows this because they believe doing this will allow companies that have bought the engine from them to raise the money to buy the next engine and develop a game from it when comes out.
Ive worked with several games for mod development and I can say that ID probably does the most to support the community that develops for their games. They have provided full documentation for their shader system and their editor for q3 while most other games have half-ast documentation at best. Not to mention that 250k buys you a full day with all of the ID staff in question and answer sessions about anything in the engine.
A final point is that ID has been in the industry from its conception so you know without a doubt you are getting a product from a company which has been around for a while and will continue to be around for a while to come.
As you can see from this long list of postings, you are not running your business correctly. Your apparent success is obviously just an illusion. Since you are an engineer we can certainly understand that you may have mis-interpreted your success as being success. After all, you cannot be expected to be both an engineer and a shrewd business man.
We strongly recommend that you abandon your present business practices and adopt one of these recommendations. The most prevalent recommendation is that you stop charging for your work and give it away. At the very least you should discount the price of your work so that it is in no way profitable. Since this is supposed to be a majority rule society, it is obvious that you must adopt this strategy.
This recommjendation is in spite of the fact that the majority of the recommendations come from people that have no record of success to demonstrate the validity of their recommendations. Indeed, most of these recommendations come from people who have no business experience beyond a high school business class and certainly have never been in the position of running a successful company.
None the less, it must be painfully obvious to a person of your intelligence that you must change your business policy immediately. To continue with your present practice is obviously folly.
Sincerely,
The community.
A typical A-class game costs 3 to 10 million dollars to develop. I'd say that 3 million is too low a figure in today's market, though it was typical several years ago. Let's say 4 million is a base figure. $250,000 is 6% of the total budget. That's it. Six percent.
I'm not saying that the Quake III engine is state of the art, or anywhere near the only choice out there (frankly, it's the only engine that most gamers know about), but in the overall scheme of things, $250,000 isn't that much.
The engine, of course, is only maybe 20% of the work required to make a game. Fanboy-types refuse to believe this, but it's true. Art creation is much more time consuming, for example. And there's lots and lots of coding that has nothing to do with the core engine. I'd estimate that graphics-type code is maybe 10-15% of a typical game. For complex games that are less gameplay-shy than Quake, this could easily be under 5%. The reaction to that is usually "But what else is there besides the graphics?" which is greatly amusing to those of us developing games for a living.
I've got a simple answer for you: because id Software doesn't want to be in the publishing business. And unlike LithTech they don't really even want to be in the engine business, they simply take advantage of licensing opportunities when they arise. I'm sure id has known for years that they'd make a killing if they were nothing but an engine and technology company but they've consistently stated that they're a games company and engine licensing is simply icing on the cake. Not that I don't agree with your comments, I just don't think id is the company to work the way you suggest.
If you license the rights to the engine and can then publish your work out to market you stand to make more money then to let someone else publish it and rake in the profit.
It kind of reminds me of the RIAA (Those F&#%s).
What about the Unreal* engines? They get licensed from time to time, but there's no info about that in this article.
Technologically the Unreal engines have been superior to the Quake* engines from the start, but they used a different design model (everything is compiled UnrealScript) that makes them a little harder to work with than the old faithful BSP-type engines.
What was it, "first class games"? Never even heard of these games that the posting talks about. Sounds like a self serving post, would be curious to know the details of who posted it.
I don't know if id get's 1/4 million per license but if so it's not too bad for the Q3 A/TA engine (Alice, FaKK2, Star Trek EF and expansion, Medal of Honor (and upcoming expansion), RTCW (and upcoming Enemy Territory), Jedi Knights II, Solder of Fortune II, upcoming Star Trek EF II) have I missed any... read's like a who's who of top shelf games. Of course id get's even more of the take for RTCW and the upcoming Enemy Lines or whatever game as they developed the game and didn't really license it I guess.
The markets seems to be run by three main players: id, the unreal engine and litchtech (garage doesn't really rate inclusion in this group I feel, others might disagree, but with only tribes 2 as a real top shelf game to it's credit, I don't include it).
Of these id seems to be the most agreeable to many slashdot types. Using opengl rather than directX, dedicated to cross platform issues, linux server always there, and with the GPL'ing of Quake and Quake II I guess we all look forward to GPL'd Quake 3 some day, though the mod groups seems to be able to do amazing things even without the core source code.
The split right now seems to be the unreal engine pusing for really high polygon counts and and the new Doom III engine (also to be used in Quake IV I hear) pushing the texture/lighting issues more. Both look really good, I favour the Doom III not only because I like the company, but from what I have seen of both, it has a more cinematic feel to it.
I suspect both (and lithtech with NOLF and all) will do well as the market for this type of stuff continues to expand.
Personally, I look for the VRML/X3d stuff to continue to falter and any real succefull 3d matrix esq on-line environment to be born out of game engines like these or perhaps the MMORPG people or the GPL'd projects related to MMORPG work.
take care
Wow, and Wow again, sometimes the Slashdot community takes the biscuit. Lets examine the facts
Id as history of producing cool games, licensing the engine, releasing things to open source and... MAKING MONEY.
They are selling Q3 for 1/4 million dollars a pop. Think of the number of games out there using this, now imagine the customer relations that Id will have if having shelled out all that cash Id release it for free within 6 months, so by the time your game is even halfway through development Joe and Ted are releasing games based on Q3.
Then Id want to license DoomIII's engine, and everyone says "no f-in way we'll just wait a year and you'll Open Source the f-er" and Id suffer problems and Slashdot posts the "Id is dead" post and all the people who wanted the world for free be-moan their passing and wonder if all of the games will now be free.
Business is about money, if Id can shift it for $250,000 then let them, if Tribes could then you bet they would. Also Id aren't a publisher so that model doesn't work anyway.
AAARRRRGGGGGGHHHH sometimes the bone-headedness of the "it must be free" lobby makes me scream.
If you want to be free then work for free and live off dust bunnies. I'd prefer to have a roof over my head.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
If McDonalds starts charging more for fries, then I guess I either pony up the cash or go to someone else. My rights and liberties have not been infringed and I have enough integrity, courage and honor (not to mention logic and reason) to not find some way to force them to lower their price outside of competition.
If fanboys get hold of the engine cheaply and use it to make a pile of lame games, won't that devalue the big sticker on the front that says "made with quake three"?
By charging a load of cash for the engine, it ensures that only the pros can afford it, and that quality is ensured and id don't get associated with a load of crap.
1. Red Barchetta from Moving Pictures
2. Subdivisions from Signals
3. Working Man from Rush
4. Closer to the Heart from Farewell to Kings
5. Tom Sawyer from Moving Pictures
Try something more challenging.
1) anarchist reactionary running-dog revisionist
hindu muslim catholic creation/evolutionist
rational romantic mystic cynical idealist
minimal expressionist post-modern neo-symbolist
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Can't they sell it for £$250,000 then based upon the merits of ID software, get the game published through them? (perhaps with a discount).
Looks like lots of Slashdotters are signing up...I will be as soon as I get the chance!
What a great looking product for such a low price! I agree with GG that this should lead to some real innovation (for a change) and will also let some new game development stars emerge who wouldn't have had the budget otherwise. AWESOME!
Also, Slashfolk, don't miss the fact that this engine uses open technologies (OpenGL/OpenAL), is already available on Windows and Mac, and a Linux client is in the works.
Too cool, I can't wait to get them my $100 so I can start playing... =)
(BTW on the id issue - give it a rest. I suspect id prefers to not have the support hassles this would entail...id is making plenty of money already!)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Id makes games, and for each game they make typically licenses the 3D engine for a secondary revenue stream. Id is NOT a publisher, they have Activision for that.
Id is a small company, and they are very focused on large, time consuming tasks. They make 1 game at a time. Why would they want to publish a bunch of smaller games from people that have no way to pay them outside of royalties? This is a job for their publisher possibly (Activision), but Id doing it themselves probably wouldent make any sense. It would spread their resources too thin and stray from doing the things that makes them 1) Happy 2) Rich. Sounds like a no-win to me.
The Quake3 engine is still very good technology, used in a lot of up-and-coming games. I dont think they can easily just drop the cost like that. I mean, how would you feel if you paid $250,000 for the Q3 engine last week, and now you can get it for $100? A bit angry?
This is something Activision may consider doing (if they can work it out with Id). For minimal investment on their part, it makes a lot of sense so long as they have the capabilities to manage it.
Actually, every successful licensee is an advertisement that increases the reputation of id technology. In fact, id has gone so far as to cultivate this in licensing Quake 3: "QUAKE III Arena engine licensees are part of an exclusive club that will remain exclusive because we are capping the total number of licensee companies."
Effectively, Raven, Ritual, et al. compete, as well as pay, for the privilege of showing off id's latest engine.
Oops, just realized i used I.D. in the caption (how the hell did I get that?). I really should learn to stop posting slashdot before I've fully woken up :)
Modes are an amazing thing. I've played Bid for Power which is a mod for quake II. This game blew my mind away as to what they did with just mods. If anyone remembers the article Making Games Live Longer With Mods posted on slashdot it goes to show that Mods are powerfull things.
:)
For a hobbyist modding would be great because like you said it's free. Hell even Team Fortress is making money off being a mod. They get to use the Quake engine without paying any fees
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
Instead of waiting 2 more years and GPL'ing the full source, why not license it for cheap after Doom III comes out, then GPL later?
If I had code that people were willing to pay $250k for I don't think I'd drop my price any time soon. Especially if it was code that people were going to use to develop a product which will compete with my product.
'Same speed C but faster'
If id wanted to expand, I'm sure they could. That much money with so few employees means they aren't a pseudo-publisher because they don't _want_ to become a pseudo-publisher. Doing anything other than what they do now would probably involve at least tripling their staff.
Besides, having tech support for people who've paid you a quarter million and having tech support for people who've paid you $100 are two entirely different worlds. Most people who have 250k to throw around already know what they're doing.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
> From my understanding, the Quake III engine currently licenses for significantly ($250,000 USD) more than that
Either your understanding is incorrect, or you've misrepresented it. Unfortunatly, most of the posters here assumed you were correct. An overview of the license model can be found at id's website. It's actually a $250,000 gaurentee against 5% of wholesales. (You get much more than the license for that of course - you get all of id's developers for a day long Q&A session too). Alternatively, non-GPL projects can license Quake or Quake 2 for a flat fee of $10,000.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
The price is not just $250.000. It is (I quote from idsoftware's own website) $250,000 guarantee against a 5% royalty of the wholesale price for the title. I guess licensees like Soldier of fortune II and Medal of Honor are bringing in much more than a quarter million each.
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This is interesting, because it brings to light the differences in business models. I see the guys at ID software with a much better plan. They don't have to sell the product. The problem with Garage Games method is that there is no guarantee of income, and they have to invest their own income to publish the game. They only make money if the game is a commercial success. The better it does, the more money they make. ID, on the other hand, has a guaranteed flat income.
This really comes down to marketing leverage. Garage Games is not as large, or well know. In order to increase their credibility and the proliferation of their technology they have to take risks. The benefits can be very lucrative-- but are in no way guaranteed. I think you'll see Garage Games adopt a different model when they become as sucessfull as ID, because most business men you talk to will take guaranteed income as the cash cow any day. But good luck to their in either case-- I love Tribes.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
The article/press release states that they have 10,000 people in their community but it doesn't say whether these people all bought licenses. Anyone can visit the site and sign up for free, giving them forum access (except to the SDK forums). I have no doubt they've sold thousands of licenses to the Torque engine, but not everyone who's a member of GarageGames has licensed it.
When you get the source you can use the preconfigured projects to build an "example" - a fully working program and some demo levels. It compiles on Linux, Windows, and Mac and for Windows at least you can use Visual C++ 6 (I think Visual C++ .NET/7 also works if you tweak it a bit), CodeWarrior and now MiniGW (which is free). GarageGames for some time now has been saying thet would release a "demo" of the engine, basically the binaries of the example. They've since stated that they want to hold off until Version 1.2, but that hasn't arrived yet (current version is 1.1.2). They do have a demo of Realm Wars, a community project, which pretty much "serves" as the demo.
The reason the demo is significant is because the Torque engine, like Tribes 2, is heavily scripted. A scripting language powers all the "important" stuff, like game code, to a higher degree than say Quake 3. Having access to the scripting language (the compiler is built into the engine) means you can make more or less a completely different game touching no engine code. The downside being that unless you place in controls or distribute compiled scripts only, everyone gets access to your code.
If you buy the engine then you're paying $100 for engine code you may never touch. The demo has all the scripts neccessary to make a new game. Of course the downside is that you can't then legally charge for your game or modification, which depending on your idea may be important. Also, if the engine limits anything then you're stuck unless you bought the engine.
Still, Torque is 1000x better than free engines, cheaper than a non-GPL license for Quake 1 ($10,000 and it's an old engine) and it has lots of neat community features built in (I'd wager a bet that you'd have much more fun with it than trying to talk to Epic about Unreal - GarageGames is more used to newbies - like me).
Still, I do wonder how it is they're calling it a "success" so far. Don't get me wrong - I love the engine and I love the ethic GarageGames has, but they were thinking it was going to be six months before a game was published - here we are one year later and no games have been finished - and only 2-3 I can name off hand I know of are nearly done. I know $100 x however many they sold is a bit but as I understand it a lot of that went to the lawyers that got the funsies with the Tribes 2 licensing done. GarageGames is the place now doing the final fixes to Tribes 2, so they have that revenue coming in (which, since GG consists of former Dynamix employees, makes sense) but other than that I hope people start finishing some games soon, or else they're going to have problems staying afloat.
Still, when Tribes 2 came out, many people's hardware couldn't take it. Now the hardware has surpassed it and so now the engine looks and plays really good - the Torque technology is sound and hopefully people get to experience that soon.
Schnapple
full credit! goal!
I can't go more challenging for two reasons:
1) I called it the radio station staples version, so I only list lyrics from songs constantly played on the classic rock station here.
2) I don't really know any more challenging songs. I don't have any Rush albums, so those lyrics are all from memory.
I have a good one for tomorrow. It's not Rush, but it's definitely not easy.
If your game engine that you threw together in a weekend, that I'm sure has support for all video cards, works so great. Put it up for download so we can look at it.
I'm sure it's 100% bug free of course.
Why not spend ANOTHER weekend and work on the network engine, physics engine, or model support? Whip out an AI over lunch.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Blitz3D is what you seek...
I want free games as good as Valve's million dollar opus. Come on free software people, make me some art and not charge me!
"why not license it for cheap after Doom III comes out, then GPL later?"
To make money?
Actually, as a Torque licensee, the support has been pretty good. But because of the way the GG team has set things up, they don't have to answer all the questions - instead, you post to the forums online, and sometimes the community addresses the issue, sometimes the GG team does. All depends on who's fastest on the draw it seems. (I have, however, seen some newbie questions go unanswered - mainly because if they would have bothered using the 'search' function, they would have found the answer right off. RTFM & RTFW! Jeez people!)
I've been happy as hell with it all - it's worked great, I've definitely gotten more than $100 in value out of it, and both the community support and GG's support has been great.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Success? Hardly. Ignoring its unproven marketing scheme the fact that this product has been out for more then a year and it still has no finished projects does not bode well.
I've been working part time as a game developer and I've been able to published two games using an off the shelf 3D game engine (3DGameStudio from www.conitec.net ). Each game took 2 or 3 people 4-6 months to finish. Fast turn around, reliable product, great support, and no strings attached. All this for $75 to $200 (depending on features). There are plenty of other 'cheap' engines out there (free-$200), but this is the only one I know of to have several commercially published games.
Ick! That sounded like a plug. If you are starting a game project take a long honest look at your abilities, write down a design, and then download all the engine trial/demo you can get your hands on. Pick the one that you think will finish your project for you.
"Look at Half-Life. It's still based on Q2, "
:)
Half-life was based on the Quake 1 code. Please stop repeating this untruth about Half-life. Half-life came out in 1997, the same year that Quake 2 did. Quake-2 based engines didn't start to show up until 1998/1999 (remember King Pin? Sin?).
How can it be Quake-1 based? Valve did a lot of good work on it:
"An updated version of the Quake engine provides true 16-bit color graphics (the other games use eight-bit textures, even with 3D accelerators). The demo version of the game had rooms that showed off its ability to mix multiple light sources, and though it doesn't necessarily enhance gameplay, it's still impressive. The game uses skeletal mapping to animate the characters, which gives them realistic movement. Their techniques have also allowed them to up the polygon count of each creature (up to 6,000 for a single robot in one location - though it was the only thing moving in the room)."
In the right hands, practically any engine can make a compelling game. As long as you have more plotline than effects
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This is a common mistake. Most people think that Half-Life is based on Quake2, but it really is modified Quake1 source.
My last original project used the RenderWare graphics engine, which is interesting in that it hasn't been mentioned here, and it is a nice middle ground between these two extremes (Doom3/Unreal2's incredibly high sticker price and Garage Game's extra value meal). For something like $50k/SKU (which is of course negotiable if you're willing to trade on points for the royalties) you get a pretty robust rasterization engine, with reasonably good docs and a nice pedigree (used in GTA3 and THPS3 to name the two current biggies).
I've also heard similar things about Intrinsic's Alchemy solution, but I haven't used it first-hand.
While I applaud Garage Games for trying a new approach (and I've worked with most of the guys on the team), the fact is that they are far from a success.
They have one game close to completion, "Realm Wars". And this game is just a cheap Tribes knockoff. Description: "Customize your character and leap into frantic multiplayer combat!" Wow. Bet that will sell a million.
I don't know where people got the impression that there are lots of great games out there just waiting to be made. There aren't. Just like the vast majority of the public can only create crappy fan fiction, juvenile screenplays, and awful poetry.
I'd wager 99% of the people who licensed this engine have the ultimate goal of producing a knock-off of some other game. That's not a money-making venture, particularly in the dead PC gaming market.
A lot of people are tearing the following line: "Instead of waiting 2 more years and GPL'ing the full source, why not license it for cheap after Doom III comes out, then GPL later?"
./ers get their knickers in a twist, thinking the poster wants ID to give away something instead of charging for it.
This hostility is clearly based on a misreading of the post.
What the poster appears to be doing is suggesting id delay the GPL release of the engine in order to license it cheaply AFTER they are no longer charging a quarter million for it.
This would mean the GPL version would be a couple of years later, and id's publisher would be licensing the QIII engine for a few hundred to a few thousand well after they would have otherwise released it as GPL.
The idea is to have id squeeze a few more dollars out of the engine, instead of giving it away.
And all the English challenged
The poster is suggesting id charge for something that they would otherwise be giving away.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I hate to be picky here, but what was on GameDev.net was a press release from Garage Games, not an actual story. So while we go there expecting an unbiased piece about 'game engine marketing models compared', what we get is what Garage Games was spinning.
I really don't see the point of a bunch of people having the Quake 3 source code. Unless your going to make something so mind boggling different from Quake 3 you don't need to have the source code, the mod community has shown this. Reaction Quake 3 or Quake 3 Urban Terror are great mods, they have very little in common with the 'standard' Quake III game. If you are gunning to make money, making a really cool mod is probably the best way to go, it worked for Counter-Strike didn't it? and unless you plan on porting Quake 3 to your toaster the source code is probably more than you'd need, afterall the sourcecode to Quake / Quake 2 has been available for a while now and i've yet to see any groundbreaking improvements.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
Are you privy to the license contract? If not, how do you know that lowering the price would not violate the terms?
$100 is cheap, great. But the main investment in such a project is the developers' time. Lots and lots of time. Now, typically, if you've made a great game you have the option to shop it around to a lot of different publishing companies. Most of them will say no, but you might get lucky if your game is good and your pitch is good (naturally, in the real world you'd generally do this before developing the game, but the point remains the same). Main point, getting published ain't easy.
So is Garage Games going to guarantee that they will publish any game produced with their engine? If so, they have no quality control and a few rotten apples (or a whole lot) will spoil their public image. If not, then any developer who spends all the time developing for this publisher-specific engine stands a very real risk of being screwed. If Garage Games says "no," the developer has no recourse -- they can't shop the game around to other publishers, because of the license.
No developer should be stupid enough to place the fate of their project in such a position, where it can be arbitrarily killed by someone with no involvement in the project (yeah, I know, lots of companies work that way internally, but it's different here).
So maybe I'm missing something. I sure hope so. But I can't see how they could use a scheme like this to publish games in a professional manner without screwing a lot of developers. Not to badmouth them -- I'm sure they're nice guys! But it seems like the only way this business model could survive would be to do that. Someone tell me the flaw in this logic, please.
My deviantArt site
It is always good to hear from fellow warriors in the the ancient and bloody crusade agaisnt the NIH syndrome.
People are so quick to dismiss money and effort already expended, specially by others. Marketing and technology people, in one of the few issues they fight side by side, also seem to like the sense of power and control a in-house development project gives you. So any defect in a piece of technology is enlarged, all good points forgotten when you want to sell you petty adventure to the board.
One year down the road, when the board is in everybody's necks about ROI and other little corporate details, you can almost believe all that blood and fear will teach people a lesson. But no, in the next project or in the next company you will see the same people adapting their reasons to the new scenario.
You don't need GPL to get creative with gaming by a long shot, and the good "freeware" game writers had already moved on to the latest and greatest by the time Q1 & 2 were released as GPL.
What made Quake so great was the ease with which it could be customized. Take Team Fortress for instance. A better multiplayer fps has yet to be released. Team Fortress Classic for Half-Life and even Return to Castle Wolfenstein are commercial releases that do very little innovation on a theme developed by people that didn't get paid a cent.
The point being that Quake 1-3 were so open to gameplay modification that the GPL doesn't entice people who are donating free time to making games any more than the games did on initial release. Heck, Quake 3 even releases the same tools id created to make the games to end users. Why do I need to look at the code to combine z-Machine interpreters when Quake 3 already has the hooks for my customizations?
The same thing's going to happen with Doom 3, I'd imagine. Quite simply, all the "opening/freeing" of the Quake code did was make it possible for hardcore programmers to bring it to other platforms. The gameplay talent already have all the tools they needed to move to the next level and more recent games. That's part of the beauty of the way id programs.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
It is easier to manage and more profitable. Fewer customers and less overhead needed to manage the customers. I'd rather sell 4 things for $250k than 10,000 things for $100. I would get a much bigger net gain on the $250k things because it takes nothing to manage 4 customers.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
WOW! YOU"RE REALLY STUPID!
Piss off, Troll Boy. A notice about a free, open source project that is on-topic for the story is hardly an "ad".
I was pleased to see Crystal Space mentioned, sinc e I hadn't heard of it before. It may well be just what I'm looking for for a (non-game) project I'm working on.
Think about why the Crystal Space guy is modded to +5, while you're modded to -1. If you CAN think, that is.
Yes, the Q3 engine goes about a quarter million dollars. Why not license it for cheap after Doom3? Well, because people will keep licensing it for a while after Doom3 comes out, and at $250,000 a pop, you'd need a cool 2,500 $100 licensees to compensate for a single normal price license. Also, Garage Games model requires a bit of publishing infrastructure that iD probably doesn't want to get into.
This is no comparison, it's cheap advertising for Garage Games' engine. Just try to remember Tribes 2 and how it sucked compatibility-wise, and how it crashed often. The game itself was fantastic, but the code was awful. Quake 1-2-3 are decent games with rock-solid engines.. that's why they're selling for big bucks (and being modded beyond recognition).
-Billco, Fnarg.com
hahahaha, tool
Their "projects" page lists ~80 projects, not all of which are games, and many of which are basically "I'm 16 years old and really want to make the coolest game ever, but I need programmers and artists and designers". Quite different from the hundreds of dev teams claim.
Also, after a year, they still aren't selling or promoting a single torque based game on that website. When you click on the link to "play games" it goes to a form where you can enter your email address, so they will notify you when they actually have some. This doesn't smell like success to me.
There are a couple of things everyone seems to be overlooking with respect to the Q3 engine.
y /) And the $250,000 is a minimum payment; the actual cost is a 5% royalty of wholesale price of your game.
When you license the Q3 engine, you don't just get what came out for Quake 3: Arena. All the modifications that id made for Team Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Scripting, camera and effects - someone was complaining about the Q3 engine's AI?) -- they are all included as well. Licensees can also license their updates between each other, if they desire.
Not just anyone can license the Q3 engine. Currently there are around 3 major Q3 engine licensees (Ritual, Activision and EA). "QUAKE III Arena engine licensees are part of an exclusive club that will remain exclusive because we are capping the total number of licensee companies." ( http://www.idsoftware.com/business/home/technolog
If you put out a game with the Q3 engine, it's Instant Publicity. This is in part generated by the above fact, that there are currently less than 10 games that use the Q3 engine, and partly because of the Carmack Factor.
When you license the Q3 engine, you're showing the world you're not a kid developing in your garage. You get a lot with that -- including the problem you can't release your game open-source. But remember id is a game development company, not an engine license company. It just so happens they have one of the best engines there is.
I don't really think id have $ signs in their eyes when they license the engine - thats what Doom 3 is for. The price is set so that not everyone can use it, and they can ensure that titles with their engine are put out by companies that have the means to make a decent game out of them.
With respect to independent game developers, there is no comparison between the GarageGames deal and what ID offers. Indies are the future of innovative gaming and arming them with AAA technology, a publishing deal, and a thriving community for only pennies will result in gaming experiences you wouldn't have imagined were possible. The big traditional publishers are looking for "hits", not innovation - from game studios with a track record. That's a hard burden to overcome for an independent game studio with little or no budget.
Therefore, when comparing the two engine models discussed in this thread so far - alternatively consider more than just the financial differences. ID gives you a lot of expensive technology and leaves the rest to you. GarageGames gives you awesome technology, a publishing deal, and great community - all for $100. For an "indie", there really isn't a better deal on the planet.
To help put some perspective on my perspective, I feel I should point out that I am the President of 21-6 Productions, an independent game studio currently using the Torque Game Engine from GarageGames to build our cooperative multiplayer, action-RPG called Myrmidon.
Anyone considering this "deal" should make him or herself very familiar with the terms "net" and "gross".
"Net" means what's left AFTER GarageGames pays ALL expenses. That might seem reasonable, but you really need to look at some of the horror stories that (e.g.) musicians and film actors/writers tell about "net" deals. Things you couldn't even imagine get counted as "expenses". To hear Hollywood tell the tale, there hasn't been a movie that made a "profit" in the last 50 years! If you're signed to a "net" deal they have no motivation to keep expenses down (quite the contrary).
There's a reason why anyone in Hollywood with any clout insists on a "gross" deal rather than a "net" deal. Gross is a lot harder to play games with.
So, from where I'm sitting, here's the deal:
1. You pay them a hundred bucks to use their (heavily-encumbered) property.
2. You do all the work of developing the game.
3. Once you've developed the game, they get exclusive rights. You can't sell it anywhere else, but they can choose to sell it, or not, as they see fit. They can sell it to another company for 10 cents a copy, then claim $5 million in expenses. You can't do squat about it.
A fair deal usually involves sharing the risks and the rewards. In this deal they face NO risk (in fact, they're guaranteed to collect at least a hundred bucks), yet take a hefty chunk of the rewards. Sounds like a bad deal to me.
I am not a lawyer, but if you're considering this perhaps you should read an article from someone who is.
Pay careful attention to the sentence that reads " The accounting provisions which are contained in the studios' SPDs [Standard Profit Definition]make it difficult, if not mathematically impossible in many cases, for net profits ever to be achieved."
First about the Quake 3 Engine:
You are not buying the Q3 engine you are still licensing it, the comment about being able to then sell it on is crap, otherwise I would get a loan together, buy it to $250,000 and then sell it over the net for $300, I have little doubt that I would make my money back. By licensing it, the engine still belongs to iD, you cannot sell it, you can license your modules for it, but not the engine itself, so Raven could license out Ghoul or Ghoul 2, but not the JK2 or SOF2 engine, as it is still 70% Q3. The licensing structure does include significant Tech Support, you are buying that, and excellant documentation.
Torque:
The Torque Engine is different. When you spend $100 1 programmer gets a license to the engine, it is reasonably documented at the moment, but it is definitly getting better, there are a lot of resources for it to improve your game freely available, and the community and GG staff will try to help solve your problems, but this isn't guaranted. Player submitted resources are often integrated into the source, which the GG guys are constantly working on.
You are not required to resubmit extras you have added into your version of Torque, it would be nice if everyone did, because it would then benefit the community but it is not required.
You have to publish through Garagegames, or Sierra, please note GG only publishes online, if your product is good enough to be boxed and sold mainstream it is published through Sierra, Vivendi.
iD license the Q3 engine for $250,000 because there are few strings attached to it, you can publish through who you want, you pay for tech support and indepth documentation. There is no reason why they couldn't sell their engine for $100 and get a deal Activision that forces those people to publish through Activision (and get money from Activision for that) as well as royalties, then all you would get is the documentation and no tech support
Personally I prefer the Torque over Q3 anyway, it is more flexible and is quickly becoming more advanced, I would love to see Q3 handle half the stuff that is in Torque now, and it's constant community development will see it become something incredibly powerful. Garage Games system works, afterall they are still in business.
Licensing the quake engine is not the normal run-of-the-mill license contract. It is far more akin to vertical software than to off-the-shelf software.