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?"

Comments

Re:Not that much

[topham]

Your funny. A week?

Yeah, if they had all the design documents and source code sitting in front of them.

Your funny.

Re:Simple...

[friedmud]

Actually I'm pretty sure that Activision does most of their stuff.

Derek

Re:Looks to be a couple reasons why id doesn't

[DrVxD]

According the id's website, the license for Q3 is based on:

For a single title license, we charge a $250,000 guarantee against a 5% royalty of the wholesale price for the title.

Now, IANAL, but that reads to me as 5% of the wholesale price (i.e. per unit royalties), with a minimum of $250,000 paid up front. So they're gaurenteed the lump and, if your games is a success, they get royalties too.

Of course, you can also license Quake/Q2 for non-GPL projects for a flat fee of $10,000

(Oh, and the link doesn't work properly since /. is modifying the anchor tag. But at least it gets to the right page.)