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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.'
Next thing you know the RIAA is going to start asking consumers to start paying for music...the bastards!
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
Well, they GPLed the Quake engine pretty quickly - I think it not unreasonable for them to keep the Q3 engine closed a while longer - shouldn't the community encourage companies who GPL their stuff after they've moved on? It's bette rthan keeping it closed forever.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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.
Um, you know, most businesses bigger than Bobs Lawnmower Repair Shop will use that $1000000 quicker than you can say 'cash flow problems'.
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.
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
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.
If they can make money off of Quake3, why on earth would they GPL it?
They won't. id is not stupid.
But, based off past procedures, you can expect the Q3 source to be GPL'd within 1-2 years of the Doom3 release. They did it with Wolfenstein, they did it with Doom (sans sound code), and they did it with both Q1 and Q2.
But, like I said, they're not stupid. It's released well after its licensing value is near zero and under GPL. Want to make a commercial game using the old Q2 engine? Sure -- pay id Software $10k (a heavily reduced price) and you can have the exact same code as what's under GPL -- except that you're not bound by the GPL.
It's one of the few ways to make the GPL work for companies to make money. Of course, even then, you'll get rabid idiots decrying the fact that it's not GPL from the start, and that you can actually get a non-GPL license in exchange for cash.
Fortunately most people are sane and simply thank id Software for contributing to the public knowledge base in such a manner.
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
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.
> 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 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
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
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
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 and Duke Nukem Forever, huh?
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.