The Next Unreal Tournament: Totally Free, Developed By Public

Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes "Epic Games is rebooting Unreal Tournament, but not in a typical way. A small team of veteran developers will begin work on the next edition of the popular, multi-player shooter, in collaboration with pretty much anyone who wants to participate. "From the very first line of code, the very first art created and design decision made, development will happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers. We'll be using forums for discussion, and Twitch streams for regular updates," reads a note on the company's blog. All code and content will appear on GitHub, and development will focus on Mac, Linux, and Windows. What's the catch? According to Epic, it'll take months to forge a playable game. "When the game is playable, it will be free. Not free to play, just free," the blog adds. "We'll eventually create a marketplace where developers, modders, artists and gamers can give away, buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from the marketplace will be split between the mod/content developer, and Epic. That's how we plan to pay for the game.""

Comments

so

[hypergreatthing]

If it's free, as in free to download, compile and use, why would anyone want to use a market place to buy and sell skins/artwork?

Re:so

[gman003]

Ease of use? Installing mods in previous games (UT99, UT2004 and UT3), while not particularly difficult for the tech-savvy, isn't exactly user-friendly, and when you mess up there's little information on how to fix it.

As for "why would you sell it on Epic's marketplace instead of on your own?", that's almost definitely going to be what most gamers will be using, so that's where all the customers are. I certainly wouldn't mind selling maps for a dollar a pop.

Re:so

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the stuff they develop for use in the market place is not included in the original free game. Moron.

Re:so

[stewsters]

Some people want to make a profit, some don't. It gives the people who want to make a few dollars of their model get paid, and lets those who just want to make something offer theirs free. See https://www.assetstore.unity3d... for an example of this now. If you don't have all the skills to make a game, you can still make money off of selling assets.

I have no idea how this will go, but it will be interesting.

Re:so

[PhrostyMcByte]

I assume they'll not be making this extra content Open Source, and perhaps have official servers which any old compiler will not be able to connect to.

The greater benefit here is that there will be a very public log of what it takes to make an AAA title. A super in-depth tutorial for all those devs who might want to license it.

Re:so

[MrTester]

When I first heard this earlier today what came to mind is Minecraft.
If they can create a good stable base product with good enough <Insert developer jargon for "information people need to develop mods" here> support then there very well may be a market for good mod packs.
I know I would have been more than happy to pay $20 or $30 for Feed The Beast for MineCraft.

If they can turn that into a market where they skim some money off the top from the mod pack sellers to pay for a free base product (the opposite of the charge for Minecraft with free mods model of Mahjong) more power too them.

Re: so

[khellendros1984]

"All code" doesn't mean a subset of the code. It means "all code". Anyhow, if one has the game code and the art assets, then there's nothing to stop you from replacing the assets in the game. If there's some DRM-encumbered binary blob for talking to the store, there'd be nothing stopping someone from coding their own replacement that points to another store.

Personally, from the tone of the announcement, I'd expect something like Google's app market. The official market would be the default, but there's nothing stopping you from connecting to an alternate market, or from installing modpacks you grab off some modder's website. Of course, if Epic doesn't make any money on the game, it'd be counted as a failed experiment, and we wouldn't see something similar from them anytime soon.

Re:so

[DrMcCoy]

Source says this:
"All code and content will be available live to UE4 developers on GitHub"

I.e. you can view the code if you are an UE4-licensee. Just like how the UE4 code is on GitHub, available to UE4-licensees.
It will not be "free software" for free as in freedom/libre. I will only be "open source" for a very weird, non-OSI-approved definition of the term.

Re: so

[DrMcCoy]

RTFA. It doesn't say anything about it being under the terms of a FLOSS license; or a liberal license. It will probably be the standard UE4 license, possibly even forbidding changing the store code.

Re:so

[Kjella]

For the user the game will be free as in beer, not "freemium" with in-game micro transactions. The code will neither be free as in beer nor free as in speech, but if you are already a UE4 subscriber ($19/month) you can use and extend the code for no extra charge, presumably under the same license and terms as mods to the engine itself so basically it's a reference implementation FPS. If you sell anything you owe them 5% of the gross revenue, if you give it away you owe them nothing. Which makes their pricing make sense, any subscriber can basically compile UT4 as-is and release it as freeware so instead they do it "officially". If you implement your own skin/artwork store they'll still take 5%, if you want to sell through the UT store they might charge more. Either way if you make money off it, they'll make money off it.

Re:so

[Threni]

Don't you report them, and then they get watched/videod and if there's evidence they're cheating they're kicked/banned?

RealCTF

[mfh]

Former RealCTF level designer here.

This is a really good idea, and I welcome this as great news! :-)

If anyone needs some level design, hit me up!!

Re:RealCTF

[Anonymous Coward]

That UID.

Re:RealCTF

[mfh]

He bought / stole the account, and he's been spouting a lot of bullshit lately.

And you're spouting a little right now! ;-)

Suggesting this acct was stolen is just a patent falsehood. The original owner of this acct sold it for $100 in a very well publicized Ebay auction. I happened to win the auction and I felt at the time that a piece of Slashdot history (a beta account -- 2digit already) was well worth the money out of sheer novelty. A 3digit acct later sold for around $700 and another for $200-300, from what I could tell.

Love or hate the low-uid, you have to admire any piece of Slashdot history. CmdrTaco is probably the only person posting with a lower UID than me and he's not posted here in a long time (2011). I donated quite a bit of time to helping CmdrTaco on a revamp of the moderation system over several emails back and forth, and he was appreciative of my feedback. I'm a programmer and system designer so he didn't just outright reject what was said. There was a small think-tank of us working on it. But shortly after that Slashdot was sold and the changes were never implemented.

Come on man. I enjoy Slashdot. I've posted my wacky opinion here for quite a long time. My other acct was 6 digit. The one before that was a 4-digit low to mid 2000s uid. I've since lost access to both of those. A good friend was very involved with this site early on and tried to get us all into it back on the TWCTF mailing list back in the day.

So you're not wrong... except you are wrong about the stealing thing.

UWindows

[damicatz]

I hope they bring back UWindows. That, IMHO, was the pinnacle of interfaces for games and the consolized interfaces of the later versions are crap by comparison.

SLightly offtopic, but...

[Nidi62]

Holy hell, I don't think I've ever seen a 2-digit ID post before.

Interesting...

[Dega704]

They seem to have taken a leaf from Valve's book with Team Fortress 2, but are taking it a step further by opening the development itself. If this works out well, it could have a lot of ramifications for the future of game development. I'll be happy enough as long as the lightning gun comes back. That thing made headshots so much more fun.

just modernize UT2k4

[Lehk228]

just upgrade UT2k4 with the things that have become standard in the last 10 years.....

actually fuck that, FPS has only gotten worse over the last decade, re-release with only the most minor tweaks to take advantage of modern hardware and improve the map and mod cache a bit (really just upgrade so hash collisions can't happen and add a browser function to delete only specific cached data when the cache grows to over 9000)

Fucking MODs

[ArcadeMan]

Every game these days supports MODs but nobody ever supports S3Ms anymore.