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Unreal Engine 4 Is Now Free
jones_supa writes In 2014, Epic Games took the step of making Unreal Engine 4 available to everyone by subscription for $19 per month. Today, this general-purpose game engine is available to everyone for free. This includes future updates, the full C++ source code of the engine, documentation, and all sorts of bonus material. You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. The business scheme that Epic set in the beginning, remains the same: when you ship a commercial game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. Epic strived to create a simple and fair arrangement in which they succeed only when your product succeeds.
A handful of engines (mostly UE4) are used for the vast majority of *all* games. What does Unreal Tournament have to do with it? Some UE4 games aren't even first-person, some are things like RTS.
Or is it still freedom-disrespecting software?
How many "I don't need this, so there's no need of this for no one" comments does the world needs? ;)
Thanks epic. I literally just started re-coding my game from Cocos2d to Unreal. My only regret is not doing this sooner; once I saw how well this worked with mac and the clean C++ just wow.
I will call it Real Unreal and whenever you start shooting the government will come and steal all your guns and bullets.
I don't know. Why don't you ask the makers of these games.
Oh look. They ain't UT clones. There's a RTS. There is a survival horror game (ok, this now almost forces the "and how many survival horror games..." question). And I think over there's an Adventure game. There's a racing game in there too, go, try to find it!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/391/244/case.html
United Shoe Machinery got broken up under the Sherman Antitrust act, because they dominated the market (90%+) for shoe-making machines. Also, they had a pricing scheme that charged more when your company produced more shoes - so they made the real bank on the big manufacturers, but they were cheap enough for the little guy that other manufacturers of shoe machines couldn't get a foothold.
In other words, they succeeded only when their customers succeeded. Sound familiar?
(For the record, you couldn't actually break up Epic using this argument, for at least 3 reasons: (1 - factual) the Unreal Engine has nowhere near that market dominance that USM did in its heyday, (2 - political) the judiciary these days is way more pro-business, and (3 - appeal to justice) the decision in US v. USM was actually bullshit and should never have been decided that way. I'll leave (3) as an exercise for the reader.)
5% on Gross Revenue is horrible. When you look at advertising costs pretty much outstripping development costs 5% is a big chunk.
Cause they know it won't stand a chance against tomorrow Valve's next Source Release using OGLNext (which is also free from Nvidia shit like Physx which UE4 is not)...
Wrong. Unreal Engine is the commonly used engine, UE4 is a completely different beast and not exactly in the wild yet. Being from the same stable doesn't mean they're the same thing.
There are dozens of high end engines in use for console and PC games. UE isn't even close to having 30% of the market.
Then you have the low end shovelware crap being made with the likes of Unity 3D. Although their days are numbered now they got greedy and chose to screw over devs.
Interactive books are not games. DQ was a quick churn turd to get some money from her relationships within the gaming press. It took about 10 days to throw together using a tool more basic than drag-n-drop. DQ was made by Zoe Quinn. Sarkeesian is the SJW feminist extremist that makes money from fools while she pretends to be on her campaign where all female characters are ultimate warriors, look like potatoes, and kill only males. Sex is also taboo.
UE4 is an engine, not assets. You still need skilled developers, artists, designers et al to get anything half decent from it, but at least you can learn a professional level tool on your own without needing a massive financial outlay. These means UE4 will have many more people using it in the future.
I think some people may not like it because now there's less of an excuse to have a crappy game. I think it's great. Let's raise the bar and purge some of the garbage.
X
A handful of engines (mostly UE4) are used for the vast majority of *all* games.
You must be using some new definition of "vast majority", as this is patently false.
One *might* be able to make a reduced claim of this sort if one was speaking of mobile games and Unity.
But UE4? Definitely not. It is still mostly aimed at and used by developers in the A / AA / AAA game space and that world remains dominated by custom engines developed by individual game studios.
The _excellent_ Vanishing of Ethan Carter uses the older Unreal Engine 3.
I can't wait to see what other indies are going to do with it !
DQ was a quick churn turd to get some money from her relationships within the gaming press.
Ah yes, all that money she made by giving a game away for free.
I think this is a great strategy, but how would Epic Games know what a developer's gross income was, year after year, on a particular game title?
Is this a matter of Epic trusting them to report it honestly, or is it part of contractual terms where you're required to supply them with your tax records each year, or what?
But she certainly brought out a lot of fools.
Oh look. They ain't UT clones. There's a RTS. There is a survival horror game (ok, this now almost forces the "and how many survival horror games..." question). And I think over there's an Adventure game.
For some reason this makes me want a version of the original Adventure (Colossal Cave) based on UE4.
I can't find references to the actual license text, but the expectation of paying royalties back to Epic certainly makes it non-free with respect to software freedom. This makes it incompatible in the same sense that the Creative Commons License's "noncommercial" clause is incompatible; most copyleft licenses insist on unrestricted redistribution (which would be broken by a requirement of paying royalties).
The video notes that this is "unprecedented," yet Epic's competitor Id Software used to release all of its engines as GPLv2 once they were ~two generations obsolete (e.g. Doom 3). No royalties expectations necessary.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Let's raise the bar and purge some of the garbage.
Such as Depression Quest?
Opensource equivalent.
Help make it better by adding procedurally generated terrain and all that jazz.
and that subject says it all...
Software Corp continues to use brain when licensing its software, remains perpetually popular. What a concept. These guys deserve our respect. I remember buying Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, one of those rare games that acutally shipped with a Linux binary back in those days.
You guys are Epic! (pun intended)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Fantastic news, in theory. I'm 3 days in to development of a new game in Unity so I tried to download UE4 to see if it was worth switching. Instead of a normal installer you have to download some Epic "community" app which will then install the engine for you. Except... it doesn't. Googling it reveals that the problem dates back at least eight months and there's still no fix.
You know, that is one of the most reasonable clauses I've seen in a very long time.
Basically, we expect you to make decent efforts at bookkeeping. If we think you're shafting you, we'll pay for the audit, unless you really are shafting us in which case you pay for the audit and the licensing-related costs.
Anyone who knows both - how does Unreal compare to Unity? I mean from a developer perspective. I've been using Unity since late 1.x / early 2.x days, and one thing that I like it for is that compared to the other engines I know from that time (e.g. Torque), it was always very easy to use and develop with, especially in the early development phases when you're prototyping and want to see some results, fast, so you can test basic gameplay and mechanics.
How does Unreal compare?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
nt.
All right, well is there a version for Linux then? I'd certainly like to give a try now, I'm only seeing Windows and Mac versions for download. I know that people have gotten this working in Linux, maybe there's a guide somewhere for how they did it?
Many a use for such an engine has a very small net profit percentage. So 5% of gross revenue (not net) can be completely ruinous. That is effectively 5% of sales over $3000 per quarter. What of cases where the unreal engine is used as a subcomponent of our larger product?
Very cool, although I don't plan to start making maps again.
By fool you presumably mean the fierce critics who, for some unfathomable reason, feel the need to mention the game that isn't a game, that made loads of money without ever being sold, and the evil sarkeesian who is only in it for the attention, so hey, let's keep the spotlight on her unnecessarily every time gaming is mentioned on /.
Seriously, people, wtf is wrong with you, when did random women become such scary villains, worthy of constant namedropping in unrelated comments sections, is this pointless posturing wankery just you kids trying to prove how alpha you are, while all we poor betas are just living and letting live?
Will they want a cut if the engine is used by an opensource project managed by a nonprofit/not-for-profit foundation?
IANAL, but it looks like distributing the source code to "end users" of a compiled program is not allowed
Untrue. I am also not a lawyer and I only skimmed the agreement so perhaps I am misunderstanding it but I believe you can distribute the source code to your game.
What you cannot distribute is Epic's game engine source code and binary tools. However your customer can download these at no charge from Epic just like you did. So it seems a customer can get everything they need to rebuild the game themselves. They just need to download game code from you and engine code/tools from Epic.
What if Microsoft said pay us 5% of your gross income goes to us because you use our operating system
Microsoft takes a lot more than that for Xbox Live Marketplace (for Xbox 360 and Xbox One), Windows Phone Store, and Windows Store (for Windows 8 and Windows RT).
The fact is Game development is rapidly moving into the hobby space much like home studios did to music and youtube is doing to TV.
Except there's a difference. Anyone can burn hobby music to a CD-R and play it in a stereo. Anyone can burn hobby video to a DVD+R and play it in any brand of DVD player. The game market is qualitatively different. The major consoles lock out hobby games, and PCs are uncommon in the living room. Some of this can be traced to certain bad decisions made by the North American video game industry in the first half of the 1980s.
That's a few maya licenses
As O-Zone asked in the Numa Numa song, "Maya who?" If a studio is trying to grow organically from a hobby into a business, is there a reason it can't just use Blender to create assets for Unreal Engine?
if everyone [took a percent of gross] it would be unfeasible.
Everyone does take a percent of gross: Google on Google Play Store, Amazon on Amazon Appstore, Apple on App Store, Nintendo on eShop, Sony on PlayStation Store, and Microsoft as I mentioned above. The market for physical goods is little different: Amazon takes a commission of sellers' revenue on Amazon.com, and eBay and PayPal take final value fees.
Really? What have they done?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've spent the evening with UE and I'm running back to Unity. I don't know about the PC version but the Mac version isn't ready for primetime yet. I know it's quite new so hopefully they'll work on it some more. A lot more.
Currently, nearly everything fails. Create an empty project and add a Player Controller... fail. Plus this is personal taste but the viewport camera controls are utterly awful. Keep in mind that I use Unity and Blender every day, two apps that are known for their poor viewport controls, and I get on just fine with those. UE's controls are so bad that they even have one way of zooming the camera in 2D viewports and a different way in 3D viewports.
Oh and the W, E and R keys for move, rotate and scale, sometimes work and sometimes don't. The quad view doesn't track mouse movements so to switch from one view to another you have to either left-click (which can mess with your selection) or right-click (which brings up a menu that you have to dismiss).
I could go on... But, bottom line, I didn't like using UE at all. Unity is wonderful in its own right, but compared to UE it is beyond words. UE is an over-engineered mess that doesn't work.
All of this is on Mac remember. I'm sure the PC version will work a lot better.
How's there less of an excuse? UE4 isn't going to force anyone to produce high quality output, if its dev tools are easy enough to use then it'll just add to the ever increasing heap of shit that is poorly made commercial early access games on steam, often Unity3D's domain in the past. No bars will be raised, only floodgates further opened, a port of the slaughtering grounds to UE4 isn't going to stop it being a massive steaming pile of shit.
Meanwhile, people make quite interesting and thoughtful stuff with gamemaker, RPGmaker, twine and such.