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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.
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.
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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.
That's why Notch wrote his own engine for Minecraft and sold Mojang for $2.5 billion.
Oh wait ... maybe success is not only a factor of the engine, but _gameplay_.
You left out the really critical part of your argument, which is that Notch wrote a shitty new engine, and still made billions. It wasn't even a competent job.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
I think it really does say a lot about the current Slashdot audience when someone asks if the engine code is freedom-respecting (as in adheres to a free-software license like the GPL) and gets marked as -1 Troll, yet the above quoted comment makes fun of that query by mocking the originator of the free-software movement, and is marked 5 Funny.
How much clearer does it need to be that we're going backwards in terms of respect for free licensing? I'm not a huge Stallman fan or anything but at least respect his viewpoints. This is just sick modertion that shows how ignorant the current Slashdot kiddies are. I hate the current state of software if people like this are the next generation of coders.