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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?
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 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.
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 !
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?
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.
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
If 5% seems high, what about the 30% cut that Apple and Google take on games in iOS and Android? Unreal seems to be following ios and android, and before that, Playstation -- charging a percentage of sales as "platform" fees.
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
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?
I've developed games on Unreal and Unity (and bare metal etc). They have different pro/con (personally I prefer Unity). With Unreal you need hardcore coders and multi-platform targeting is hard. I think of it as the good, ol'-fashioned AAA big budget approach. Unity has quirkier graphics pipeline and some odd asset management things (works best with smaller teams), but it is incredibly easy to do basic behavioral scripting, there's a big on-line community driving their asset store, and cross platform delivery really works.
imo the real story behind the Unreal licensing change is that Unity has been crushing Unreal for marketshare in mobile game dev. Unreal had to do something radical or they were going to end up powering only some big AAA projects. "retreat upwards" is not a sustainable business strategy.
I certainly would like to see both companies healthy and pushing the platforms forward so I hopes this gives Unreal a boost.
Very cool, although I don't plan to start making maps again.
I have yet to see a game made in Unity that was not obviously made in unity (more like just slightly less effort was put into really getting the details polished). They also all seem to suffer from comparative shittier performance. Maybe unreal has just been at it longer and bigger players use it and do amazing things with it, and it is just the community that has to catch up with Unity. Maybe. All I know is hearing a game is being made in Unity puts me off.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
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?
And that is not fair either, it should reflect the marginal cost to them of providing you with the service not a percentage of your gross profit.
The point is its not fair not that no one does it, and if everyone did it it would be unfeasible.
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.
it should reflect the marginal cost to them of providing you with the service
You are saying that because you know full well that the marginal cost to them is effectively zero, and you would therefore get it for nothing.
In business, you don't offer your products for sale at their marginal cost, for the very obvious reason that if you did you would never make any profit.
If you use their game engine to make a game that sells millions and earns you a fortune, it seems entirely reasonable that they get a proportion of that fortune. You are not being forced to use their particular game engine, after all. There are others out there, or you could roll your own.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it