Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's not a bug, it's the installer's documentation that's wrong. I found the correct instructions on a forum and the install now appears to be working.
You have to click on "Library", then add engines, select the latest version and click install.
unity chugs like a mofo on even the beefiest hardware, UE runs well even on lower end hardware and looks really good on high end hardware.
source: I play besiege, KSP, and Sanctum 2
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
That's just the default license. You are free to negotiate something different if you prefer.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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 my project requires custom licensing terms?
If you require terms that reduce or eliminate the 5% royalty in exchange for an upfront fee, or if you need custom legal terms or dedicated Epic support to help your team reduce risk or achieve specific goals, we’re here to help. See the custom licensing page for details.
Fill out that form and Epic will get in touch with you to negotiate terms for a custom licence.
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.