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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.
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.)
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.'"
EULA
6. Records and Audits
You agree to keep accurate books and records related to your development, manufacture, Distribution, and sale of Products and related revenue. Epic may conduct reasonable audits of those books and records. Audits will be conducted during business hours on reasonable prior notice to you. Epic will bear the costs of audits unless the results show a shortfall in payments in excess of 5% during the period audited, in which case you will be responsible for the cost of the audit.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
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.
Oh, I respect his viewpoint -- he's a net good for the world -- however he's also kind of a crank.
To be clear though, it was that zealotry, attacking any piece of software that isn't under a license such as the GPL that I was poking fun at. I think it's naive to think that we'd be where we are now if literally everything was 'free' via something similar to a GPL license.
It's a lot like that APK guy, I use his host file. But I'll still poke fun at him coming out of the blue to spam the shit out of a thread.
PS: I feel like a dunce for misspelling his name.