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Should Developers Still Pay For Game Engines?
Nerval's Lobster writes: Game developers no longer have to pay for the software they need to make great video games, because the tools used by some of the biggest and most successful studios in the world are available to everyone, for free. Among the existing major engines, there is one holdout that does not offer a free version: Crytek continues to charge everyone for CryEngine, and is intent on continuing to do so. That's not to say Crytek is being unreasonable. The company introduced a $10-per-month subscription last year, making it accessible to indie developers who can't afford the higher-priced package that includes full source code. "With CryEngine, Crytek is going to the high-end," Crytek co-founder Faruk Yerli recently told Develop, a news site for developers. Unity3D is going for the low-end while Unreal is aiming for everything from low- to high-end, he added. But according to some developers queried by Dice, there is little reality to the idea that the big three engines are divided between low, mid-end, and high-end capabilities. If you're a developer, is it still worth paying for a game engine?
You end up paying either way, assuming your game actually has any sales, since the "free" and subscription plans all include a pretty healthy royalty for the engine developer. So, what's $10 a month?
It's all about ROI, risk assessment and how effective the engine is at meeting your objectives. It's as simple as that.
No.
There's some 3rd party assets that probably are worth paying for on the associated asset stores, but with both UE4 and U5 free there's really no reason to pay for engines.
The only reason is if you're already competent with a paid engine and don't want to learn it all again.
Empallusly NO!
If one is talking about a hobbyist/near-hobbyist project (budget < $100K), then free (= low upfront cost) is good. But for a real programming project, the up-front cost of the engine is pretty small compared to the possible difference in programming time. If a fully-outfitted programmer is $10K/month after tax and tip, one is in danger of costing the project dollars (of programmer times) in order to save pennies.
In other words, evaluate the engines based on their qualities, not the up-front costs.
(On the other hand, lots of game programming nowadays does involve hobbyist-level budgets, in which case the real criteria is "if they're not being paid much, will the programmer's at least have fun using this tool?")
You still pay a 5% royalty, which is a rather high price if you make high-end games. For indies and students it might be a good deal, but if your studio is into AAA, paying up-front is a better deal.
Will developers not find an open source or free solution that works better than a paid solution when the time comes? Don't these things just happen? Why do we need a story to pontificate on this fact? How is this possibly news? If this story had any political slant, I definitely feel it coming from typical 2000s era "libtard" (said in quotes as it is a common term but not meant disparagingly, mods please) side of politics. As the time will simply come when humans, who have free will but still operate according to the physical laws of nature, find that an open source or non-paid solution works better than a paid solution. It happens once, then twice, then another time until what happens is (as we call it).....the "market" decides. This is what I find confusing about "libtards" (mods, please see first parentheses). They come up with these "truths that ought to be" ..these... high level conceptual ideas about how society should be or act or opine. Like this Slashdot story, these "ideas" which "libtards" like to call "radical" get shoved down our throats day in day out. Well, let's face it until we can weed them from the human race completely (millions of generations) there will always flavors of sociopaths and those that prey on society. I guess we ought to just accept that there will always be a group (aka, "libtards"), who seek to prey on society's producers much like sociopaths. But please, of all places can we have less "libtardism" shoved at as us. As credit to the community is owed, I think we (these hallowed threads of Slashdot) all here are likely producers of society, rather than prey.
Those engines aren't free. It is true that you can download and start developing without paying a dime, but you pay royalties once you start selling the software you've created with the engine.
Should readers continue to read Slashdot with Dice junk making it to the front page?
No.
... paying for engines made sense, but no longer. The costs of AAA development are through the roof and it just makes more sense to have game engines as infrastructure that everyone can look at the code and see where bugs/bad design is. Just because someone licenses a game engine doesn't mean it is well designed or designed for every type of game.
I am so sick and tired of reading about how hard it is to chose a game engine these days, as if you don't have a choice. News flash- most of the engines out there aren't that complicated. You're paying for the editors and development tools, which is where the real power lies. Maybe that's worth it if you're building some giant triple A title, but not everyone is doing that. If you can figure out your own workflow, then you can write your own engine. To date, I've worked on 11 projects that did exactly this. None of those projects owed royalties or licensing fees to anyone, and they worked just fine.
Seriously, write your own engine if you can. Not everything needs to be based on UE/Crytek/Untiy/Ogre/whatever.
And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?
With good tools, one or two programmers can produce software that's better than a dozen programmers. And good tools should support exactly doing that: greatly reducing the requirement for people on a project.
Of course, a real game project will have a lot of dull programming jobs unrelated to developing with the game engine: packaging, testing, building, asset management, etc. But since those don't need the game engine, they don't need a license either, and you shouldn't count them as justifying a high-priced game engine. Furthermore, you can increasingly outsource and automate those jobs.
If they're worthwhile (by whatever metric you want to use that's important to you), yes. If not, no.
Everything else is mental masturbation for the sake of political argument.
And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?
By "real programming project", I mean were all the participants are being paid at market rates and the budget is large enough to produce a product of the quality (polish, size, art quality, gameplay, etc.) that is expected by current iOS and Android customers. My suspicion is that budget is in the hundreds of thousands, but I low-balled it at $100K.
I'm not denigrating hobbyist projects, after all, that's all I've ever been involved in. But my point (which I think you agree with) is with a real programming project, the up-front engine cost is trivial compared to the cost of employees.
[insert dice joke here]
This is pretty obvious to professionals, but seems lost on laymen. An engine is not a magical solution. It does not turn lazy workers into hard workers, it does not turn Random Joes into creative people.
Furthermore, engines come at a huge efficiency cost. Instead of knowing your own products, you've got to master someone elses. It takes substantial time to learn a tool chain and become efficient with it. It also takes time to adapt the tool chain to do what you actually want. Not to mention time spent dealing with bugs in the engine itself. All time that for many devs could have been spent making their own tool chain exactly how they want it.
Time is money. Engines can be free all they want, but that doesn't automatically mean they'll save you money. A careful cost-analysis should be done for any product, especially one that's going to completely dictate your production process. An engine has got to solve more problems than it causes--all the way down to the mouse clicks used in the production of assets--to warrant the cash.
And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?
With good tools, one or two programmers can produce software that's better than a dozen programmers. And good tools should support exactly doing that: greatly reducing the requirement for people on a project.
Of course, a real game project will have a lot of dull programming jobs unrelated to developing with the game engine: packaging, testing, building, asset management, etc. But since those don't need the game engine, they don't need a license either, and you shouldn't count them as justifying a high-priced game engine. Furthermore, you can increasingly outsource and automate those jobs.
Unity is a per-seat license, but Unreal Engine and Crytek are per-project. None of them are "high priced" compared to the others unless you're looking purely at how much the engines would cost with no royalty payments. If you're not expecting any sales at all then, fine, go with the "cheapest" one. Otherwise, you should be looking at whatever improves your workflow the most.
Yes, the people who test, build, and manage assets directly interact with the engine. Yes, how friendly the engine is does directly affect them and thus does provide justification for the cost.
0/10
I've somehow managed to go my entire career without working on a third party licensed engine. It's always been developed internally by the company I was working for. And even when I went indie, with just me working on my own little game, no commercial engine had the specialized features I wanted, and ended up spending a couple of years writing my own. Plus, I liked the fact that I was able to build my game engine to work exactly the way I wanted it to function.
Using a commercial game engine makes a lot of sense when the game you're developing happens to fall in line with the way those engines are expecting things to work (for instance, a small company making a character-based shooter? You'd be insane to develop your own engine). You need to more or less "drink the kool-aid", as one of my colleagues put it, meaning it's important to work the way the engine developers are expecting you to work.
If you're doing something extremely unusual gameplay-wise that requires some very unusual engine capabilities or stresses the engine in unusual ways, you have to consider the possibility that a commercial engine may end up fighting you and your game's vision, causing your a lot of long-term pain. Moreover, with your own engine, you completely control it's destiny. If you want a feature, or want a specific optimization, or a change in it's behavior, you can make it happen. Technically, you can do this if you have an engine's source code, but doing so puts you on a diverging path with the developers, which is always risky.
Of course, the downside is that creating and maintaining your own engine is a massive engineering cost. You need a dedicated team of engine programmers. That being said, you tend to need *fewer* than a commercial engine, because you can focus specifically on the features needed for your game, rather than all features *possibly* needed.
Anyhow, that's my perspective as a videogame programmer / engine developer. I'm not qualified to discuss the merits of third-party game engines, since I've never used one myself.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That's not what Betteridge's Law is about.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
... over on Reddit. It keeps getting rehashed:
* Game Engine Design
* UE4 is now completely free
* wishlist game engine from scratch
* differences between Unity and Unreal
* UE4 vs Unity Faceoff
* More AAA games using unity?
* AAA are all free
There are still 2 reasons to "roll your own" game engine:
- To learn. i.e. See this uber diagram of all the components of a modern game engine!
and
- The popular engines still do a terrible job of dynamic terrain management, instancing, meshing, etc. Rolling your own such as Proc World, say using dual contouring, etc., means it is easier to fit into your rendering pipeline instead of trying to figure out someone else's architecture.
And Slash's latest slashvertizement is about game engines. If you order NOW you get not one, but TWO copies of the source code. Can't afford that? No problem we have an easy $10 a month subscription. Why get what you want for free when you could pay us money? Don't wait, order NOW.
There are a significant number of 'missing features' in the free version of Unity3d...for example, render-to-texture. That's a pretty serious omission for any kind of serious software development - so the $1500 (or $75/month with a 2 year commitment) is necessary if you are really serious about game development. In a typical game company, $1,500 is roughly the salary of one programmer for a week. So over the life of any reasonable commercial game, the cost of buying a full license for each worker is essentially negligible.
What the free versions do is to enable indie studios to grow to the point where they can afford to pay for a game engine - and to get amateur game developers to grow interest, loyalty and expertise in a particular free engine that will hopefully translate into sales of the professional version when they become paid game developers in the future. But there are enough annoying road blocks that even an amateur developer may be tempted into buying (or renting!) the full version after running into a few of them.
It's a good model, and I hope it grows and continues.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
And it works quite well, for all platforms.
So I guess they'd pay for a crappy generic game engine like Unity.
One of my and my group's major sources of income is cleaning up after those "one developer" projects. The "rone developer" often has no idea how, or no willingness, to set up a testing plan before releases, to integrate robust security, to make software high availability, or to scale it behind a certain very modest size.
The result is that the first project or demo works well and is very lean and agile in the performance sense. But as the number of customers grow, or as people find and report bugs, scaling up and keeping it working well is much easier for the larger, more cautious team. Ideally, they code reviewed each other's work and pointed out where a fix here broke a feature elsewhere, or pointed out the edge cases that also need to be handled. As an example, what works on a laptop sitting next to the server running the multi-player game may not work so well behind three firewalls, NAT, and an overburdened local cable network setup. Lone developers often are not expected to spend time on those issues.
If you actually were running a business, you'd realize that there are no "trivial costs". For any expense, the question is not "how big is this relative to other expenses", but "is it going to make me more money than I spend on it".
When the premise is "this tool is expensive because it's useful only with large teams and you won't notice the expense in your budget relative to all the other crap you pay for", that's a bad premise. When the premise is "this tool lets you reduce the number of programmers you need from 10 to 2", that's a good premise.
Ah, there's the rub.
And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together? With good tools, one or two programmers can produce software that's better than a dozen programmers. And good tools should support exactly doing that: greatly reducing the requirement for people on a project.
I can beat a dozen clueless developers, I can't beat a dozen people like myself. If you can there's something horribly wrong with your cooperation, communication and coordination skills. Most of us work on systems that are bigger than one man can build and maintain and if I tried to get my paws into every corner of the system I'd only be the whirlwind trashing things on my way through for the rest to clean up. I've reached my natural scope at the level of detail that I work, if I wanted to increase the width more I'd have to reduce the depth going into design and architecture rather than the finer points of making it work.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ludum Dare #32 taught me one thing... Unity sucks! The web player crashes and even the binaries for Windows/Mac have a tendency to crash. Unreal engine won't even load in Windows 7 (for me). The best bet is just to use a scene rendering library for OpenGL and then create your own engine. It will help prevent your game from having a generic feel.
My point is not that "lone developers" should tackle problems that are too large for them. My point is that if you are using a gaming framework worth its money, all of that should already be taken care of, since these are standard problems in game development. Justifying an expensive tool by saying that after buying it, you still need an army of programmers tells me that the tool isn't very useful.
Game Engines take significant development time to build. For some companies their primary product is Game Engines. This is literally demanding that a company give away one of it's primary products for free.
Of course there's trivial costs in a business. If you're worrying about the costs of pens and whether you can get them 10 cents cheaper, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost savings of turning the thermostat from 70 to 71, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost of something that is less than 1% of your budget, you're wasting your time- even if you reduce it to 0 you'd have saved more by focusing elsewhere. A good businessman realizes whats worth being concerned about and what you just have to live with. Nothing is 100% efficient in life.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Cool, now you only need to convince game developers how network communications for multiplayer games are a solved problem they should not bother around and instead buy PRODUCTXXX to do it. Right.
Or at least they think they can, they think they can, they think they can.
Picking and using gaming framework represents a massive investment in time and effort; it's not a "pen".
Given that profit margins are often only a few percent, that's utter bullshit.
Engines are obsolete and only used by luddites, like Windows 7. Real games should be based on apps!
Apps!
Use Crystal Spaces and forget about it.
On the other hand, if you're going to publish your work on XBox Live! or PSN Network, the 3D engine cost is the lesser of your problems.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Get your hand off it. You'll go blind doing that.
bro, you need to stop going to reddit, bunch of dummy poopy heads there. go to hackernews
if you get confused by the results when you google for hackernews, you don't belong there. stay on reddit
The process of writing your own engine gives you both insight and more creative freedom... Most people aren't successful at writing their own, and even if they are of course it wont be as graphically impressive or comprehensive as the leading AAA engines - but it's the process that's important. There is more to writing games than just filling in story and content, i'm not saying that is worthless but it's only one of the many creative avenues to explore in games, the engine gives you ultimate control over mechanics, you are not bound by the laws defined someone else's physics engine, you can make something up that's out of this world.
... someone actually wants to charge for their work, heaven freakin' forbid, can't have that now can we?
do you pay a royalty for every copy sold?
then it should be free. it's fucking stupid to have to 'buy' the engine when you're on the hook for future profits.
When read as "1% is not important", you are right. But when read as "spending time optimizing small stuff will get you less benefit than spending the same time optimizing big stuff", I have to disagree with you.
Upfront cost? Most engines are charging percentages of revenue which means they can quite readily chew up 100% of the profits ie if your margins are only 10%, then 5% of revenue means they will be demanding 50% of your profits. How can programmers be so bad at math. If anything the crytek models looks suspiciously cheap. Can a programming house with 100 programmers get one subscription or do they need 100. How far out into the future will the subscription and its conditions hold, ie at least 3 years and preferably ten years but the customer can drop it at any time.
The current percentage of revenue model is nuts and should only be around .1% not 5%. Imagine M$ bringing in that model on spread sheet software, we demand 5% of your revenue if you want to use our software.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It is a wrong question to ask. If you are asking about a business decision, you will be better off asking what are the products with certain features and decide from there.
How much do I have to pay for Unreal Engine 4?
UE4 is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products. Read the EULA FAQ for more details.
I’m a consultant. Do I owe royalties on consulting fees?
No.
I think the reason for this is they all want to become the defacto-standard, they are all very keen to create a developer community around their toolset. Personally I like the UE4 / PhysX sales model since you don't pay until you make money from it. I'm interested in playing with these engines as a hobby but have no interest in writing a commercial game, If I was serious about developing and selling games, the license fees for any of the popular engines would be a very minor concern, it's a great example of a capitalist "win-win".
Selling model content to use in these engines is where the money is for individual devs/artists, kind of like the people who sold shovels during the gold rush. IIRC UE4 has some sort of public marketplace where you can release/sell models you have created.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Am I too old that I remember when "game developer" meant actually developing the game engine too?
Programmers USED to actually WRITE CODE (and UNDERSTAND the code they wrote, of course).
Nowadays, however, it seems that the majority of people who fancy themselves as "programmers" are actually just "integrators" who hook together lots of code other people wrote into a haphazard product which they can never fully debug and never truly complete - because they do not even know how it all works, having not written most of it. This hit a nerve with me because I have been in design review meetings with younger programmers who clearly did not understand all of "their" code, and were not even certain of all the licences on all the libraries they were using.
I'm sorry, but in my book if you are using any libraries that are not the basics needed to interact with the OS (like the standard C lib, DirectX or OpenGL, etc) then you are not a real programmer; you're closer to a "script kiddie"
You kids, GET OFF MY LAWN! (the first program I wrote was saved to paper tape, I got to try punch cards later. Now I mostly code in C or C++, occasionally use C# and find Python handy)
I can think of half a dozen companies I worked with in the last decade, all of whom thought they'd re-invented network protocols. All of them found that by the time they'd implemented necessary error correction, buffering, and re-transmit protocols for missed data that they'd actually _lost_ performance. It never showed up in the early testing because the inexperienced, "key developer" didn't know the history or the available technologies, so they'd never tested it under realistic circumstances.
mod parent up
Upfront cost? Most engines are charging percentages of revenue
Of the game engines mentioned in TFA, "most" = "one"?
Unity: $1500 (or $900/year) per developer.
CryEngine: $120/year per developer.
Source 2 (upcoming): Free (for games released on Steam).
Unreal: 5% royalty.
You're fucking insane.
10 cents for a pen sure. Saving 10-20% on a $800k stationary bill however..
Changing the thermostat, again, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars across a multinational.
1% of your budget? That's fucking massive. Where I work that's several tens of millions of dollars.
A good businessman focusses on everything, because you can, and it works out better for you, and your stakeholders.
Furthermore, engines come at a huge efficiency cost. Instead of knowing your own products, you've got to master someone elses. It takes substantial time to learn a tool chain and become efficient with it. It also takes time to adapt the tool chain to do what you actually want. Not to mention time spent dealing with bugs in the engine itself. All time that for many devs could have been spent making their own tool chain exactly how they want it.
Yeah, that's why everybody writes their own engine instead of using Unity, or one of the Unreal engine incarnations, or Source, or Crytek.
Oh wait. No. They've done the careful cost analysis and the productivity benefits of an engine and being able to get big swathes of the solution domain out of the box works out a fuck of a lot cheaper than hand crafting everything.
You're right, time is money. Learning an engine takes time. Writing your own engine takes time. Hiring someone that already knows an engine is quick, easy and comes with the advantage that the technology is already proven.
And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?
If that's the definition your experience immediately leads you to then perhaps it's time for a career change. This industry really is littered with under-exposed, overly-cynical people who would rather sit in a dead-end crappy position and complain about how stupid management is than actually do something about it.
If you're worrying about the costs of pens and whether you can get them 10 cents cheaper, you're wasting your time.
No it depends on how much you are spending on pens.
If you're worried about the cost savings of turning the thermostat from 70 to 71, you're wasting your time.
No it depends on how much that will save you.
If you're worried about the cost of something that is less than 1% of your budget, you're wasting your time- even if you reduce it to 0 you'd have saved more by focusing elsewhere.
Rubbish! If I have an 800k budget and I spend 2 days reducing a 1% cost to a 0.75% cost that's totally worth it.
A good businessman focusses on everything, because you can
I cannot.
I have to say that I disagree with this philosophy, because no-one I've met *can* focus on everything. Mental energy is finite, and I'd prefer that it be focussed where it can do the most good. (Over my career, my few fights with management were when their priority was "everything".)
That said, I have seen small things get bigger and bigger, but because the incremental change was so small, people didn't want to deal with it, so it's worth checking one's priorities every so often. But constantly focussing on everything - that has been a recipe for disaster for me and my mere mortal peers.
When the premise is "this tool lets you reduce the number of programmers you need from 10 to 2", that's a good premise.
I want to know about any tool that makes programmers five times more effective!
Moreover, we've probably both seen cases where the philosophy was "this tools is expensive, so it *must* be good".
But I've seen a lot more "A thousand dollars is a lot of money" when I see it add 5-10% to a 100K programmer's productivity. Admittedly, it *is* hard to measure productivity, but my general philosophy is that if you *aren't* spending a few percent of an employees salary to enhance their productivity, you should be looking carefully to make sure you're getting the most out of them.
It's amazing how often you see employees losing 30 minutes a day in cumulative 1 minute delays (which frustrates the heck out of them) because spending 2K for a decent computer is out of the question. Far cheaper to lose 15% of the employees productivity and the increased turn-over due to the frustration is just icing on the cheapness cake!
So, with respect to the topic at hand, I strongly believe if you have decent employees, then they can probably tell you what engine will work best for them. And if it costs up front, then you pay it. And no, I don't expect 500% productivity increases. But it doesn't take much of a productivity increase to have the right product pay for itself within the year.
Furthermore, engines come at a huge efficiency cost. Instead of knowing your own products, you've got to master someone elses.
Seriously that is the same stupid argument industry newbies and old fogies make for not using the C++ STL, the boost libraries, etc... and is the primary driver of NIH syndrome. Can you actually provide some statistics or real examples of cases where it is more cost-efficient to write your own comparable engine rather than licensing an existing one? I'm sure there are some for niche cases that mainstream engines don't serve (say you want to do primarily sparse voxel octree rendering) but for the most part you can extend an existing engine if there are bits and pieces you need that it doesn't provide.
R for statistics, Matlab for numerical programming, Simulink for simulation, Lua for game AI, etc.
If you ask a bunch of C++ programmers about what tools you should buy, they are probably not going to recommend tools that they don't know and that would put most of them out of a job.
My point is that for most game programming you should demand big productivity increases compared to writing your own solution, because for most types of games, the problems are well understood and there are excellent solutions.
Furthermore, it doesn't take much of a vendor screwup to have a small productivity increase in one year eaten up by a buggy release or other problem the next year. The cost and risk of adopting any new tool or library is huge, which is again why buying a library or tool for a small productivity increase isn't worth it.
You're conflating focus with prioritisation.
Any business bigger than a sole trader can focus on more than one thing.
Shit, one company I worked for saved 10 cents on pens by stopping buying stationary. It was that or go out of business. They stayed in business.
If you're worrying about the costs of pens and whether you can get them 10 cents cheaper, you're wasting your time.
Picking and using gaming framework represents a massive investment in time and effort; it's not a "pen".
That's nice but the pen was example of a trivial cost. You are the only one here comparing choosing an engine to purchasing a pen.
Utter bullshit not to worry about cost of a pen? Really?
Yeah, man! Companies should have to give us all their stuff for free, man!
Sure there might be some reason to build an engine from bottom up if its something specific or other reasons but if a team can just focus on their design and creation of their game, as a consumer, I would rather have the developers focus on making a good game.
Free can be nice. But do you really want to live in a house built by the lowest bidder? Maybe not...
The vendors can choose whatever price they want and the buyers can choose whether to buy it or not. But it only is a success if there is a balance.
And as is mentioned here, It is not that simple. There are many costs involved. And one that should be considered is: might the vendor dissappear just as you really need it?