Unreal Engine Made Free By Epic Games

[justmy2cents]

When licence is about "once you commercially succeed, we are coming to get you" well, that can't really be free software licence nor opensource one.

true, you have to pay 50000 from 1000000. but, that is 950000. if you used unity pro and had few stations you'd be almost at the same spot before earning 1.

and at least how i see it. i couldn't be fucking happier if i had to pay Epic 50k. it would mean i was successful

[dungeon]

true, you have to pay 50000 from 1000000. but, that is 950000.

That is fine if payment starts at 1 million bucks and stops to count share at let say 5 million, but it isn't... If you made game let say succesfull as Minecraft, then 5% is way too much for one shitty engine whatever that is

[xeekei]

This is awesome. Epic deserve to get paid for their engine if they want to. If you make $3000 per product per month you can certainly afford giving them a petty 5 PERCENT cut. It doesn't need to be GPL.

[justmy2cents]

That is fine if payment starts at 1 million bucks and stops to count share at let say 5 million, but it isn't... If you made game let say succesfull as Minecraft, then 5% is way too much for one shitty engine whatever that is

so, let's say you earned 1000000000, 5% is 50000000. you'll really be missing that money. i can't even imagine how you could survive so poor then again, Q&A and long time support will cost you a lot if you earn that money and in lots of cases you simply redirect it forward

there is greedy and there is greedy

[SXX⁣]

and at least how i see it. i couldn't be fucking happier if i had to pay Epic 50k. it would mean i was successful

Epic charge you 5% from gross, not from net income.
So if you earn 1,000,000 then there :

1. Your expenses to make the game.
2. Distributor cut like 30%. (Steam, App Store, Google Play)
3. Taxes.

Depend on country and development expenses at this point you'll likely have something like 15-30% of this 1kk. So you'll have to give them 16-35% of your profit.

if you used unity pro and had few stations you'd be almost at the same spot before earning 1.

Main difference is that you buy Unity once and then you can do as much games as you want with it. UE4 royalties are per-title.

[feydun]

it's not so bad

5% of gross.
So, 30% for distribution, +5% for licence, then let's say you have low production expenses of 15% of gross revenue, leaving 50%, and maybe pay 20% of that in tax, you now have 40% of your revenue, optimistically. If you didn't pay them for the licence you would have 80% of (100%-30%-15%)= 44% of your revenue. The difference is about 9% of profit.
However, i don't think that the 5% model applies once you're earning over 100k p.a.
The point is that you could save most of the 30% of gross by direct distribution, but you'd make much less money; and you could save 5% by using an inferior game engine, but you'd make less money.

Epic charge you 5% from gross, not from net income.
So if you earn 1,000,000 then there :

1. Your expenses to make the game.
2. Distributor cut like 30%. (Steam, App Store, Google Play)
3. Taxes.

Depend on country and development expenses at this point you'll likely have something like 15-30% of this 1kk. So you'll have to give them 16-35% of your profit.

Main difference is that you buy Unity once and then you can do as much games as you want with it. UE4 royalties are per-title.

[mark45]

This. And I say this having done several university projects with Unity and liking it for the purpose :P

How is UE4 better than Unity?
(Just curious)

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Epic charge you 5% from gross, not from net income.
So if you earn 1,000,000 then there :

1. Your expenses to make the game.
2. Distributor cut like 30%. (Steam, App Store, Google Play)
3. Taxes.

Depend on country and development expenses at this point you'll likely have something like 15-30% of this 1kk. So you'll have to give them 16-35% of your profit.

Main difference is that you buy Unity once and then you can do as much games as you want with it. UE4 royalties are per-title.

I tell you what. How about you invest millions into developing an equivalent product that both Unity and Epic develop for you to use. You'll still complain about the 30% app store fee, but ignoring the fact you have a ready-made 300 million client model.

Keep whining.

[dungeon]

so, let's say you earned 1000000000, 5% is 50000000. you'll really be missing that money. i can't even imagine how you could survive so poor

That is too much zeros for me to count . Successfull people are poor in their own way... you might have high developement and other expences, Epic will epically took all you money, with all your zeros in the end you will got nothing .

[GreatEmerald]

Anyone tried UE4 on Linux ? Reading the official page on Linux Support, seems that is better to cross-compile from Windows which I don't have and don't want to install.

I tried it, and it works nearly perfectly. The only things that aren't ideal right now is that it may crash on certain specific conditions (but they're usually quick to fix those if you report the bugs), and renaming assets doesn't work correctly yet. Also, depending on your distribution, you might need to install dependencies manually (right now only Debian and SUSE derivatives are supported, and the latter courtesy by me).

I don't think it's that easy: With Qt the program you release is the major part, and if you want to release a version for which people always must pay (i.e. no third party has the right to redistribute), you have to go for the closed source option.

With a game engine this is different, if you were allowed to redistribute the software part of an Unreal engine based game under the GPL, then Epic would have no right to ask the game developer for money, but the latter could still sell the assets (textures, sound, etc) and charge for in-game items, i.e. make money off the engine without giving anything to Epic.

For example, ID games like the DOOMs, Quakes etc, that have the code available under the GPL still require that one buys the actual game to obtain these assets.

They have assets separated just as well as third party components. They have a directory called "Restricted Assets" just for things like that. Not shipping them with the FOSS version would be trivial.