Holy crap! Unreal Engine 4 is free!

Ergload

Epic announced that the Unreal 4 engine is now free for anyone to download and develop with. You'll only pay a 5% royalty once your product earns $3,000. This is HUGE news, it might make UE4 the go-to engine for everyone from big studios to small indie devs.

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

 

thoughts?

Fearum

I just hope people stop using unity

 

Nevulus

Unity is not the problem, it's people who lack the skills to get their shaders right and coding correct. 

 

That being said, Unreal 4 is a powerhouse and its abilities outweigh Unity Pro by a short distance. Real time nav mesh generation/placement, easy editor-style shader programming, more affordable, and C++. The fulle code for Unreal 4 is available on request.

czaq123

Its a good time for developers. I remember times when if you would like to write a game you had to have a lot of money to buy an engine or a lot of time and skills to write one. For now almost everybody can jump in into game development.

Crytec targets at big studios, while Epic learned from Unity that they can earn money on indies too

Note that  Unreal Engine is not free at all. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter

Thane

i think this is a good idea for starters.

usualy they wont make alot of money with it anyway, get some "fame" with their small producs, and then buy the engine before they go major league.

Ergload

Here's another great article that compares the different engines (Unity, Crytek, UE, UDK) and their pricing points.

http://blog.digitaltutors.com/unity-udk-cryengine-game-engine-choose/

Timesplit

I think it's a great thing for everyone. The problem is making the game itself, not making the money, so i don't think 5% is too much to ask.

DeserttFoxx

All this makes me think is, "yes, no more 2.5d platforming indie titles."

 

Unreal is a great engine, devs can actually start working on quality next gen titles, and knock it off with the child of light, snes style nonsense.

psiic

Would have to read the actual agreement here 5% royalty is dangerous wording.  They make it sound like 5% of $3000, but its a royalty so its basically 5% of every dollar over the first $3000. 

That is a hell of a lot of money over the life of a standard game.

SpottyGekko

Does this mean we'll soon see an absolute explosion of new Kickstarter projects looking for funding ? 

Ergload

Originally posted by SpottyGekko
Does this mean we'll soon see an absolute explosion of new Kickstarter projects looking for funding ? 

haha man i didnt even consider that...cant wait to play all the pre-alpha-alpha buy-ins 

botrytis

Well, the title the OP used is a misnomer - YOU DO PAY FOR THE ENGINE, just after you make money and it is on GROSS PROFIT (meaning before you pay for everything else) you make, not your profit after all your bills. Actually that means they can get more developers using the engine, they make more money. Makes perfect sense but it is not free.

Nevulus

Originally posted by DeserttFoxx

All this makes me think is, "yes, no more 2.5d platforming indie titles."

 

Unreal is a great engine, devs can actually start working on quality next gen titles, and knock it off with the child of light, snes style nonsense.

 

You will see even more 2.5d platformers and side-scrollers than ever before. Unreal 4 will only make sure of that.

 

It takes big teams and big skills to generate quality next gen models/animations/shaders. Why do you think Unity went from a predominantly 3d engine to accomodating 2d during its Unity 4.2 cycle? Because its faster to generate/draw up/ and prototype no matter how badly Unity wanted to throw 3d into the mainstream indie scene.

 

So more Child of Light and more 2D stylizied games are coming our way, for better or worse. Unfortunately it will be for the worse since most people will forgo actually learning to code and stick to general assets and pre-generated framework code.