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Unreal Engine 4 license costs (w/ source code): $19 monthly sub, 5% royalty rate

belushy

Banned
Completely new to this stuff but I was waiting for details on UE4 to surface because I'm trying to start development on a game myself. Couple of questions:

- How would the payment model apply to a free game? I'm not talking F2P, microtransactions, anything like that. Just a completely free title with no initial commercial intent.

- I have virtually zero programming experience and none with game engines. Is there a suitable amount of tutorial content available for learning UE, and now UE4?

For specificity's sake, I'm looking to make a cel-shaded, multiplayer-only arena shooter title with conservative graphic fidelity. Is UE4 the way to go for something like that, or would it be wiser to just go with something like a Cryengine 3 free license?

For your second question, there is the new Blueprint system which uses nodes as a "visual" programming language. Mainly used for prototyping, I believe. If you want, you could always pay $20 for now, and then cancel the subscription. Then prototype/learn the engine yourself. Once you are ready for full-on development, you can re-up on the subscription to get new features. As for tutorials, the engine just came out so it might take awhile for the really good community tutorials to come around.

edit: #GravityGauntlet
 
Seems like my GPU can't even run the Editor, so i'll stick with Unity for now. Really wanted to try that Blueprint system :(

Wow that's weird.

What's your GPU?

Are your drivers up to date?

At the very least, since you have the complete source, you could always take some time to debug it to figure out what's going wrong.
 

Mik2121

Member
I bought this yesterday and have it now running on my PC. I already used the engine before at work (not related to any game though) and this version is newer and nicer than the latest build we got.

I can't wait to work on stuff at home and be able to post it online!!
 

PirateKing

Junior Member
Artist? Programmer? Game Designer? It depends on what you wanna do.

Three people, those three examples you gave, each person is good in their own field. Will the team be able to learn and advance the project (Indie Game)? Is it user friendly or beginner friendly?
 

Mik2121

Member
For the Artist and the Game Designer, I'd say yes. I don't know about programming, but apparently now it's much more user-friendly because it stopped using UnrealScript and now it's just C++ (and all the blueprint stuff, also). But I could be wrong.

Anyway, for the artist UE4 is probably the most friendly tool, and the one that gives him the most things to do. For the game designer, he can also use blueprints to make many things that he'd have to ask the programmer to do, otherwise. Also doing things like level design is quite fast. So yeah.. you might want to check on the programming stuff, but otherwise there's no problem I'd say.
 
Three people, those three examples you gave, each person is good in their own field. Will the team be able to learn and advance the project (Indie Game)? Is it user friendly or beginner friendly?

Why not try UDK for free and then decide if you find it easy enough to get into, instead of spending 20 bucks and maybe figuring it out some time later. IF you pick up UDK easily enough from what I understand, it is a fairly easy process to move everything over to UE4.
 
Three people, those three examples you gave, each person is good in their own field. Will the team be able to learn and advance the project (Indie Game)? Is it user friendly or beginner friendly?

Unity is best imo for complete beginners because of the user contributions in their asset store. Some incredible contributions for AI, graphics, animation, all categories. to cut down on programming. Practically point and click into a basic game.

However, Unreal of course is more powerful. In time, if Unreal's marketplace becomes as rich as Unity's, it will be the obvious choice. I hope Unreal's user made assets grow exponentially and their store grows quick. That marketplace is the key to being king of the young indie mountain.

Makes me excited to imagine Unreal 4's engine combined with Unity's community asset selection and community forums.

Whichever Epic employee is reading this, get your marketplace growing fast and you will win the indies. And don't be restrictive on the assets you allow into the market.

edit: In short, Unity user-made asset store helped the engine lose that "It looks like a Unity game" image. The same can be done with Unreal.
 

PirateKing

Junior Member
Thanks for the info guys. Currently I'm downloading both free versions and will try them out myself. I'm just wondering, programming wise, does Unity uses C++? I only know C and C++.
 
udk is fairly buggy, just a heads up. It has frozen on me when doing the most simple things, like loading a level. Or every now and then, the mouse will freeze in udk, and by mashing the keyboard you may get it back. For 20 dollars, just buy UE4 and cancel, it's worth it
 

smik

Member
Great news, simple to use engine on a cheap affordable price for indies

its really win win here, cant wait to see what games become of this
 
I'm guessing due to the timing of the announcement we won't hear about it for awhile, but there's no way Unreal will continue to charge a 5% royalty when the other major engines do not. It's bad enough that you have the toll roads to consumers charging 30% (when it should be something more like 10% or less). Besides, most indies won't be creating games that would benefit from Unreal's feature set.
 

EMT0

Banned
I went ahead and bought a month's subscription. The demos they showcased blew my mind, and if it's as intuitive as they say, well....
 

Mik2121

Member
I'm thinking of making an Unreal Engine 4 thread like I did with the UDK one back some time ago. Would you guys be interested in that?
 

Blizzard

Banned
I'm thinking of making an Unreal Engine 4 thread like I did with the UDK one back some time ago. Would you guys be interested in that?
But I already subscribed to this thread as the ad-hoc, possibly monitored by Epic community representative thread!

But yes if you want to make a dedicated thread that's fine with me. :p

Side note, there appears to be an Epic representative in the freenode #unrealengine IRC channel, and they've been talking occasionally, so that's good to see. I think they said if there are crashes, save the crash file so it can be sent to them and they can fix the problems.
 

syko de4d

Member
I'm thinking of making an Unreal Engine 4 thread like I did with the UDK one back some time ago. Would you guys be interested in that?

yep, i would be interested. Will get it when Paypal option is added. I am a totally noob in this Area but UE4 looks awesome and VR is super interesting. I know i will never build anything anyone wants to pay something for but just to build stuff yourself and walking in VR in your own demo is interesting enough for me. So a thread would be great to find good Informationen for a noob like me :)
 
Thanks for the info guys. Currently I'm downloading both free versions and will try them out myself. I'm just wondering, programming wise, does Unity uses C++? I only know C and C++.

Unity uses C#.

Granted if you know C/C++, you won't have any issues learning C#.
 

Mik2121

Member
Cool. I will work on the thread today after I get home, so it will still be a few hours away.

Hopefully UnrealEngine (the user) also comes with us :p
 
launcherzkdnk.png

I've spent some time with UE4 over the past few days and what follows are my initial beginners thoughts (sorry if it is too long and not particularly helpful).

The Engine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD5cRnrMqWw

There isn't a whole to say about UE4 in terms of the engine itself. Typically UE has defined the industry with their offerings and UE4 looks to have all the features that you would like. There are a few issues relating to lighting and I'm sure you might be able to find something missing here or there compared to the competitors, but the bottom line is you are getting the full thing out of the box and that is a pretty big deal (and if you are upset about some technical feature, what I think isn't going to help you a lot ;)).


It is worth noting that the engine does come with several GB of impressive examples, so you will certainly be able to see what is on offer yourself (if your computer can handle it, running the whole stack is going to require a fair bit of power). In particular, there is competent 2D support and a few of the samples are targeted directly at this (swing ninja and the flappy birds clone). I haven't played much with this side of it, but I imagine it would do the job pretty well given the blueprint and animation support.

clip0227d9j5v.gif


The Editor:

But can you actually build anything without being an expert? Well this is where it gets a bit more interesting.

Game engines have always been the Dark Souls of software development. If you are put in front of one you will have no idea what you are doing and it is never clear exactly how you are supposed to proceed. But of course if you know what you are doing? You can do anything you want and will then spend your time telling people how easy it is if you are slow and patient.


UE4 is no different in this regard, but there have been some important advances over previous versions. Firstly the menu systems are all re-designed and now almost make sense. While there are still a huge number of quirks such as how you save properties, fiddly scaling controls and poor defaults on column widths (so you can't read most things until you adjust them), by and large everything is clean and simple and the designers have done an excellent job (except for things like setting up action mappings, which is a mess).

There isn't anything too revolutionary here, so if you have used an engine before you will have a fair idea of what to expect, but it does a better job of not putting a billion things on the screen at once and planning for things like vertical space actually exists. The animations editor in particular is rather nice, so for that alone it might be worth a look over other options.


That said, it isn't perfect and you will hit a few odd little bugs. For example the pop-ups for compiling code and opening visual studio don't seem to always go away, so you may not be sure if they have finished or not. In fact the whole integration with Visual studio seems a little "off". A couple of times the editor wanted to spawn a new instance, rather than reloading the current one in use. There were also installation issues where it demanded VS2013 even though 2010 was already installed. Once 2013 was up and running? It happily used 2010 anyway (and thank god for that).

The whole workflow problem between adding a function and having to restart the editor is also a constant pain. Hopefully they come up with something a little more elegant down the line.

What this all means is you have a really strong editor, which just needs a little bit more tweaking to iron out the little issues (Of course it'll never be perfect, it is a game editor and there is shit everywhere). I certainly didn't hit any show stoppers in my time playing with it and everything is reasonably responsive.

Blueprints? Well this is Epic's attempt to provide "non-programming" "programming" by dragging and dropping and generally getting a game up and running without typing in C++ code. It is a pretty impressive system, but I have to wonder about how viable it is given the relative complexity. If you can wrap your head around blueprints sufficiently to achieve something complex (and I think you can get some decent results out of it), you would probably be just as well served from doing it in the code in the first place.

As such, I think it is only really going to be a useful option for people scratching the surface with the engine. This isn't a bad thing of course and will change as people code more things to be dropped into the blueprint system. But for now still be prepared to dust off the coding textbooks if you want to create something big and use the code and blueprint system together as intended.

The Eco-System:

To compete with other players like Unity (in the indie space especially), a strong marketplace is a must. UE4 comes with one out of the box... but there isn't any really content at this stage. You can download a few samples and pay for a weapon pack, but that is about it. More problematic, little things like download sizes on content are missing until you actually download them (or I presume pay).


While the UE launcher does a decent job of keeping everything organised the marketplace itself has no concept of categories or searching or anything else like that. It is very much a day one concept and more of a promise than anything useful. Still, it is hard to think that it will not fill up quickly to provide all sorts of useful things. But will Epic limit the content available? Will it be expensive? Well, we will just have to wait and see.

A Note for Beginners:

A good question that might get asked is "I'm a beginner, is UE4 right for me?"

The answer is, it depends what you mean be "beginner". If you mean you are just starting out, want to make a game and don't know what you are doing? Then no, UE4 does not seem like a good choice. You'll be able to put some levels together, perhaps. But there are a lot of advanced concepts involved here and C++ is not something you are just going to jump into and understand.

I'd still go with Unity if you must have 3D (but even then, don't expect to actually make anything). This is simply because of the amount of help available and the number of objects and scripts you can copy and paste in from somebody else. I don't think it will take UE4 long to catch up in this regard, but it will still take time that you could use to learn game development with an easier curve. Rest assured that a lot of what you learn in Unity will largely carry over this time (and vice-versa).

On the other hand if you are beginning in a career in game development? Then yes, sink your teeth into Unreal and get some skills that will help you later on. Because of the lack of limitations, you are really only held back by the time you are going to spend learning it. And if you are serious about making games for a living? Well you might as well get stuck in now for the long journey ahead (and at least you know the tutorials available right now do work).

ue4_testlki7h.gif


Conclusion:

The new licensing model of Unreal 4 was a big surprise, but a pleasant one. The engine is no longer that "thing that costs millions for the real version" and is available for even the most humble indie developer (who doesn't want to make a console game).

While the editor still needs a lot of polish, it is well designed, functional and will not get in the way of letting you create your dream game. Just be aware that the content, tutorials and marketplace are still very much in their infancy, so you will need to be doing a lot of the work yourself.

For $20 it would be rude not to give it a go.
 
I've spent some time with UE4 over the past few days and what follows are my initial beginners thoughts (sorry if it is too long and not particularly helpful).

.

Great impressions, i am really tempted to pick it up. Looks like they are pretty decent content examples too.

Thankfully i am not too invested in a particular engine and with blueprint this actually looks alot more user friendly then unity (assuming you dont need to dig into the source much)

Any vids/impressions of swing ninja ? Is it a fun template ?
 

tauke

Member
Thanks for the detailed first impressions toddhunter.

I've only dabble in UDK mainly on the art part so I don't think much have changed for that.

Also maybe I overlook it in all UE4 news but does it still support Scaleform? I use Flash to generate the HUD in UDK since the integration is seamless.
 

Divus

Member
Been going thru the process of wanting to make my own games. Never done it before and my programming is poor at best. I have spent the last month or so reading into it though. My brother heard about this and wants on board as well and may have some serious time to put into it where I've got a full time job and a tiny YouTube channel as my hobby.

I first looked at Gamemaker which seems relatively easy, but after spending a couple of days with it I realize it's very limited. Ok for your real basic 2D games but not exactly what I want.

I then turned to Unity and it looked great and it seemed like the price was right and from some of the tutorials and amazing asset store made it seem like it would be well in my grasp. We wanted to start off with a relatively simple mobile game. Just started getting into it and then I seen it. I was told there was a small fee to port your game to IOS, and Android, but that's subjective I guess. It requires $1,500 Unity Pro license and both mobile platforms are also $1,500 a piece. Throwing in $4,500 in on a hobby isn't really something I'm ready to do at this point.

So then like a sign or something they announced this Engine the day I decided I'm not ready to spend a chunk of my savings on Unity. $19 a month is nothing, I spend that on a good meal. Only issues are it being so new I'm not sure how feasible this really is for mobile development. Also it not having Unitys impressive asset store is a con, but realistically I'm months away from anything and I suppose this will have time to grow as I learn a bit more about programming.
 
"I then turned to Unity and it looked great and it seemed like the price was right and from some of the tutorials and amazing asset store made it seem like it would be well in my grasp. We wanted to start off with a relatively simple mobile game. Just started getting into it and then I seen it. I was told there was a small fee to port your game to IOS, and Android, but that's subjective I guess. It requires $1,500 Unity Pro license and both mobile platforms are also $1,500 a piece. Throwing in $4,500 in on a hobby isn't really something I'm ready to do at this point. "


There's not a fee for mobile licenses for Unity unless you need a feature that requires the Pro mobile licenses. You don't need Unity Pro unless you need a feature that is Unity Pro only.

You can release a Unity game on iOS and Android without paying Unity a single dime.
 
Any vids/impressions of swing ninja ? Is it a fun template ?

Added a gif above, but yeah it is a pretty meaty template for a 2D endless runner type game (but you could stop him running easily enough I imagine). It isn't much fun to play though, just a nice demo of what you could do (but it has all the bits you need).

What I found interesting was the work done to build the city to be projected into a 2D plane.

 

element

Member
If the EULA is correct, then make sure you do your budgets correctly. The royalty license is 5% off gross income, not sales. So if you do a Kickstarter with UE4, your 5% is based off the amount of your KS total, before KS, Amazon, or any fulfillment on your end are paid.
 
If the EULA is correct, then make sure you do your budgets correctly. The royalty license is 5% off gross income, not sales. So if you do a Kickstarter with UE4, your 5% is based off the amount of your KS total, before KS, Amazon, or any fulfillment on your end are paid.

I think they specifically address this but it's 5% royalty on direct sales from the product. The example they gave is that if you had a 20 dollar tier that gave a copy of the game, you would owe 5% of that. But if you had a 50 dollar tier that gave a poster and a game then you would owe 5% on the 20 dollars for the game but not the 30 for the poster.
 

EVIL

Member
I think they specifically address this but it's 5% royalty on direct sales from the product. The example they gave is that if you had a 20 dollar tier that gave a copy of the game, you would owe 5% of that. But if you had a 50 dollar tier that gave a poster and a game then you would owe 5% on the 20 dollars for the game but not the 30 for the poster.
Correct:
What if my product obtains crowdfunding via Kickstarter or another source?
Royalties are due on revenue from Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sources when the revenue is actually attributable to your product, for example if the user is required to purchase a particular funding package to obtain access (now or later) to your product, or if that package gives the buyer benefits within the product such as in-game items or virtual currency.

Here’s an example of what we mean by “attributable”: Assume you provide two tiers of offers, a signed poster for $20, and a signed poster plus game access for $50. No royalties are due on ancillary products like posters, so no royalty is due on the $20 tier. On the $50 tier, the user is paying for the poster with a $20 value, and that implies that the remaining $30 of value is attributable to the product. So, for each $50 tier sale, you’d pay a royalty of $1.50 (5% of $30).
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
"I then turned to Unity and it looked great and it seemed like the price was right and from some of the tutorials and amazing asset store made it seem like it would be well in my grasp. We wanted to start off with a relatively simple mobile game. Just started getting into it and then I seen it. I was told there was a small fee to port your game to IOS, and Android, but that's subjective I guess. It requires $1,500 Unity Pro license and both mobile platforms are also $1,500 a piece. Throwing in $4,500 in on a hobby isn't really something I'm ready to do at this point. "


There's not a fee for mobile licenses for Unity unless you need a feature that requires the Pro mobile licenses. You don't need Unity Pro unless you need a feature that is Unity Pro only.

You can release a Unity game on iOS and Android without paying Unity a single dime.

Unfortunately, if path finding is something you want to do by yourself or using one of many asset store plugins, you get already into your first show stopper as they all rely on a Unity Pro feature.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I think something related to pathfinding was just moved to the free version?

And then there's this, which works just fine without Unity Pro: http://arongranberg.com/astar/

Creating the nav meshes offline or dynamically used to be a Pro only feature even in version 4. I have not checked for version 5 though.

Edit: I stand corrected, this project is doing it without the use of Unity's built in nav meshes.
 

benjipwns

Banned
Added a gif above, but yeah it is a pretty meaty template for a 2D endless runner type game (but you could stop him running easily enough I imagine). It isn't much fun to play though, just a nice demo of what you could do (but it has all the bits you need).

What I found interesting was the work done to build the city to be projected into a 2D plane.
Somewhat similar, Saints Row IV's side-scroller level when you move the camera: http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/578999951999944192/42C768585E45AED7D0D82F968C8DAEB8188A4AB2/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CWc9UJA22Y
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
I think they specifically address this but it's 5% royalty on direct sales from the product. The example they gave is that if you had a 20 dollar tier that gave a copy of the game, you would owe 5% of that. But if you had a 50 dollar tier that gave a poster and a game then you would owe 5% on the 20 dollars for the game but not the 30 for the poster.

I could see some imaginative tier creation working around some of that.

$29 tier - get a 'thanks' posted on our webpage when we're done
$30 tier - get a 'thanks' posted and a copy of our game.

basically makes your game 'worth' $1 and therefore you only pay 5c to Epic.
 

EVIL

Member
I could see some imaginative tier creation working around some of that.

$29 tier - get a 'thanks' posted on our webpage when we're done
$30 tier - get a 'thanks' posted and a copy of our game.

basically makes your game 'worth' $1 and therefore you only pay 5c to Epic.

I think you have more to worry in terms of possible backlash if you sell the game for 1$ on kickstarter versus 20 on steam, thus I doubt people would go that route. and even if it works out, you gotta sell your game on steam to be able to make it profitable, so epic gets a small cut from that. and even then, 5% is peanuts on the total scale of what % goes to you.

Compared with traditional publishing, developing and publishing everything yourself is still very profitable for indie/small developers via digital distribution.
 

Bold One

Member
Totally confused. What is it missing that makes it not on the same level? Care to elaborate?

I don't think its on the same level of visual fidelity of the Cry Engine,

- shaders
- textures
-physics

the only visually appealing game from UE3 was Mirrors Edge.



don't know why I am being attacked.
 
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