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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why benevolent needs to be in quotes in your comment.

Regardless of whatever financial or tax upside they get from doing this, the upside the game development community gets is the same.

They are doing something they really didn't need to do, and as GP pointed out, most companies don't do.

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"As with all of Epic’s internally developed assets, the Paragon assets are only licensed for use in Unreal Engine 4."

This is marketing for their game engine. They don't have to do it, sure. But SaaS companies don't have to provide free blogs, webinars and e-books either but we don't pretend they are benevolent for doing so.

Don't get me wrong. I think more art assets available in the game dev community is a good thing. I think more free stuff from one company (Epic in this case) will beget more free stuff from their competitors (Unity mainly). I'm just pointing out that this isn't free for the sake of being benevolent. It's free for the sake of capturing market share.

> I'm just pointing out that this isn't free for the sake of being benevolent. It's free for the sake of capturing market share.

this seems like it could be a false dichotomy. it's not obvious why it can't be both.

Benevolent: "(of an organization) serving a charitable rather than a profit-making purpose."

That's not how this word works. We can use another one.

I hasten to add, again, that I'm attributing nothing pejorative. I'm glad Epic have done this. It's great marketing that may be helpful to lots of people.

"benevolent" wasn't being used to describe the organization, it was being used to describe a particular action.

The issue is this action isn't benevolent. It's nice, but as said previously it's to promote their engine. So they will profit from it indirectly.

If on the other hand they would release the assets without strings attached (for use with any game engine / in any way) then I'd say this word would apply.

and my point was that this seemed like a false dichotomy.

True. A dichotomy cannot explain for example tax deductible donations: they're obviously self advertising at much lower cost than a real PR campaign, still they benefit someone, so we probably should use a trichotomy like "I'm doing good even if it has a sustainable cost" - "I'm doing good only if it somehow benefits me as well" - "I'm not doing good because being evil brings even more profit than the above".

> This is marketing for their game engine.

Which faces _stiff_ competition against the Unity engine. Epic is the incumbent in the space and the success of Unity in the last several years must be a huge concern for Epic.

Epic has always been a game engine developer first and foremost, so anything to claw back market share from Unity is going to be a calculated strategic move on their part.

I don't think it's quite that clear. Sure Epic has been in the game engine market longer, but it was only relatively recently that they entered the non-AAA market due to a major change in licensing. Unity was really the incumbent in that space at the time. In some ways Epic is the up and comer. You can also see that as Unity has had to react strongly to Epic's entry into the market.

Indeed. Tired of people associating benevolence with no monetary reward whatsoever.

I'd argue benevolent belongs in quotes. Not to question the very clear upside to the game development community. But rather to acknowledge that Epic is likely anticipating the benefits to itself as a company will be higher than the costs.

I would disagree that a prerequisite of a corporation being benevolent is losing money.

There was no requirement of giving away the assets in order to gain the tax benefits.

> I don't see why benevolent needs to be in quotes in your comment

> most companies don't do.

Because most companies are for-profit entities. Most companies don't do this because they aren't in this specific situation. Most gaming companies have really delicate economics (high up front capital costs, with less than guaranteed returns).

Call me cynical all you want, but the idea that video gaming companies (of all industries) are somehow out to provide benevolently for it's software developing community is laughable at best (see EA, Ubisoft, Zynga etc). The video gaming market is rife with abusing long hours out of it's employees.

> see EA, Ubisoft, Zynga etc

You're cherry picking a handful of awful companies for the sake of making a point about the entire industry.

I take it you haven't worked in the industry? There's literally an industry term for it ("crunch") because it's so bad.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/257143/Working_time_amon...

http://www.gameinformer.com/themes/blogs/generic/post.aspx?W...

https://kotaku.com/crunch-time-why-game-developers-work-such...

https://venturebeat.com/2016/03/20/why-crunch-time-is-still-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/opinion/work-culture-vide...

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150120/234443/T...

Asking employees to work long hours in order to meet deadlines is not unique to the games industry.

It's not an ask when made a condition of employment.

You built your own straw man.

Nobody said that video gaming companies "are somehow out to provide benevolently for it's software developing community."

If we were talking about Epic Games giving $100 to each American, that wouldn't follow either.

But if you can't acknowledge that some decisions are more well-meaning than others, you're just sour grapes.

It can be both. Doing good by others does not require absolute zero benefit for yourself. The total refund is a win for Epic and it’s customers alike.

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