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Comment by wwalser | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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> 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.

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