Comment by codelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codelord | Hacker News Reader

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IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers. Unless you are building something for the web or low powered mobile VR I wouldn't even consider anything else. For PC and console games UE5 provides incredible amount of tools and flexibility. It's also great for building 2D/3D mobile games. People who say complexity of Unreal has stopped them from using it have gotten it wrong. UE5 provides you with a lot of tools, you don't have to use them all. But if you are thinking of building something more complex than a hello world example, you'd realize that the additional tools that UE5 provides you greatly save your time.

If you are a total beginner you can use Blueprints to write the game logic and use the existing out-of-the box tools. If you are a more experienced programmer you can use C++ to build custom components/plugins to get more customization.

I remember a time that game engines were these precious secret tools that you had to pay millions of dollars to get a license for. Now you can get the full source of UE5 on Github for free. And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. This is just a no-brainer folks. IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there. Use UE5 unless you have a really really really good reason not to.

> IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers.

The only place Unity really shines (both IME and in industry) is mobile games. Unreal IIRC doesn't really have even close to comparable support for mobile platforms. Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry, so I would say the ">90% of use cases" thing is just untrue.

> And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue.

> IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified.

Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_.

In retrospect this comment feels like some form of advertisement for UE5 more than actual discussion.

> Mobile games by revenue make up more than 10% of the games industry

I've said this already in another recent thread but mobile games and pc/console games are two entirely separate markets, with different potential customer pools.

Conflating them together makes about as much sense as conflating console/pc games with accounting software.

> I've said this already in another recent thread but Mobile games and PC/Console games are two entirely separate markets, with different potential customer pools.

Yes, agreed. But again, as I've already said, the reason to point out mobile games specifically is because that's where much of Unity's success has come from. There's really no point in discussing Unity's monetization efforts without also discussing the mobile games industry. PC and Console games just aren't written in Unity at the frequency or scale that it would matter.

> Conflating them together makes about as much sense as conflating console/pc games with accounting software.

Yes, which is why I pointed out the above post combining them when the ought not be.

Sorry, you managed to trigger my pet peeve faster than I managed to properly read the whole conversation :)

>Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_.

Not necessarily, let's do the math:

for 1m downloads, UE depends on how much money you make. But regardless of how much money you made, Unity's new plan on Enterprise (in the worst case, because they have not specified if the charges start after 1m installs or applies to the first million as well) will cost you $46,500, on top of the per seat pricing of enterprise. in this case, the cutoff point for when Epic costs more is if you made more than $930k in revenue. But since Epic waives the first million, this actually means you need to make $1.93m in revenue before it cancels out.

and if we go further along (where Unity's prices for enterprise start to stabilize at $0.01 per install), if you hit 5m downloads you are charged a total of $106k, the breakpoint here for UE is if you made $3.1m in revenue (again, waiving the first million).

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By the looks of things, for a mid-revenue game UE looks better, but higher revenues mean Unity start to win out. In particular, mobile games tend to utilize whales that can make the attach rate MUCH higher than $2/user (you may not have 99 users paying anything, but a whale dropping $1000 balances the arithmetic mean to $10/user), so Unity will win out. Funnily enough, the less ethical f2p games may still prefer Unity over unreal.

For games that rely on ads or subscriptions, though? Absolutely fucked over. Drastically. You simply cannot make an ethical mobile app with Unity anymore as every user that visits and leaves in 10 minutes after a certain threshold is costing you money. If you had a bad launch with lots of users but barely any revenue, you can legitimately end up in the red for using Unity. As it would be better to shut down your app and relaunch under a different name than to try and recoup the costs with the current app.

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I won't ramble on too much longer, but I do want to add one more tidbit to keep in mind. Gamepass and Apple Arcade are also factors, and Unity said they would charge the distributors for this. In the worst case, this can mean that Microsoft/Apple can remove your existing games from these services and disallow Unity games to be hosted. So if you want to one day utilize these kinds of subscription services, you may not even have such a choice to begin with.

30% for distribution is fine, 5% for more than half the cost of development is not?

Fortnite is also a top selling mobile game developed with UE5. You can make great mobile games with UE5 now. Mobile hardware right now is comparable to last gen consoles.

> 30% for distribution is fine, 5% for more than half the cost of development is not?

Quote me where I said the 30% tax was "fine" please.

> Fortnite is also a top selling mobile game developed with UE5.

Yep! So we've gotten to the exception that proves the rule. Aside from Fortnite, which is written by Epic, Unreal Engine hasn't had even close to the success or adoption on mobile platforms as it has elsewhere.

> You can make great mobile games with UE5 now.

You can make great mobile games in javascript. This isn't really about "can".

>Unreal Engine hasn't had even close to the success or adoption on mobile platforms as it has elsewhere.

not sure if that's a fair comparison. UE existed for 15 years before smartphone applications existed. Unity's first public release was mac only and focused a lot on making web and IOS apps. No surprise that Epic's decade long dynasty wasn't surpassed when they never put a strong emphasis on mobile to begin with.

IIRC Unreal Engine has 15% mobile marketshare, so it's not an unviable option. Especially in times where even mobile games are starting to come into the open world action frenzy.

> 5% for more than half the cost of development is not?

The same can be said about Unity asking you to pay $0.05 per install (which is massively cheaper than Unreal for any non F2P game)

It isn't though, in the context of a f2p mobile game. Under one model, only paying customers cost you. In the other you're paying for every drive by (re)download.

Yeah, certainly. This feels like such a weird model. Many developers will end up paying much less than 1% maybe even closer 0.1% while for others it could be much higher than 5%.

And the worst thing is that they’ll apply it retroactively so that your only choice will be take down the game or pay up whatever Unity asks..

> Again, for mobile games, that's 5% after 1m in revenue, which also includes Apple and Google's 30% cut. So again, no, it's really not a good deal _at all_.

5% of 70%? Or 30% + 5%?

Regardless, price your game in a way that makes you money.

> IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there.

How? That’s significantly more expensive that Unity if you make more than $2 per user or so.

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