Unreal Engine Pricing Changes | Hacker News Reader

Unreal Engine Pricing Changes

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45 pointsmdtrooper52 comments

If I were the Epic CEO, I hold these bad news for several months, because the people has in their brain the Unity fee.

Which is why the change is only for non-game apps... For now, at least

Games already have a 5% royalty. Epic makes $0 if an automotive company uses UE for doing concept visualization.

I don't think a severe price hike would make that much sense for games.

The current setup of not paying anything until your product makes $1M (gross revenue) and then 5% is obviously way too generous and will get corrected. I could see 100k and 7%. But changing the licence model entirely to an ongoing, per seat model would create a barrier to entry. The indie/hobbyist segment is very large, and a lot of these people end up working on UE for someone else if their own project fails. Lots of UE devs on the market is what Epic wants. If you charge the indies/hobbyists, you will not get more money, these are tiny companies or individuals operating on close to zero budget.

When does a 'visual tour' (or whatever a virtual house showing is called) become a game? Collect all the coins? Use a crowbar to break up the crates in the garage?

I agree with you that there is a lot of room for ambiguity here. I'd imagine their target are e.g. architectural studios and advertisers, but how much interactivity is too much or whether this is separated by the platform a UE project is distributed by are questions that need to be clearly answered.

The fact that, after the recent communication issues/attempt to pull the rug over the entire industry (depending on whom you ask) by Unity, Epic didn't prepare a detailed and easy to understand page explaining this topic in detail, rather announcing this in a speech, is somewhat disappointing and shows an apparent unwillingness to learn from their competitors missteps.

>Epic didn't prepare a detailed and easy to understand page explaining this topic in detail

The pricing change hasn't been announced yet. This was an announcement of an announcement.

Is it sold on Steam? On Itch/EGS? Any of the consoles? It's very easy to figure this out.

They can publish it as WIP/private/in-dev/not-entirely-pubic for 1 month on Itch/EGS/Steam, and then take it down after their client has seen it. Point being that it's not "very easy" to figure this out, as the individuals that want to skirt this rule will find a way that ticks the boxes but doesn't satisfy the intent.

Steam sells software and soundtracks, and previously sold movies. Epic sells developer asset packs. itch.io is even less discerning. I don't think that metrics holds well for determining what is a game.

Seeing YNAB on steam taught me how to budget.

Epic will probably define it in terms of "purpose"

If the purpose of the 'visual tour' is to showcase or advertise another product, then it will fall under the new rules, no matter how many gameplay elements you add.

If the purpose is to be a standalone product, then it counts as a game.

It seems like this couldn't hold. A lot of companies are developing visualizations or interactive systems to look cool, look high tech as shit, but where the 3d is somewhat bolt on, not the core product.

If these companies just give away their 3d stuff, how was Epic ever going to make money on them? Epic is probably happy doing a couple feature pieces like virtual production in the Mandalorian, but eventually they're going to want to not just give Unreal away to any enterprise who wants to use the tech.

It's boggled my mind wondering what Epic would eventually turn to to convert this Unreal for non-core-product from a give-away into a market. I guess per-seat licensing shouldn't be a surprise; few others have figured out straightforward predictable pricing models to supply software with.

Companies that pays a salary for someone to work on 3d visualizations can also afford to pay epic for a subscription, it doesn't change anything fundamental its just a small extra fee for the company/contractor.

The reason this doesn't work for games is that many games are made by unsalaried hobbyists just playing around, there revenue share is much more reasonable than a per seat cost for both parties. Epic wants to get a part if the game goes big, hobbyists don't want to pay if they make no money.

The actual reason it doesn't work for most games is that most games are free to play... and any non-trivial per-install cost makes the value proposition fall apart. If you're collecting $20 you'll take a hit, but it won't blow your business up immediately.

Isn't this a per-dev fee? Which is completely different from per-install.

Yes, absolutely. I had the Unity fiasco in mind. Epic has seen Unity blow itself up on the minefield and is likely reconsidering the path forward.

So you mean Unity decision will marginally disincentivize low-quality, free to play games with in game micro-transactions, and incentivise high quality, pay upfront games?

Are we supposed to be mad about this?

This the same company that's shooting cannons of money at random targets to attract people to their game store. Letting free apps use the engine for free was something that could have held.

Fun fact: QQ, one of the most popular chat app in China, started using unreal some time ago.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3164819/tencent-q...

Because Tencent owns both Epic and QQ

I am not sure why the backlash. I am in favour of godot, but i dont see an issue with unreal wanting to monetise that segment. It’s far from what unity did, and tim is certainly not a mediocre ceo. I think unreal should also consider a “lighter” engine version, thats less demanding in resources, to carve out some of unity’s market share in the mobile segment.

Unity did open the pandora box, to some extend of course.

In the realm of c++ abominations, you also have the star citizen 3D engine.

But if you don't need 3D, you better off using a 2D GFX toolkit and just be careful with the OS interfaces usages. Look at nuklear 2D GFX, everything in one C/c++ header file, and I bet it does a good enough job for already tons of apps.

I wasn't impressed when I installed the UE developer materials and it put adware on my computer that displayed a banner on my desktop, without my permission.

And Epic went to lengths to hide this garbage on my system (a Mac) to make it a PITA to find and remove.

That is some low-rent, offensive BS. Did a quick search just now and found reports of antiviruses flagging it as malware. And oh yeah, I think it was the "Epic Games Launcher" that is in fact shitware that pollutes your system.

And the more you look into this, the more hate you find among UE users for Epic and its allegedly shady, offensive software. Very disappointing. I was truly astounded that a company at this level resorts to malware to... do what, exactly? It's mystifying that they would be stupid enough to pollute developers' systems.

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It's amusing to watch the vote count go up and down, as aggrieved devs battle shills and apologists over this issue. We were +2 a minute ago, now at zero. Who tries to bury such basic and easily verifiable assertions? Just one rant I found about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckepic/comments/bztwxx/epic_launc...

Lol it's sad and funny at the same time. Game engines need a good FOSS 3d solution.

O3DE[0] looks interesting - owned by the Linux Foundation, originally based on Amazon's Lumberyard, and it has some big players involved: Amazon, Epic Games(!), Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, Huawei, Red Hat, and more. Seems to be in very early stages though.

[0] https://o3de.org

Oh, I'm so glad I didn't use Unreal Engine for my metaverse client.

Jokes on you, you built something for the metaverse.

Which metaverse are you mocking? The web3/blockchain one? The specific Meta one? Or the broader definition which (depending on your precise definition) is doing rather well.

My point is that there's no agreed term. Some people include Fortnite or Roblox. Some people say it has to involve a VR headset (VR Chat still has pretty healthy active user numbers).

So - whether I want to join in with your mirth rather depends which definition of "metaverse" you're mocking.

You're asking the wrong person.

Who calls Fortnite and Roblox 'Metaverse'?

Tim Sweeney has said things along these lines about Fortnite as have other commentators. Roblox is often compared to RecRoom and Meta Horizons in terms or market share and functionality

What is it you object to about this particular definition? The fact they don't run in a headset? (Roblox now does). What is your definition?

I think that qualifies as a game, unless you’re targeting a specific business vertical?

I think it's going to be fun watching Epic define "game" unambiguously.

It is a good time for send the showreel of serious apps in Godot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kKp0oguzr8

I know a free software monitoring tool made with Godot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVAU2JjvHug

https://github.com/someengineering/resoto

I don't know, if I was at an architecture firm or a movie studio and saw this I wouldn't consider switching to Godot. They're fine, there's nothing wrong with them particularly, but they're very indie, very programmer-y, very 2D and not very graphically intensive. I've had a look at some of the Godot graphical showcases and the best stuff there is on par with the late 360 era, probably not on the level of the original release of UE4.

If you're using Unreal Engine it's probably because you want the very best graphics and peformance and you want it to be usable for artists or architects without requiring them to learn to code. I just don't think Godot can compete in those areas until we start to see scenes which are on the same level of graphical fidelity as UE.

The video above is the "Apps & Tools" showcase. Here's the desktop/console games showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAS_pUTFA7o

Yeah, I don't see how that competes with Unreal in this space on any level.

And is here a showreel of using Unreal,

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/events/state-of-unreal

Could be a huge win for Godot.

Usually given as example in these last weeks, always forgetting about lack of feature parity.

Nobody's forgetting about it. Godot is trying to be a competitor, but realistically they don't have nearly the funding or total manpower that Unity or Unreal have, at least at the moment, but at the same time, they're still making good progress on being viable for some things (they're already very viable for most 2D games, and 3D games with simple graphics).

Doesn't look like it, given the amount of times it keeps being pushed as "alternative".

Unreal for VFX is hard to scale, but have some interesting iterative advantages. If Godot is the alternative, VFX will likely fall back to path tracing.

That reads suspiciously similar to that dreaded meme of "this is good for Bitcoin"

I can see a little resemblance in bringing up something that didn't need to come up, but a competitor raising prices is pretty relevant.

And that meme didn't really take off until it was about all kind of bad events, arguing that actually they were good things, and that's clearly not what's happening here.

You actually made me check, both Bitcoin and Ethereum are holding up remarkably well after the interest rate increases.

Can anyone that follows cryptocurrencies confirm something? I have a suspicion than 99% of smaller cryptocurrencies have been wiped out, though.

Except that's always said when something bad for Bitcoin happens. The analogue here would be to say "this is actallg good for Unreal", as it's definitely good for Godot that a competitor started charging.

Godot and Unreal aren't really competing in a lot of areas. No one's going to make movies using Godot any time soon, for example. Unreal's rendering is just so far ahead of the pack.

this comment has to be satire?

Blender is 1000 times closer to intended usecases

Can you create apps like these on Blender ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37776009

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing but you've not engaged with the "intended usecases" part of the comment you're replying to. You both disagree on what "intended usecases" really are in this context so engage with that rather than replying with a bunch of videos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com