Lifetime royalty fee on any related worldwide gross revenue is a happy problem?
If unreal cost money up front, would this have been built? No.
Unreal is saying: hey, we contributed to 1/20th of your success, because you could not have done this without us.
Thus, in the event that you're extremely successful, yes, you'll owe unreal a million dollars. But that's only because you made 20mm and keep 19mm for yourself.
That's an incredible bargain.
I'm not saying it's a terrible model and it's great that games are made with it but let's be honest it's not all rainbows.
"it's not all rainbows" - I would also not let perfect be the enemy of the good here.
You do, becaude I explained... It's subscription based. It's fundamentally the same because in both cases you don't own it. Epic's is just with the added element of freebie at first
weird how HN is up with pitchforks against that but OK with Epic's.
Unreal is like venture capital or a book advance (or the equivalent in music record deal)
Can you self publish? Sure, of course, have fun. But if you want the support and infrastructure of a company that understands the business of books, you take a deal and it is just like this: if a bunch of authors get book advances, that is generous to the ones who are unsuccessful, and they can only do that _because they capture the upside of those that are successful_.
Without that, you don't get advances for anyone.
So the point I'm making here: unreal provides variance reduction for all game publishers and yes that disproportionately benefits the ones who make under a million. But they're the ones who need the help!
And in exchange, if you're one of the lucky few, you pay a shockingly reasonable 5% in perpetuity.
My contention is that people can build more ambitious games that are more likely to make their creators rich if they use Unreal, and if the creators also think that they should use Unreal and if they don't they shouldn't.
I just fundamentally disagree with this line of thinking:
> even a subscription is better than royalties
Royalties are a great business model that allows more creators to create. You can dislike it, but I genuinely don't know that this game would exist with a different business model, and I want it to be easy to make art (or other things!)
And while there were a bunch of interesting side effects of piracy (people who pirate more music were bigger fans of music and spent more later - correlation/causation questions obvs), I would strongly prefer that the easy thing to do (ie cheapest/lowest friction to get started) be legal
I think the guy did it on enthusiasm and if he used say Godot he could probably have a pretty good result too, if less impressive visually. But you have good points, sure.
Sounds like a happy problem to me;)
By the way you don't only have to file a report for Epic whenever you release a game using UE, you also have to report them your yearly sales and calculate what income is "directly attributable to UE" for that game. For an ordinary small person, for whom you imply lifetime 5% off gross worldwide revenue is a "happy problem", this is way more involved (and prone to legal liability) compared to app stores. You will probably have to hire people well before the million mark to make sure numbers are OK and you don't accidentally owe Epic $$$$$.
I know which model I would choose. Probably the one where I raise prices by 30% and don't have to deal with anything else.
You are simply making up nonsense. It is not a lot of work as most likely sales are being driven through a handful of platforms. Reporting is simple and no different than doing your taxes. It is very much a happy problem. Similar to having to pay more taxes. There is more burden but you are making more money.
Your argument is insane because Indonesia average income in USD on the high side is around $300. If you make $1mm USD, having to do some extra paperwork and pay $50k per $1mm of revenue is an awesome problem to have.
It's a free choice to use the engine, you can use another engine or make your own if 5% is too much for you.
You know it's not 1 mil per year, it's 1 mil over your lifetime
Anyway, while 1 million isn't really enough to retire instantly, for sure it lets you retire 10-20 years earlier if you're just a little bit smart with money.
I would be okay with getting 75% of everything earned over $1M.
They could sell the engine and sell new versions separately as one time purchase.
> I would be okay with getting 75% of everything
I'd be okay getting 70% from the start. That's not what it's about.
steam did provide the basic dev/hosting/sale/marketing platform.
Heck steam takes 30% which is much more egregious but factoring in costs of running steam, payment processing and the free marketing its almost always worth it.
Share a counter argument to how it should be please.
Edit: NM you are a new account. Shadow banned on my end. Enjoy!