
Welcome to Unreal Engine 4 - seivan
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/welcome-to-unreal-engine-4
======
rkalla
Everyone seems pretty focused on the pricing - I thought the inclusion of an
asset-marketplace directly into the editing environment was brilliant.

You could imagine Adobe following suit very shortly here withs something
similar and invalidate all those graphic/template/icon/texture/animation
sites. You just open the "marketplace" inside of Photoshop and browse around
for the assets you might want.

Same would go for video-editing. No more buying Action Essentials, just load
up Final Cut and look for the perfect blood animation.

You could imagine at some point your IDE having a marketplace inside of it to
allow you to purchase proprietary platforms directly and integrate them into
your project without much hassle.

It's a really cool proposition, ripe for monopolization unfortunately, but
surely convenient if executed on well.

~~~
devindotcom
I've been saying there will be a huge middle man market for assets for years.
A whole studio specializing in different models for boxes - every era, every
state of decay, every material. A studio dedicated to the most realistic rain
effects possible - at the lowest price and graphics overhead. You don't have
to worry about the "Wilhelm Scream" of boxes or rain effects though because
there will be a lot of choice, a lot of options, and probably a tracking
system for which assets are being used by which projects. Oh, Crysis 4 bought
up all the high-def palm fronds? Sounds like there's a market for a tropics-
based object studio!

I got carried away. But yeah, an asset marketplace will be essential in the
future if only to keep art team sizes manageable.

~~~
cmyr
This sounds nice from the point-of-view of somebody looking to put something
together in a hurry, but this sounds awful from the point-of-view of the guy
getting hired to model boxes all day.

Maybe that's not a huge difference from what a lot of people are doing at AAA
studios anyway, but my god.

~~~
wlesieutre
Some people get really excited about boxes. I could see making a collection of
boxes in different styles being a neat project, though there's certainly some
busywork involved.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUHJnl8qPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUHJnl8qPM)

------
ChuckMcM
_" 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users."_

As others have pointed out, that is a huge amount, that is probably 25 - 30%
of your "profit". The accounting is pretty easy though. Units * SRP * 0.05 ==
royalty.

That said, it is a lot simpler than investing $25 - $30K up front while
building the game, only to have it go poof because the market or your designer
flaked out. Figure 3 year development at $20/month that is less than $1,000 at
risk. This gets people using their engine early and often perhaps hoping they
can negotiate a different royalty later on. It would also be interesting to
see if it had a cap, like $1M or something.

Kudos to the Epic folks for coming up with a pretty creative strategy in
todays market.

~~~
gabriel34
Not so fast. Retailers' gross is SRP*Units. Dev's gross is what the next link
in the supply chain pays him. That is still true in today's distribution model
since Apple/Play/Steam store take some cut of the retail price and pays you
the rest. One could even argue that you developing and you selling are two
distinct companies and that gross is what dev you makes (actually they are
quite distinct business functions, so I'm not bending anything here).

~~~
gabriel34
Come to think of it, you could wrap it around a thin wrapper program and
provide that as a product for a nominal fee over which you'd have to pay 5%,
then develop your game over the wrapper. What is to stop anyone from doing
this? Maybe the license says your product must be licensed the same way, so if
the end user mods your game and sells it they too have to pay 5%.

~~~
cdash
License says if you sell your game for 10 dollars on the app store and Apple
takes 30% cut of that Epic is taking 5% of 10 dollars and not 5% of 7 dollars.

~~~
gabriel34
Seems you are right:

 _" When releasing a product using UE4, you're signing up to pay Epic 5% of
gross product revenue from users, regardless of what company collects the
revenue. That means: If your game makes $10 on the App Store, Apple may pay
you $7, but you'd pay Epic $0.50 (5% of $10)."_

Still, you'd have to legally define end customer because you could have, as I
pointed out, much more complex cases. I didn't search much, but couldn't find
the actual fine print license to see how they did it, but they probably did it
well and ironclad and don't need legal advice from a guy with no formal legal
education. I stand humbled.

~~~
sseveran
All these types of deals (even not in the game industry) use gross revenue
since anything else can be manipulated.

------
BSousa
I'll say it, THANK YOU!

I've used UE at previous jobs, and while I'm not gonna say it is the best ever
engine, allowing this piece of software in the hands of indies for 19 bucks a
month is a bargain. I will probably not use it as I left the games industry,
but compared to other commercial offerings out there, the 19 bucks a month
plus the 5% is a bargain if any team is doing high end graphics games. You can
bitch about Linux or try to do all the math you want to say Epic are being
money grabbers, but seriously, unless you had access to full source code
before and see what the engine can offer you, please take a moment to step
back and appreciate what they are doing here.

ps: not affiliated with Epic at all. Just from many years in the games
industry, Unreal has been the best engine I worked with and this is a
FANTASTIC offer

~~~
darksim905
How does one even get into game design? I have an idea in my head that I want
to get out but it gets more & more complex as I think about it.

~~~
TulliusCicero
By making games. There are lots of engines and frameworks these days to cater
to people who want to create a game, but don't want to or can't do it from the
ground up. Game Maker Studio and of course Unity come to mind.

------
arethuza
It says "paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users" not "5% of
profit".

I'd be rather surprised if they asked for 5% of profits due to Hollywood
Accounting:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting)

~~~
demoncore
Or just regular accounting. Profit is taxed, so every company will always try
at the end of financial year to sink profit into something that'll deliver
future revenue to defer tax and fuel growth. Unless you have shareholders who
expect/demand a dividend like MSFT has, this is usually the best approach.
Several very large businesses even thumb their noses at their shareholders
demands and reinvest profit for revenue growth, like AMZN, and get very little
credit from shareholders for how tax efficient their decision is.

~~~
krallja
Amazon trades at a P/E ratio >600\. Seems like shareholders are giving them
plenty of credit.

------
greggman
I haven't used Unreal but I have shipped AAA games. To those who have used
Unreal 4 is this really something an indie would want to use?

My impression is Unreal is designed to make giant games, not small ones. True?

My impression is Unreal is not nearly as iterative as Unity which lets you
change code as it's running. True?

Also Unity targets more platforms?

Of course it's great the Unreal is accessible. Appearently Crytek now has an
even better deal. But, I just wonder is Unreal really suited to indie
development and quick prototyping or is it more designed for large teams who
don't care as much about iteration time and expect to spend way more time
getting started

Since I haven't used Unreal I have no idea. Please enlighten me

~~~
colemorrison
I would love to see answers to this comment from people that have used it.

------
Tloewald
The 5% is a bit misleading too because it's 5% of "sticker price" (what they
call "gross revenue" which means purchase price not including sales tax). So
for a $10 iTunes game they get $0.50 (5% of what Apple gets) and not $0.35 (5%
of what you get).

This is particularly bad for retail games where you're getting 30% or less of
retail price (and that's hardly pure profit).

Unity, in comparison, costs more per month (or $750 per upgrade cycle) but no
revenue share at all.

~~~
Xeroday
I believe they are willing to make exceptions for certain titles:
[https://www.unrealengine.com/custom-
licensing](https://www.unrealengine.com/custom-licensing)

~~~
Tloewald
Indeed, if you're writing a AAA title you'll probably go for a one-off six
figure licensing fee instead of 5% of back end, but that's hardly going to be
more attractive than these terms. I imagine Rovio or the Candy Crush guys
might similarly prefer a one-off license deal (were they to use Unreal).

------
drx
This is huge. Unreal Engine 3 was used in a lot of AAA games, including the
Arkham games, Borderlands etc. And this is the new version. Basically, the
state of the art 3d game engine for 5% gross royalties.

Also, this gives you access to the engine source code, which for Unreal Engine
3 meant paying a fee on the upper scale of six figures (some engines are even
more expensive, CryEngine costs over a million bucks).

5% (even considering it's gross) is really really competitive, considering
what you're getting in return.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Complete (or at least huge) list of Unreal Engine games:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_3)

If it's an FPS or "action" game released in the past 5-ish years, chances are
good it uses UE3.

------
Zarathust
"You can cancel your subscription at any time and keep using the engine,
though without monthly updates."

If you are really tight on cash then I guess that you can check the change log
and only pay the 20$ for the month for crucial updates. Paying for product
updates is usually a big red flag for me but since it got down from several
tens of thousands of dollars up front then this is not such a bad deal.

~~~
wtracy
The idea of cancelling until right before launch day came to mind. :-)

------
Mikeb85
This could be huge for indies who want to use something other than Unity.

$19 per month is a very low barrier to entry. And 5% isn't much compared to
every other AAA engine.

And access to source code for this price? Damn.

I'm still going to stick to my open source tools (for now), but this just put
Unreal Engine on my radar...

~~~
winslow
Out of curiosity what open source tools are you currently using?

~~~
ivanca
His comment is dead (?), he answered with a link to maratis3d.org

~~~
winslow
Thanks for catching that.

------
pdeva1
the $19 paywall complicates all things. complicates distrbution. their github
repo cannot be public. etc. If you going for indies, why not just go all in
and make it free to start. The money they make is on the 5% not $19

~~~
mattzito
If I had to guess, it's designed as a threshold barrier so they don't have to
deal with trying to track down thousands of "projects" where the developer is
someone who had big plans to build a game but got bored a week in.

At least now, presumably the $19 at least covers the operating costs of
tracking all the people you might need to be collecting license revenue from.

~~~
pdeva1
well thats the whole point of opening it to the community. that 'failed
project' developer will himself gain a lot of experience that he can freely
share. I dont think they care about hunting down extremely tiny devs and even
$19 doesnt cover that cost.

~~~
potatolicious
The key thing to understand about game development is that _everyone_ wants to
be a game developer, in the same way everyone wants to be a rock star, or a
famous actor.

It's a prestige profession, which means most self-professed practitioners of
it don't actually practice at all.

Put plainly, that "failed project" developer is in all likelihood not a
developer at all. That "failed project" developer likely has never written a
line of code in his/her life. That "failed project" developer is much more
likely to be some schmuck with starry-eyed naivete about game dev and thinks
the UDK is some magical unicorn that will carry them to fame and fortune.

That won't stop said "developer" from flooding the forums with inane questions
that anyone who has written code before would have figured out already. They
are noise in the system, and as far as game dev goes they outnumber the people
who actually know what they're doing.

There are tire kickers (people who are technically proficient but don't really
want to license your software), and then there are _tire kickers_ (people with
little/no technical ability who have played many games and imagine themselves
capable of making them, and downloaded your SDK on the assumption that they
can point and click their way to success). The latter group generates a
_stupid_ amount of customer support load.

~~~
wernercd
Make UnrealDev.StackExchange or something similar... push $20/month people
there. Have a separate tier for "paying" customers.

Problem solved all around.

------
pothibo
The difference between AAA and indie games is blurring. If I was EA & Ubisoft,
I'd be concerned.

Consumer are/will benefit from this movement.

~~~
teamonkey
The difference between AAA and indie is several hundred full-time content
creators and millions of dollars worth of marketing.

One area Epic win here is that by making their AAA-grade engine affordable to
individuals they'll end up with a lot of budding game developers self-trained
in Unreal. This creates a sort of lock-in: AAA studios are more likely to
chose Unreal because it's easier to hire people with Unreal experience.

~~~
Jare
Which is exactly what Unity has been busy doing for the past 3 years. Epic and
Crytek knew that as soon as someone released a major AAA game based on Unity,
it was game over for them, and the beginning of a console generation (where
developers are still leaving a lot of power unused) was the perfect time for
this to happen. They needed to react, and they have.

------
thepumpkin1979
If you want to see an awesome visual IDE/Debugging action, check the video
"Creating a Level - 10 - Blueprint Doorway Pt2" in youtube.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Ua6ncLcVY&index=11&list=PLZ...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Ua6ncLcVY&index=11&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gaCL2XjKluO7N2Pmmw9pvhE)

------
callesgg
Really missing linux support...

But i think the pricing is fair and i like it otherwise :)

~~~
fotcorn
From the FAQ
([https://www.unrealengine.com/faq](https://www.unrealengine.com/faq)):

What platforms can I access under the subscription plan?

If you access the source code, you'll see that there is early work on other
platforms, including Oculus VR, HTML5 and Linux. You are welcome to extend and
modify this code, and also build and ship games for these platforms.

~~~
thinkpad20
Kinda funny to have to pay someone to contribute to their code.

~~~
nacs
You're not really paying to contribute to their code. You're paying to get
access to the source in case you need any custom engine modifications.

------
math0ne
Looks cool, but I don't understand the 20$ a month fee, I don't think it will
make them any money and it will hurt adoption.

~~~
venomsnake
5% of Minecraft, LoL, Candy Crush is pretty good moneymaker. If you catch
early the next indie breakout hit ... you could look at millions down the
road. You also make sure that any indie is well acquainted in the engine - so
if the studios get aquihired ... you have your own free sale force on the
inside.

Although I would really like Unity or Carmack to make an engine that is potent
enough to threaten UE. The unreal homogenization is probably not that good in
the long term. Healthy competition is a must.

~~~
jere
I think some of the replies here are missing the point. 5% could be huge,
sure. You would think it would absolutely dwarf the $20.

So why _risk missing the next Minecraft_ for a measly $20?

~~~
a8000
If there are enough teenagers like me, that dreamed of making there own game
and researched game engines only to find that there weren't really any
available for (almost) free, that could potentially be a nice enough
additional revenue stream. I.e. amateur programmers, that want to play with an
engine and probably will never release a commercial game.

------
mrschwabe
Interesting model for software distribution ($xx per month access paywall to
source code, leveraging GitHub private repository). It's crossed my mind for
smaller-scope projects.

Not sure if this will 'break the spirit' of GitHub and open source, but the
next logical feature the GH team could do to accommodate this model more
effectively would be to implement a "subscription button" users can click on
to instantly get access. The fee is then tacked-on to the user's GH account
(some of whom will already have their credit card on file), which is then
distributed back to the repo owner less a small commission.

------
gfodor
don't see anyone else talking about this, but this seems to be the first time
ever you can get access to the source code of a state of the art game engine
essentially for free.

------
araes
Now I'm looking forward to when the ultimate code dives start coming out, like
they did after ID released their source code for Quake / Doom / ect... All the
interesting tricks / shortcuts that people found when they really started
picking into the code base. Heck, even style, and how they've organized and
managed such an enormous code-base would be neat to see a deconstruction on.

------
callesgg
What happens when one stops selling the game? Can one then say it is free?
Would one still be required to pay them 19 USD per month, one cant actually
take the software back, it is already out there using the engine and all.

~~~
ctdonath
FAQ: _When you cancel your subscription ... your login will remain active, and
you are free to continue using the versions of Unreal Engine 4 which you
obtained as a subscriber under the terms of the EULA._

$19/mo is for code updates. What they really want is 5% of your revenue, which
ends when you stop making money from it.

------
seivan
Still no source on
[https://github.com/EpicGames](https://github.com/EpicGames) as of now though.

~~~
dimillian
You need to pay the subscription, then they add you to their private
repository.

~~~
brokenparser
Do they accept pull requests?

~~~
jontas
From the main FAQ[1]:

How do I submit Unreal Engine 4 changes back to Epic?

GitHub is our channel through which the community can fork and modify Epic's
code alongside our own engineering team. Source code changes you check in at
GitHub will be viewed by the community, and if the vetting process goes well,
we'll incorporate your code into UE4. This means you'll help lots of people!

1: [https://www.unrealengine.com/faq](https://www.unrealengine.com/faq)

------
fotcorn
What happens when you fork a private repo into a public repo on github? Is
this even possible? Or how will Epic enforce the EULA?

~~~
lotyrin
You get a new private repo which you can't make public. It works pretty well.

~~~
snuxoll
And I can turn around, make a new public repo then push the code right back
up.

~~~
lotyrin
And your repo will get a takedown notice... So what?

~~~
snuxoll
Sure, but there's no technical measures in place that can stop me from
publishing the code.

------
jhuckestein
Essentially allowing all devs to use the source code and hosting it on github
is brilliant. I imagine bug fixes and other improvements will be shared much
more quickly and openly amongst developers. I'm not even sure if this happened
at all before. I assume the few big studios who have the source code simply
maintain their own fork.

------
pwthornton
A lot of mobile games and apps could make use of this. So, while the price
seems cheap for a Triple A studio, it's a price that individuals and small
mobile devs can test out. More mobile games and apps with an incredible engine
behind it is good for all of us.

------
rnernento
This can't be good for Unity...

~~~
shadowmint
People don't just suddenly drop their prices dramatically for no reason; this
move is _directly as a result_ of how well Unity is doing; and how big name
studios like Blizzard are taking it up.

...but hey, I would be 100% not surprised to see the guys from Unity pull a
similar 'cheaper but with profit share' for pro licenses.

------
malkia
And a prime example that Perforce is still better for game asset management
than git :)

~~~
cookiecaper
Of course it is. Binary support has always been an afterthought in git. I do
hope someone eventually fixes that, but I don't know of any informed person
that claims git is an ideal management utility for binaries. It merely kinda
works if your binaries are small enough.

------
TomGullen
We develop and sell a game making tool as well, we've thought about this sort
of option but decided not to go down this route as it appears impossible to
police. Anyone know how Unity intends to police 5% profits?

------
eliang
Damn! I've been teaching myself unity3D for the last days, time to stop!

------
zenbowman
Wow is this ever a change! I remember when I worked in the simulation industry
we had to hand out a cool $350k for a license of Unreal 2.5 (and this is when
Unreal 3 was already out).

------
Fuxy
That seems a bit ambitious either gt with 5% or 19$ but both?

~~~
RussianCow
As others have pointed out, $19/month is just the friction fee to keep it from
being completely free/public. The actual monthly cost is negligible; the real
cost is the 5% royalty.

------
techiemonkey
Yes! Another step forward in the field of graphics.. Soon we may see graphics
approaching eye level quality

~~~
unreal37
I read a blog post recently that outlined why we may never actually see photo-
realistic games even as the technology improves.

Basically, it's a MASSIVE amount of work/cost to create individual blades of
grass that independently react to a person walking on them, vs just pasting an
static grass texture on the ground. And unless the movement of the grass is
really important to the story, it will never be cost-effective to create all
the art work, physics, CPU processing time, and disk space to include it.

Interesting theory at least.

~~~
nawariata
Remember when 640kb was ought to be enough for anybody? Never say never in
tech world. Someone might and probably will come up with tech to realistically
render individual grass blades, just like they did with TreesFX, hair strand
simulation technology used in most recent Tomb Raider game.

~~~
crististm
I remember reading something about O(2^n)... That may apply to the cost of
making the illusion appear real: it doesn't scale.

It may be that instead of looking at rendered photo-realistic grass, one may
be better of going out touching the real thing.

As for the artificial realm, who cares if it isn't photo-realistic? It is
artificial anyway.

------
gabriel34
So, they are opensource non-free. It will be interesting to see this model
progress. If successful it could be a turning point for openness in software,
but would pull requests be accepted into main? Would they get a cut of the
cake? It would be interesting to see github handling this instead of patent
and secrecy.

------
amark
Why do they use so much bloom lighting? It's excessive.

------
nailer
Anyone know if the authoring work on OS X too?

~~~
dangoor
According to
[https://www.unrealengine.com/register](https://www.unrealengine.com/register),
"Mac OS X support hasn't undergone serious developer testing yet". So, it's
supported but may be buggy

