
Epic Games releases $12M worth of Paragon assets for free - program
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-releases-12-million-worth-of-paragon-assets-for-free
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ocdtrekkie
The Paragon closure has come with a surprising number of upsides compared to
the usual collapse of a game. I really wish more companies opened up their
assets (or even the game code) upon the closure of a game they've written off.

The other highlight note is that when Epic decided to shutdown Paragon, they
opened up the refund offer for _all_ purchases, not just really recent ones.
They've taken essentially a complete loss on this entire project, that I
believe had upwards of 100 developers working on it at one point.

But given Fortnite's success, plus the general solid padding of cash Epic
always gets from having one of the most popular game engines that everyone
else uses, means they can afford it.

~~~
mbesto
> They've taken essentially a complete loss on this entire project

It's a genius financial and strategical move, predicated by having a lucky
monster success elsewhere in the company that required a quick influx of
resources (Fortnite). They can effectively write off a failed game over the
next 5 years, and reduce their tax burden as a result. They then act as a
"benevolent" actor to the gaming development community by giving away assets
that have no financial incentive to them. So they get a nice influx of
resources and get to advertise to a new pool in the same breadth. That's a
win-win.

EDIT: I should also note - I was a benefactor of shifting my payment from
Paragon to Fortnite. Given that it had no variable cost to give me $20 worth
of skins in Fortnite, that's a pretty solid user acquisition strategy.

~~~
sbarre
I don't see why benevolent needs to be in quotes in your comment.

Regardless of whatever financial or tax upside they get from doing this, the
upside the game development community gets is the same.

They are doing something they really didn't need to do, and as GP pointed out,
most companies don't do.

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wwalser
"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.

~~~
abiox
> 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.

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wwalser
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.

~~~
abiox
"benevolent" wasn't being used to describe the organization, it was being used
to describe a particular action.

~~~
awesomepeter
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.

~~~
abiox
and my point was that this seemed like a false dichotomy.

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sergiotapia
Epic is absolutely SWIMMING in money thanks to what was essentially a weekend
project by two of their engineers.

Fornite BR is exploding in popularity, with Ninja recently streaming with
Drake, Kim Dotcom and another popular rapper. They broken the all-time record
with 620k+ viewers at 2am!

I'm sure their success facilitated the decision to release this for free and
also give out refunds for Paragon. Win/win for them!

~~~
oh_sigh
Wasn't Fortnite just a quick clone of PUBG once they saw it taking off?

~~~
kmfrk
Sort of, but Epic Games seem to actually know how to program. PUBG, not unlike
it's former competitor H1Z1, has languished with a terrible code base whose
technical debt seems to have kept PUBG from ever really fixing things. The
netcode is bad, the game runs AWFUL on all setups (Twitch streamers with state
of the art computers were forced to play on low settings while streaming on
the same computer), and there seem to be some particular performance issues
with AMD CPUs.

Cheating is also a major issue.

So it was a clone, but basically a better one than the original.

Fortnite is the first survivor game that _just works_.

I felt bad for PUBG first, but PUBG is still such a huge mess, I do have to
give it to Epic for building an extremely solid game that runs well and isn't
rife with cheaters.

Shame about the business model, though.

~~~
kevindqc
Helps when you have inside knowledge of how the every part of the engine works
though.

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lostgame
>> "As with all of Epic’s internally developed assets, the Paragon assets are
only licensed for use in Unreal Engine 4."

'You've raised my hopes and dashed them quite expertly, sir - bravo!'

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jcoffland
> Epic Games releases $12M worth of Paragon assets for free

> The assets, built at a cost of over $12 million...

It's a common mistake to assume that something is worth what it cost to create
it.

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cupofjoakim
Value is relative, right? It depends on who looks at it. To Epic, they're
definitely worth $12M whilst to you and me it's probably not more than a
couple hundred bucks (unless you're a game dev in need of assets, that is),

~~~
jcoffland
> To Epic, they're definitely worth $12M

No, that's the fallacy. The assets are only worth $12 million to Epic if Epic
has a viable way to reap $12 million in benefit from them. The fact that it
cost Epic $12 million to create the assets has nothing to do with it. That's
just sunk cost.

~~~
tonyhb
There's now a business loss of $12M on their books, so they're getting
benefits on their next tax filing. That's where the real monetary value comes
from.

~~~
chii
> loss of $12M on their books

this is really hard to quantify independently, and they can use this figure to
inflate their losses to claim more taxation benefit than otherwise deserved.

Why can't i say that I "lost" 12million developing my indie game, and
therefore, claim some taxes off my casual contract work?

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hardwaresofton
One question before I cement Epic Games as a game company (or just tech
company in general) that does things differently in an an interesting way: How
easy is it to import/export models/ UnrealEngine assets to other platforms? If
I want to use an asset from UnrealEngine in like godot, how easy would it be?

This is pretty massive if it's really a no-strings-attached release of assets
to the community but the skeptic in me says there's no way it's _just_ that

~~~
atkbrah
Looks like the assets are licensed for only to be used in UE4 based products
[https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/paragon-
dekker](https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/paragon-dekker)

~~~
hardwaresofton
Aaaaand there it is. The've basically converted their writeoff to a
lossleading/marketing spend. Nothing wrong with shrewd business moves, and I
guess they're not trying to mislead people intentionally.

Well nice of them to release the assets at least, I'm sure devs who are
already committed to UE4 are pretty stoked.

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openbasic
What's the EULA on those assets? Are they UE4-only?

~~~
jsheard
[https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-
engine/announcements-...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-
engine/announcements-and-releases/1445832-12-million-worth-of-paragon-assets-
released)

Q: How much do I have pay for the Paragon assets?

A: Nothing! They’re completely free. You can use them in both commercial and
non-commercial Unreal Engine 4 projects.

Q: Are there any restrictions on the use of the Paragon assets?

A: As with all of Epic’s internally developed assets, the Paragon assets are
only licensed for use in Unreal Engine 4.

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benbristow
Nice. I bet this is going to encourage more asset flips though.

~~~
maaaats
What do you mean by asset flip? (And how would this encourage this)

~~~
dgritsko
I've generally heard the term used to refer to low-effort games that are
basically just third-party assets packaged up and sold as a full experience,
while having little to no "playable content". The availability of these assets
could encourage this since they are freely available.

~~~
wlesieutre
It's especially common to throw these together as "early access" games,
pretending that they're still in development and will get deeper content at a
later date.

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bitwize
This reminds me of the Golgotha drop from 2000: unfinished code and assets
from a scrapped game, released as open source/PD. I don't know what, if
anything, ever became of those...

~~~
abiox
wow, thanks for reminding me of that. i remember this happening...brings back
some memories. i was trying to learn to program my own games, and this event
(despite the unfortunate circumstances) seemed like some gift from the gods in
terms of being able to see the guts of a real game.

looks like some stuff is on github:

[https://github.com/videogamepreservation/golgotha](https://github.com/videogamepreservation/golgotha)

[https://github.com/saniv/golgotha](https://github.com/saniv/golgotha)

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ixtli
Can someone with more knowledge comment on how strictly tied to the unreal
ecosystem these assets are?

~~~
extrememacaroni
As per their license, you cannot use them outside of UE4. This means that
while you may be able to pull out the assets from your UE project and import
them in Unity, it's not legal to do so.

~~~
AgentME
Maybe you could use them in another engine if you show the Unreal engine logo
on startup and pay for the licensing of the Unreal engine. (Though I assume
other proprietary engines like Unity have rules against portraying their
engine as another with the other's logo shown first.)

~~~
extrememacaroni
If you have money to get Epic to make an exception for you, you likely don't
need freebies like these assets ;)

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tekism
I know nothing about game development or the likes. But I just browsed the
site. Wouldn't it make sense to maybe create a torrent or huge iso file of
this info instead of downloading each asset manually?

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jlebrech
Brilliant, you can make a proof of concept VR game for example and make it
look good.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Making 3d models look good on the screen and making them look good in VR
usually optimize for different things.

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arca_vorago
I've had and have my disagreements and issues with Epic lately, but kudos
where kudos are due. Nice job Epic, especially on the listening part. (now can
we get more gnu/linux love please?)

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reiichiroh
Won't the people of the internet just use this for Source Factory type porn?

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omot
This is how you redeem yourself, when you screw over a gaming community.

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otalp
.

~~~
scott_karana
Wrong discussion?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917)

~~~
otalp
oops

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katastic
"Free" = For use in Unreal Engine only.

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Erlangolem
Deleted

~~~
eutropia
The game had been out for a few years, but as a MOBA-style game (like DotA, or
League of Legends; thus competing with two of the largest video games in the
market period) it didn't attract a critical mass of players to keep the
ongoing dev effort worthwhile.

~~~
wlesieutre
Being tilted more toward the 3D shooter style, also competing against
Overwatch. Different gameplay objectives, but "class based team shooter" could
describe either of them.

~~~
trisimix
to be fair moba is pretty universal/vague too.

~~~
wlesieutre
Yeah, I honestly hate that name. Just by the meaning of words, Unreal
Tournament is an "online multiplayer battle arena" but somehow it came to mean
specifically "top-down Warcraft 3 custom map with fighting in 3 lanes" now.

But the lane fighting genre has been all downhill since Monday Night Combat
anyway, so I'm happy to ignore it :P

~~~
delecti
A number of genre names are only meaningful because people already know what
they refer to. Probably the best example is RPG, which ostensibly applies to
effectively every game where the player controls a character with a persona.

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Dude2023
I wonder which engine it works best with...

~~~
teddyfrozevelt
I wonder which engine is the only one you're allowed to use it in.

