War of the 3D Engines

http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1426

by irrlichthn • 12 years ago

69 47 12 years ago

orng• 12 years ago

The way I see it with Unreal is that the 5% of your gross revenue is the real price and in the article it is put in parentheses as if it doesn't matter! If you are successful it could be a lot more than buying a license the old fashioned way would have been! I don't know if that classifies as "cheap".

Edit: added a missing word.

chris_wot• 12 years ago

If you find it hard to buy the software upfront, it does take away some of the initial risks, at a cost later. Some people may go for it - good for them I say.

obsurveyor2• 12 years ago

Agreeing to a 5% royalty is pretty crazy in my opinion. If you're even planning on being able to support just a modest salary for yourself with your game sales, Unity or CryEngine are better deals. The UE license is only worth it if you plan on making less than $15,000 a year.

RyanZAG• 12 years ago

Agreed. For an example, Mass Effect 3 is a relatively recent game on the Unreal engine that sold over 1.5 million copies + DLC, probably for revenue of something like $100mil. 5% of that $100mil per successful game should be enough to keep Epic in business.

socialist_coder2• 12 years ago

AFAIK Every AAA game pays a flat rate per game (in the 100k-500k range), not the rev share. The rev share agreement would only be for indie / non-pros.

Based on industry knowledge, the AAA flat rate game licencing costs don't seem to be going down.

One reason might be that once you have a few Unreal engine / Cryengine games under your belt, the cost to switch engines is HUGE. You're basically locked in unless you want to re-hire / re-train the majority of your programmers.

mynameismiek• 12 years ago

Epic is still offering other licensing structures as needed/requested for their larger clients. I'm sure if you had a game explode and start selling millions of copies they would work with you to come up with a different licensing scheme so you weren't paying them millions (plural) of dollars, but possibly some smaller set amount and a smaller royalty.

swalsh• 12 years ago

"What we see here might be a begin of the phenomenon known from various app stores: The race to the bottom, where the app developers try to undercut each other, and prices for the apps drop"

What you see here is what's called "A healthy market" its an attribute of capitalism, and its great for customers, and its great for their customers customer. Another "phenomenon" that comes out of a "healthy market" is innovation. People come up with better features, when price alone is not enough to stand out, people will search for something new.

We're either going to see A. Bankruptsy from a bunch of old engines or B. Some really great new features that make the product stand out in a unique way.

Ygg2• 12 years ago

I hope some of some of bankrupt engines go into FOSS domain, and sell support or are supported by community (e.g. Blender).

bhouston• 12 years ago

There was already a nuclear winter for game engines about 6 years ago when Unity3D rose to prominent in the medium/low end niche. This is just a fight between those that are still standing.

socialist_coder2• 12 years ago

I hate when people say things like this, "prices for the apps drop, so far that even 90% of the developers can't live anymore from their apps".

90% of developers are releasing shitty or niche games with no sense on how to market or monetize to the audience. It's the #1 problem of the indie game developer right now- they're building games that they themselves want to play, instead of the games that actually work for the market.

It's the difference between a professional and a hobbyist. If you want to make money, stop being a hobbyist and turn into a professional.

For professionals, none of these engines are cheap by any means. Unity is $4500 per developer once you add Pro, iOS, and Android. Unreal / Cryengine are potentially going to cost you a whole lot more than that given the 5% gross revenue share.

For hobbyists, yes, the price is low and probably not sustainable, but for professionals I think it's priced perfectly.

luizpv9• 12 years ago

I think it's perfectly reasonable to start a game development with "what would I like to play?" rather than "what would the market buy?".

jeremiep2• 12 years ago

Working in the game industry, I see "what would the market buy?" generating much more crappy content than "what would I like to play?"

Usually it's a mix of both that makes it happen, you start with what you want to play and adapt it so others want to play it too.

gabzuka• 12 years ago

Just a small correction, the CryEngine doesn't have the 5% gross revenue share. It's 9.90 a month and that's it.

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

Oddly I get the opposite impression, most of the crappy games on app stores I have a hard time believing that even the developers themselves would ever sit down and play for fun.

I get the feeling that they targeted some arbitrary demographic and worked through a checklist of features and finished when that was completed rather than iterating on an idea until it was good and working out from there.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

Most of innovative indie games are probably using a custom engine anyway. I think it's good when the whole team is creative including programmers.

m3mnoch• 12 years ago

three quick thoughts here.

1) you're bang-on-correct.

2) that why i only read industry analysis from folk who are making money for a living doing it. not a guy who hasn't shipped a game. not a guy who's only tinkered with small libraries.

3) more to your point, a hobbyist can't even USE unreal or cryengine. how many posts of "why doesn't this look better? i'm using unreal!" have you seen? "well, for one thing, you don't know a lightmap from a bumpmap and your game stutters because your objects have 50,000 tris and you're doing 200 draw calls on each one...."

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

It's the #1 problem of the indie game developer right now- they're building games that they themselves want to play, instead of the games that actually work for the market.

It's the difference between a professional and a hobbyist. If you want to make money, stop being a hobbyist and turn into a professional.

This kind of thinking is the reason why the contemporary video game ecosystem is so dull. When you orient everything around profit and "working for the market" (appeasing to the lowest common denominator), you make crappy products that sell, but fail to leave a lasting impression.

It's the reason why demos are no longer released, a few levels or even core game functionality is shipped as DLC, games no longer ship with mod tools and why you get tons of microtransaction-focused games with predatory mechanics. Among other things...

I agree with the 90% thing, it is Sturgeon's law. But to say that the root cause is indies not exploiting their players for $$$ is ridiculous. We need visionaries and hobbyists who develop games they want to play.

ryandrake• 12 years ago

The contemporary video game ecosystem is dull because customers demand dull.

It's the same reason why 90% of the cars coming out of the major manufacturers look like identical bars of soap and come in shades of black, white, silver, red, and blue. The market's taste is generally very dull, and people want cars with styling that doesn't vary far from the norm.

baldfat2• 12 years ago

I find that this is ridiculous and missed:

Unreal / Cryengine = 5% (Negative responses of high cost) But they actually provide the tools and are makers

Apple/Google = 30% for providing an app that lets you support their OS (What's an OS without Apps)

khc• 12 years ago

Why is this ridiculous? Without Apple/Google, how would you distribute and market your apps?

k00pa• 12 years ago

IF there weren't App Stores or anything, it would be possible to download applications from websites.

So basically you would distribute the same way as in PC. You buy the install files in physical/digital form and install it. Then enter cd-key or something.

And of course somebody would come and make some kind of store to make the purchasing easier just like on PC. (for example Steam)

And yeah. Its ridiculous when Apple/Google take shares of the profits, comparing to what UE4 for example takes.

wolfgke• 12 years ago

Exactly the same way you distributed applications on PC/Mac before the advent of appstores.

logicchains• 12 years ago

Steam, or something like it?

Shorel• 12 years ago

I wish we could know what's the percentage for Steam.

JTon• 12 years ago

Best guesses place it at around 30%

reubenmorais2• 12 years ago

30%: "Notch on why Minecraft still isn't on Steam": http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/25/notch-on-why-minecraft-sti...

happyscrappy• 12 years ago

They have hundreds of millions of credit cards on file and handle the billing and payments. If you want to run your own login and payment you are free to do so, this is exactly what we do now, although on smaller apps we gave up the 30%.

drewying• 12 years ago

I didn't think you could run your own login and payment on Apple. Or have they changed that?

Guvante• 12 years ago

Unreal helps your developers make the game.

Apple gives you a market place to provide marketing, handles the "do I trust them" problem, makes the pain to pay nearly non-existent (another CC form?), and handles the installation process for you. Ditto for most other platforms.

The platforms are more acting like Publishers than frameworks now, so directly comparing these prices is a bit hard.

fidotron• 12 years ago

Characterising any of the Unity, Unreal or Cryengine trio as a 3D engine isn't quite right, they are full on game systems with physics etc. and especially in the case of Unity complete software ecosystems in their own right.

The further you get from utilising the core functionality of each engine the harder of a time you're going to have, and this constrains the genres you can work in. This is the main reason that a lot of 2D titles developed in Unity purely for iOS <-> Android portability have performance problems (things like the alpha cutout stuff goes a long way to helping here), while their showpiece games, such as those by Madfinger, that simply use the built in physics run perfectly. Sadly I can't be specific, but I have run into some amazingly simple games that ran like absolute dogs thanks to their inappropriate choice of middleware.

Fasebook• 12 years ago

3D engine is a subset of Game engine, so your comment is essentially meaningless. You want to know what's "far from the core functionality"? HTML5 game engines.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/mozilla-and-epic-games-brin...

butabah• 12 years ago

I love this. We need more of these powerful tools for cheaper prices.

UDK was a great platform, but the scripting language was hell. It was like being given a helicopter and flying it with your feet. This was really the reason why we moved to Unity, because it was so much easier to code inside their sandbox.

Game tech companies need to realize that developers love fully featured software, and we are willing to pay for it, we just don't want to pay out the ass for it per dev. It looks like Epic sees this and is jumping on it, CryTek following suite, I wonder how Unity will step up to the plate?

xedarius• 12 years ago

I wonder what position this puts existing development houses that have shelled out $1 million dollars for use of the Unreal Engine.

thomaslangston• 12 years ago

The comparison to app store pricing is ridiculous. A better comparison would be with IDEs such as Visual Studio or IntelliJ. For each a free version exists, but no race to the bottom has occurred. Instead the free version provides students and hobbyists the ability to learn the tool, which provides employers a greater pool of applicants which have experience in it. It also provides startups a way to minimize their burn rate until after a mockup or even a MVP is validated.

Afterwards, in each case when the economics make sense businesses pay large amounts to buy additional premium version licensing, training, integration, and add-on tools. As primarily customer hosted software the additional cost of free riders is low, at least as low as the advertising costs required to grow the paying customer base by the same rate.

kayoone• 12 years ago

Comparing the race to the bottom of consumer product prices with a freemium (not really free i know) model for b2b tools doesn't make a lot of sense. These engines will now be accessible by people who didn't have a chance before. If you are an AAA dev (or hugely successful with your indie game) you still have to pay huge sums, at least with Unreal Engine. To use CryEngine for 10 bucks, you have to qualify as an indie dev. So they are opening up to more potential users to upsell to, which in todays booming game market makes a lot of sense.

War of the 3D Engines

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