Epic Games launches Unreal development grants

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/epic-launches-unreal-dev-grants

by bluesilver07 • 11 years ago

99 15 11 years ago

fnayr• 11 years ago

Unreal is really winning a lot of points in my book. First with the engine pricing and now this. If I ever step up my mobile game making to 3D I'd definitely use them over Unity.

binarycrusader3• 11 years ago

Nevermind that their offering is superior in terms of long-term product maintenance and potential platform offerings since you get complete source access.

Unity's advantage remains in the asset area with its pipeline and arguably easier to approach editor, but source code access is a huge win for any developer that has the skills needed to maintain a product long-term.

laeus• 11 years ago

Having worked in games for 13 years, at studios large and small and projects of the same variety, source code access has almost never blipped on the radar. The few times when we had issues with various engines for which we didn't have source, our support contracts gave us the changes we needed to ship on time. On occasion we modified the engine, only to be hit by tricky merges with subsequent releases. In general, I've found that modifying an engine should be done by engine programmers (and if a game company does enough engine development to have such specialists, it's probably not licensing any of these options).

The latest Unreal is a wonderful piece of engine software. Their blueprint system as well as their material editor and best-in-class renderer really are something to talk about. They also have a gigantic learning community. And I think their licensing terms are a good approach.

However, Unity has blazing fast compilation time on the order of seconds, a properly built play-in-editor mode, large asset and plugin ecosystem, seamless asset pipeline, and support for a modern programming language in C#. Each of these could arguably be considered a game changer in isolation, but in aggregate they are an efficiency avalanche. Nothing makes a better game, faster, than being able to go from idea to prototype in five minutes rather than two hours. It's possible to try more things, to discard ten or even fifty bad ideas for every good one, and still come out ahead. This is what it all comes down to, in my experience. And when you're done, you can port your game to over a dozen platforms (in some edge cases by simply changing a dropdown value).

That said, I'm happy that both engines are so good, because it means neither will rest on its laurels. Unreal's marketplace and Unity 5's renderer are no accidents.

cma• 11 years ago

Unity also has zero royalties.

VikingCoder• 11 years ago

WOW. I wonder how frequently the grants will be awarded.

archagon2• 11 years ago

Anyone have experience working with UE4 on older iOS devices, such as the iPad 3? Specifically, can you make a game that still runs at 60fps on that device? I'm thinking mostly 2D, but with polygon-based meshes instead of sprites for my graphics.

_random_• 11 years ago

Unity3d is eating it alive starting with legs :).

arca_vorago• 11 years ago

I'm very excited about this. I have been keeping my project under wraps and hope that I can get the prototype ironed out a bit more before I try for this. Just a few thousand dollars to pay for licensing fees of software and maybe a dev machine or two and some marketing.

Epic Games launches Unreal development grants

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