Dawn of Subscription Based Game Engines

[Higuy]

Today Unreal Engine 4 was official released to the public, however in a subscription based license. You pay $20 monthly, and also have a 5% royalty on your gross revenue from the game you release. They give you all the tools, including the entire source code which you can get through GitHub (C++). You can cancel your subscription anytime and still have access to the tools, but you wont recieve new features, have access to their new marketplace (like Unity), or be able to sell your game.

More information here: https://unrealengine.com/

CryEngine also announced later today that they were also moving to a subscription based model, and for indie developers they would be doing it $10 monthly with also no royalties. Not a whole lot of info on this yet though.

More info: http://www.crydev.net/newspage.php?news=121751&sid=3168b021191224c91fe5c29a92d48afb

[Dwood]

"no royalties. " - whoa.

[Amit]

So...subscribe for a month and then cancel to finish the game. Then subscribe again to get license to publish the game? And then cancel again after the game is licensed?

[Zeph]

"no royalties. " - whoa.
As it stands, they've yet to pull in any money off the Free SDK. At least this way they can recover some of the effort.
And it's no royalties on that tier level. It's essentially the Free SDK with features from the Ryse branch.



So...subscribe for a month and then cancel to finish the game. Then subscribe again to get license to publish the game? And then cancel again after the game is licensed?
That's possible, but Crytek will most likely be pushing daily/weekly commits. If you find a steady build you like, that's most likely what will happen considering their offline authorization changes.






There are some thing I can say about the Cryengine model against Epic's model. Be wary of the tiers.

[JackalStomper]

UDK community is already full of people that barely understand unreal script. A fairly simple high level language. C++ is an entirely different beast.
I foresee a whole lot of "THIS DOESN'T COMPILE WHAT DO" abound...
I like the entry level pricing, but the engine outside of blueprint is well beyond entry-level demands.

[Higuy]

UDK community is already full of people that barely understand unreal script. A fairly simple high level language. C++ is an entirely different beast.
I foresee a whole lot of "THIS DOESN'T COMPILE WHAT DO" abound...
I like the entry level pricing, but the engine outside of blueprint is well beyond entry-level demands.

UE4 forums are already full of "my thing isn't compiling!!" so yes, it's not level entry at all. Technically speaking you can make an entire game using blueprints but I personally wouldn't recommend it.

Otherwise scripting for levels is pretty much the same as it was in kismet, just now with "level blueprints".


So...subscribe for a month and then cancel to finish the game. Then subscribe again to get license to publish the game? And then cancel again after the game is licensed?

I'm not sure about CryEngine but with UE4 you will need to be subscribing every month your game is selling.

For CryEngine I have a small hunch that you'll need to be subscribed in order to keep using it, but I'm not sure about that. FYI UE4 now has a similar "login" screen like CryEngine as well, to keep track of your subscription and access to the marketplace and such.

Also, something important to note is that the material editor, like everything else, has been improved quite a bit. They are also moving to PBR.

[Zeph]

UE4 forums are already full of "my thing isn't compiling!!" so yes, it's not level entry at all. Technically speaking you can make an entire game using blueprints but I personally wouldn't recommend it.

Otherwise scripting for levels is pretty much the same as it was in kismet, just now with "level blueprints".

Depends on how you define entry level.
Entry level for people who don't know how to set up a build environment suggests they don't know how to program at all considering an Epic Programmer made a video walking through the process.
Is it full of "help I dont know what to do but I'm doing something" or "hey something with X on your end is keeping me from compiling what should I do to resolve it without breaking something".



I'm not sure about CryEngine but with UE4 you will need to be subscribing every month your game is selling.

For CryEngine I have a small hunch that you'll need to be subscribed in order to keep using it, but I'm not sure about that. FYI UE4 now has a similar "login" screen like CryEngine as well, to keep track of your subscription and access to the marketplace and such.
Crytek has seemingly worked out a way to let people use the SDK without having to authenticate every time you open something. As it stands now, they've built it so it authenticates once then keeps that information within the registry. Could be used to force reauthentication at a specified date, but we won't know for sure until they elaborate on how they're going to implement these partnership tiers.


Also, something important to note is that the material editor, like everything else, has been improved quite a bit. They are also moving to PBR.
Are they still doing the material editor? I know a visual editor for things like HLSL is nifty, but that seems to be counter to an offering of source access.

[Zeph]

Anyone pick up UE4 yet? Does it have an xml parser included?

[Kornman00]

XML? In this day and age of game dev, why not JSON?

[Zeph]

Markup is markup.

[Warsaw]

Anyone pick up UE4 yet? Does it have an xml parser included?

Talk to Warlord/Cobby. He's been playing around with it quite a lot, recently.