An Unreal Decision

Actually, you don't owe royalties on "all revenue" with UE4. You only owe royalties on revenues above the first $3,000 per quarter, so you can theoretically earn up to $12,000 per year with UE4 without paying any royalties. Beyond that point, you would start paying some royalties. This arrangement is awesome for indies getting started because it defers the cost of the engine until after you have established some success.

I am definitely not saying Unity should eliminate their current options and only offer a subscription with royalties, but I do think Unity would benefit by adding another payment option similar to what Epic is offering. There is a big pricing gap right now between Unity Free and Unity Pro, and Epic's UE4 offering is fitting well in that gap. Unity needs to add a payment option to fill that same gap. Talking about how expensive UE4 could be for people already making six digits is just another way to ignore the real pricing gap issue.

 

Everyone's talking about getting a royalty-free deal with UE4... Does anyone actually know how much that agreement might cost? It could very well be over $500 000 or more.

 

this topic must be renamed to "if you want a PC-only game ... use UE4"
because UE4 doesn't ready for mobile platforms. It's vapoware (if we are talking about mobile)
Unity works almost on every mobile device on the market, UE4 works only on few devices.
even update 4.4. brings almost "nothing" for this support.
you couldn't start deveoplment with UE4 if you want a mobile game.
but for PC/Mac - I agree about UE4

 

+1, Perfectly said, could not agree more.

 

I've tried out Unreal 4 for a couple of months now and have to say, it's still pretty shoddy. It's still in "early adopter" phase so shouldn't expect too much. It's not very intuitive at all and looks pretty ugly.

If it wasn't for the fact that at least Unreal has rolled out a new UI system then I wouldn't even be looking at it.

Also I like the blueprints in Unreal. They are a lot of fun! (Even if it's probably 10x slower than scripting - hey, making games should be fun!)

So at the moment I think the Unreal engine is severely lacking but they are improving fast and I enjoy watching their weekly twitch casts. They have interesting accents. (They are from North Carolina!)

Unity vs Unreal is like Europe vs America.

(In fact Unity's UK office is about 9 minutes walk away from me!)

 

You are actually the exact audience that I believe the UE4 subscription rate is targeted at, so choosing it as a hobbyist would be a good decision. As I've said in other threads, you picking UE4 isn't really a loss to Unity, as you're either going to use Unity for free or give $20 to their competitor. Unity wasn't going to get your money anyway. The only people missing out are the community members who've enjoyed your presence here.

Edit: I should also point out that Unity offers a very nice educational rate for the Pro license and all its modules, which can be used commercially. I would imagine this actually grabs up a lot of students in the hobbyist audience.

 

I am a Unity Free user, and have no intention of getting pro at the price it's currently at. And Unreal looks attractive.

I've also spent hundreds on the Unity asset store (and I can't be the only one, right?). So it's not quite as cut and dry as 'use Unity for free or give $20 to their competitor' I feel.

Sure, the asset store may not make much for Unity. That's fine. But I felt it would be good to try and debunk the assumption that free users have absolutely no value.

I mean, we *don't* have any value as far as our opinions go. This has been made clear. But we do add *some* value in that we buy assets.

I feel now, though, that we're just going to get into a cyclical argument of Unity Vs Unreal.

There's no need for that. Unity has made its decision. Everyone, including Unity, will live with that until they can't anymore.

Simple

QS =D

 

Unless they decide to take their hobby and make it into a profession. At which point they're more likely to start with the tools they've learned during their time as a hobbyist. Since Unity has a flat price point they need to continuously draw in new customers in order to grow.

 

"Also I like the blueprints in Unreal"'
almost everyone who touched UE4 loves Blueprints.
I have no idea idea why Unity3d Asset Store doesn't contain few full-clones of Blueprint's functionality

 

Not neccessarily, this is where reduced subscription pricing could make a huge impact.

Make it around $49.99 a month for pro, and people may very well convert from free to a pro subscription at that price.
But at $225 a month for iOS and Android Pro, Unity is snuffing out a lot of potential paying clients.

 

Well, sometimes it's better to have a single customer that pays $10 than 10 customers that pay $1.

 

To be fair, while the screenies aren't at all comparable I didn't get the impression that they were trying to compare them. That's naturally what readers are going to do, of course, given the nature of the article.

If they did think that the top screenie was a fair representation of Unity's output for comparative purposes then my impression would be that they're not overly familiar with the tools, but everything was labelled "WIP" so I'm inclined to think that's what it is - just whatever screenies they already had available, as opposed to deliberate comparison shots.

It seems to me that UE4 might be a better fit for that team. To me, plenty of what was said seems backwards... not invalid or wrong, just not fitting with how I do things with my team. If they're getting better results with equal or less work in their new tools, that's a win.

 

I think what is the key to this team is that they had issues not just graphical ones. Out of the box Unreal 4 is going to get you better graphics, people mentioned to use Lux shaders instead of standard Unity ones... That is clearly saying that out of the box it isn't as good as it maybe should be?

In any case they swapped over to UE4 and I would say it is a good fit, firstly they are making a FPS, unity is a game engine a generic one it isn't focused on particular games but I suppose maybe more suited to mobile and arcade games. A team making a FPS in Unity would need to really make sure the reasons for doing so is because they know the tools better etc.

The pricing for UE4 is a bargain. We all know that, but it all comes down to using the right tool for the job.

 

Without knowing exactly what was/wasnt done, maybe the point was they didnt need to do all that stuff to get it looking nice in UE4... Im not going to pretend to know how much extra work was/wasnt done to get it to the quality the second screenshot showed... but if the point was they made it look that nice with out of the box options, and not a lot of tweaking, extra assets that Unity requires, then its quite a valid point... of course yeah yeah, Unity version is older tech.. guess we will see when Unity 5 comes out.

What I would like to see, is someone who is capable of making professional levels spend a few days (same time frame) with both engines (UE4/Unity5) , and see which ends up with the best results... im talking out of the box... no custom downloads... Im betting it wouldnt be Unity.

 

Why invest your time and money in an engine that doesn't even support multicore processors in 2014?

 

luckily 2014 isnt over yet...

 

They both support multi-threading, 64-bit editor would of been a valid point.

 

It actually does. The question is why the hell $4500-expensive engine doesn't support this, doesn't support visual shader nodes and many other things out of the box?

 

I was waiting for a Unity-64 bit editor but I gave up and went over to Unreal. Makes me wonder what I am doing here...

I will be honest a Cube with the proper UV Mapping and no textures would look better in Unreal 4 that Unity scene that you slave over for a month.

However lets see what Unity 5 brings.

 

And per project also, if I'm correct.
So you could have 100 projects with $3000 of revenues per quarter not paying any royalties.

 

I am not 100 percent certain that is it per project.

However that is a possibility if a good majority of your projects are free.

 

HeadClot88, I would be very interested (no sarcasm here, I am serious) to see some screens that validate your point. A cube in unity and a cube in unreal. If it is not a big trouble for you.
I keep on reading about this differences and I would love to see them in this simple context.
Thanks.

 

And an updated VFX / terrain system / cinematics tools and expansion tools. Physx for destruction and point of origin / tile system...

Every little helps.

@HeadClot88, I've been showing hippo differences between lightmass and LPV and the amount of difference lighting makes, you can make UE4 look ugly. Also the realistic rendering demo has a lot of pieces that are nothing more than surface scattering and the color white and obviously some constants for the shiny parts. Some tex's on the wooden table and chair, but for the most part it's just a Color ID maps and base colors. The walls are just BSP static meshes, nothing complicated from an art standpoint. Decent meshes and bog standard materials..!

If that's not example of engine tech I don't know what is. Shame about what happens when you start doing terrains, it all starts to fall apart a little. This is where the likes of Enlighten can help you, whilst Unitys terrain system is old it's also battle tested.

They really need to add some better post, although please correct me if I'm wrong. With a fully deferred renderer, not light pre-pass shouldn't it make life pretty simple to use MSAA? As of GL 3.0 as far as I remember (correct me if I'm wrong) call texelFetch().

 

... but... but what are the UVs for if there are no textures?

 

Applying colour ID's, create your UV's and Color map. Then assign different constant / vectors / roughness / metal properties from the material editor using the RGB channels.

No textures needed.

 

C'mon, show me a cube

 

OK, Cube stuck in using the lighting from the realistic rendering demo.

 

Hey uhhh @jonas echterhoff is this true?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181407

 

Half Life 3 confirmed!!!!!

 

Wow. I thought you guys would let us chew on 4.6 for a good while first before even showing 5.0

Either way it's ok for me, I'm not particularly waiting for 5.0 for our current projects.

 

Except in the case where a price reduction produces more than a linear increase in customers.

 

i actually found the article to be a great read as i read through the whole thing. the author states it himself that both tools are great for different things atnthe moment and that its great to have choices. how could you not agree with him?

the screenshots do look a tad exaggerated though but its a mobile game so if the second screenshot is run on a mobile as well then fiddle my diddle. i personally think that the first screenshot is run on a mobile and is early build and the second one is in the editor early build.

 

Any word on who will be in the beta? Thinking about pre-orders etc.

 

You can't purchase Unity 4 any more and it's been like that since they announced Unity 5 for preorder.

People didn't seriously compare the PS4 to the Xbox360 when the PS4 was released, they waited & compared it to the Xbox One when that was released because they're both current generation. Same here. UE4 can only be compaired to Unity 5 when it's released. UE4 is obviously going to be better than the last generation.

 

Possibly one reason for the difference in images is that they stopped at different points in development. I don't believe they were maintaining both projects (for too long) simultaneously. The points made about support are spot on though.

If I understood correctly, the team has other active projects in Unity that they're going to maintain. Additionally, in an email exchange with the author, he in no way bashed Unity, and in fact promoted Unity for a small team such as ours.

 

I saw the article and it seems to me that they're trying to make an AAA game, and while Unity can do that, it takes a lot more work than UE does.

 

I'll take any glimmer of hope I can get at this point.

 

It is perfectly fair to compare UE4 to Unity 4, since Unity 5 is not available yet and nobody outside of Unity has any any when Unity 5 will ship. I'm guessing Q1 2015. Once Unity 5 is available to download and install (even if it is just a public beta), then it is fair to compare UE4 to Unity 5.

And at that point in time, we will all want to compare the current latest available version of each. For example, let's say Unity 5.0 vs UE 4.9 (or what ever is the latest version at the time). Right now, the comparison is between Unity 4.5 and UE 4.4, because those are the available versions right now.

 

One thing that is always missing in the "stuff Unity does horribly wrong in this day and age" is the fact that Prefabs and Scenes are all binaries and thus cannot be merged by modern source control systems like Git.

To work with other people on the same scene/prefab. For an engine that claims they pride in "letting people do stuff quickly" they seem to have completely missed the huge amount of time and productivity that working with this archaic system kills.

It's 2014 for crying out loud. Source control is part of software development, make sure your engine supports it out of the box. This is why I end up doing all the Unity work myself and just have people give me the assets.

 

Well ok then, I will eat my hat for that one. I'll have to double check to make sure it actually works though

It doesn't mention anything about Prefabs though. Does that option affect prefabs as well?

 

\o/





(sorry, couldn't resist)

 

I disagree. Technology moves very fast. Comparing an engine that's a few years old with an engine that's a few months old doesn't make sense unless a new version of the old engine isn't on the horizon in the near future & basically you'd be able to start & finish a game before a new version comes out.

 

If this works I will love you both for at least a month.

 

Time is the most valuable resource. I can afford either engine, and I chose Unity for it's rapid development and prototyping abilities combined with it's ability to quickly deploy to most mobile platforms. Six projects, with another due imminently. I am neither a fan-boy, nor a blind-sheep. Knowing it costs more, I still chose it for both solo and professional projects.

Gigi