Don't jump ship to UE4 unless you're ready/capable of learning the API / C++

Which if you are below 200K only requires you to upgrade to Unity Plus ($35/mo or $420/yr). Contrast that to Unreal 4 which would have cost you up to about $5,000 in royalties plus the added headache of having to report your financial information to them regularly.

https://epicgames.formstack.com/forms/royalty_report

Of course at the end of the day both are insignificant compared to the cost of building your own engine let alone the game.

I'm always forgetting to add that underlined word.

 

Still worth it imo. Frankly they're doing way more than half the work anyway.

I'm much more interested in whether the engine does what I need it to. A couple of weeks of wasted time is probably worth more than the royalties I'd have to hand over anyway, and much more frustrating.

 

peoples argument was about Unreal being called free, which it is not. It is up to you to decide which pricing is better for your purpose, but 5% gross can be a lot of money since we are not talking net income. S that could mean the difference between being able to pay your bills or not. While in unity you are at a fixed priced, based on the income bracket. Once your above 200k gross income and using Unity Pro the only thing that effects how much you pay, is how many seats you require.

lets look at the 200k bracket for Unity, $125 per month per seat vs $10,000 in royalties to epic games and no way to control this cost. While on Unity you would have the option of dropping seats, of have a cost that scales with the size of your staff.

To a indie developer Unity could be considered much more free, since $100k gross income will take a while to hit, and the $200k will take ever longer while in unreal even when you are just making pocket change they will start taking their cut.

Also royalties are a pain in the ass, you have to report revenue to a 3rd party, and it simply will hurt you as the company scales, or if you require other products that take royalty.

 

Here we go again : A new challenge every two years. After a free version with the Pro features, this year put pressure on UT for a 100% Unity free (This is not the first subject that speaks about it these days.).

Next two year challenge : full source?!.

 

I'd settle for just the new Input API.

 

I guess the question is, what does a company that is driven by royalty-based profit provide compared to a subscription-based one?

I'm not arguing that royalties are cheaper, but I really don't think that it's the biggest financial issue, especially considering the relative contribution to the project. Taxes, marketing and publishing costs are going to be far more difficult to bear. Not to mention the question of how much work it takes to get the engine to do the job that you want it to, and stuff like whether you have to spend a lot of resources to work around bugs and issues when you don't have the source.

The way I see it, it's much more important to simply have the best tool for the job, and concentrate on doing all the difficult things right (like marketing) than it is to worry about losing 5% of your gross income for the games you make with it.

 

Apparently you didn't stumble onto any of the other threads deeply discussing how and when the differences in costs affect you, your project and your company.

This horse has long since died, there is no new information at this time and there is no need to resurrect dead threads to beat it. There are swathes of threads discussing this if you are inclined to look for them.

 

That's not how it works Ryiah, in every other framework there's different methodologies and subsystem interaction created upon their own way of implementation. Even from a terminology standpoint it's different, you couldn't use the release notes to understand a Raycast is actually called a trace for e.g.

Let's say you're not a Unity user that only knows C#, if you don't RTM you might end up fighting a multi-million line engine and most experienced developers should know better. They might end up trying their own GC / Mem alloc and serialization when it's all included for you and if you don't understand the game framework trying to fight it you'll be hitting nothing but an uphill battle.

Even from a source perspective you're only manipulating their own classes which you have to understand, because you can end up breaking 20 other things even if it's a well designed modular architecture.

Even from a game logic perspective I've learnt some cool stuff from the Epic demo's.. Yes the core concepts are the same no matter which engine you use.. But spending a couple of weeks reading documentation and reverse engineering examples can save you months of hurt even with experience.

This isn't engine specific, it's just good practice.. As for the ever ongoing engine debate, just pick one and stick with it for the long haul.!

 

I'm likely wrong on the first sentence but the second sentence is just my own foolish decision to keep it within the same paragraph and not separate quote his complaint that the documentation doesn't point towards the newer methods that replace the obsoleted ones. At least I believe you're including the second sentence in your post.

Glancing over the guide it does seem to offer more than I thought it would have but the official tutorials ended up being enough for me to get a basic understanding of the engine. If I were porting an existing project it might have been different.

 

I learned about Unity's post after it was expired, but received an email from UE4. The point is that it was handled much differently.
If you feel C# is not a simplified language, called such for the ability to use common English in most instances, then you are likely not going to see the difference in difficulty.
The point of citing the guide is that a guide exists, which is to say that obviously enough have asked the question to need it. The purpose of listing the Unity documentation was to give them something of a counter point, albeit not quite as significant to the conversion aspect.


Free refers to the base price to use the Editor (or features of it). It is no different than saying that being an Android developer costs $25 and being an Apple Developer costs $100/yr. I know this tends to confuse people, so lets say that you pay more up front for Unity, while UE4 will take a larger portion of the earnings. The difference being you get a chance to become profitable before having to pay the fees.

I did not. This one happened to be one of the top results in a search for something entirely unrelated and directed me to the exact page of the comment for which I posted a reply. I still appreciate your rude comment for its attempt to cite that there are better discussions.


It all comes down to personal preference, but today UE4 looks worth learning. The joy of having a modern computer is the ability to install both. Best of luck with the battle, though.

 

Both the unreal royalties and the Unity sub price are based on gross income, and you can argue both give you the chance to become profitable before paying with unity allowing you to bring in more money than unreal before you have to pay. You only require a paid unity license after $100k of gross income while epic wants money after $3000.

 

You don't get the Pro editor (or source) for free. Sorry, but it's a moot point.

 

This seems a fairly easy process with Epic tho.
All you have to do, is to fill out an online form, which even calculates the payment due.

 

Besides a different frock there aren't really any differences (nothing stopping you making a game).. End of the day Unity has things it needs to improve like everything else but you get a free, fully useable, powerful, easy to use, stable and frankly downright fun engine..

I think of Unreal as the more 3D focussed Unity at this point, I mean the biggest decision you really have to make is which engine best suits your project and preference.. Ain't it beautiful to have options??!

As for royalties, I'd be ecstatic to be in a position where it actually matters.. We're talking hundreds of thousands before it even becomes a consideration.. It's publishing costs that are the real hitter.

I don't think some really see these types of conversations as necessary, because it's personal preference at this point.. Now discussing what features UE has that would be mighty cool in Unity (and vice versa) is a good convo, who doesn't want new shiny tools?

 

there is almost do difference between the free vs the plus/pro version. it mostly comes down to the splash screen and and editors skin.

What im saying is cost is not a front you can fight on for this. It comes down to choosing the best engine for your individual project. I have used a lot of game engines, and depending on what i have to make it might choose unity, or i might choose unreal. But what i can say is the royalties are a bit of a barrier to Unreal. Source code is nice, but but the C++ documentation is still pretty S***ty on Unreal compared to Unitys C# docs.

 

I think people get set in their ways and any argument against that becomes a personal attack. I was given both at no cost with no real concern for revenue considerations (educational licenses) and opted to focus on Unity. With how my game started growing about the same time I would have to subscribe to maintain my custom splash and discounted assets, I decided to try UE4. It does some things better, but some things not as well.


I think a little too much weight is placed on the difficulty of UE4. I imported an fbx from my Unity game without animation and a bunch of legacy animations for it. I went to each animation and performed an automatic rig. Opened the base model and performed an automatic rig. Deleted the skeletons for all the animations, which in turn prompted me to retarget to the base model. Threw together a file that said what condition would execute each and was done with it. Fully animated character and haven't touched a line of C++.

I'm not saying not to use Unity. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I am saying Unity is not the poor man's UE4. They are drastically different platforms that should be evaluated as such. I apologize to anyone taking this as a personal insult, but it's a general opinion.

It was strictly a cost to feature comparison. It's still a moot point no matter how you rephrase it.

 

Tbh though, if your game makes $3000 then 5% of that is still nothing.

Anyway all I'm trying to say is that especially when you're a small-time indie, royalties vs subscription is hardly the biggest of your problems. And I personally think that royalties very likely produces a better outcome for you as the developer, indirectly.

 

I've been using UE4 since beta and I've been using Unity since the early 4.X, Unity is far more forgiving to beginners. I don't believe for a second anyone really thinks an engine that's responsible for some of the best AAA games released to date is a "poor mans Unity".. If anyone argues "a lot of them were made in UE3", yes they were and it was pretty much the same engine in a lot of ways but orders of magnitude more difficult / restrictive to use..

It can be intimidating, the UI alone is filled full of so many options.. The lightmass and post processing volumes alone probably contain as many options as the entirety of Unity.

I agree, once you get into it and know the fundamentals it's rapid and in a lot of cases makes more sense than any engine I've used but Epic tend to "assume". Unity doesn't assume you know a damn thing about games, especially on the code side you're free to trial and error until your heart is content. UE isn't as forgiving..

I can see why people find it intimidating, plus if you want to push your project out to a decent scale.. You really want to hybrid the system, not just use BP's alone.. Whilst I think BP's are excellent, they can become a restrictive spaghetti mess.! There's nothing better than a scripting language like component based C# as a safety net.

I use Skookum in UE for simple scripting, I find it far more enjoyable even though I write a lot of components in C++. Plus many are just happy with Unity and I can thoroughly understand why.!

 

I agree that it can be extremely forgiving. You can practically run broken code, which can be useful when there is no other means to accomplish something and a huge downfall when an issue that was not intentional surfaces. The thing that keeps eating at me, given some of the bugs that exist, is whether this is by design or luck.

 

How do you think it looks to the average Unity user when you show up and necro a thread that is at least six months old for the sole purpose of complaining? How can you possibly believe it will appear as anything other than bashing when you make nonsense statements like UE4 being completely free?

I'll admit I have my fanboy moments but your post practically screamed fanboy too.

 

The problem with what you're saying isn't that it "tends to confuse people", it's that it's flat out incorrect.

 

I feel the statement I quoted, along with the entire premise of being experienced in C++, is no longer accurate. I clarified that the editor is free, as in no up-front costs for the Pro equivalent. Sorry if it offended you, but it wasn't even directed at you in the first place. I edited the post so hopefully nobody else takes it to heart. Have a nice night

That's your opinion. Depends how you look at it.

 

It's not an opinion.

 

That's your opinion.

 

Unity's editor is completely free too... right up until you have an income source that conflicts with that condition.

 

True, but only if you are willing to give up the extended features. They may be irrelevant to you, but in a 1 to 1 comparison, they are one thing less. Hopefully you are all caught up now, lol.


I have noticed that Unity does better at instancing and system compatibility. You can have Unity 4, Unity 5, and an AVD open at the same time without issue. UE4 is very possessive. It only permits one instance of any version and will crash when an AVD is already running. It also requires certain versions of Mac OS, which can limit the version of UE4 you can run if other software isn't ready for the next upgrade. That makes for some tough decisions.

 

Only people who are confused are the ones who mistakenly believe the splash screen will stop sales. Additionally if you are not profitable by the time you have reached the gross revenue limitation then you are either a team that is just starting or you have serious problems.

My evidence that the Unity logo will not prevent a game from being successful is The Long Dark. You can watch the introduction video below that continues to ship with the game and shows the Unity logo.

Here is a link to the stats page. It has just shy of one million owners.

http://steamspy.com/app/305620

Full customization options for the Unity logo and the dark skin are extended now? You know what. Let's remove the dark skin from this discussion altogether since there is an alternative way to have a dark skin in Unity that is completely free and far more customizable.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/zios-editor-theme-support.411818/

That leaves us with just the customization options for the splash screen being your "extended features".

 

I never said it would stop sales. I'm not entirely sure why you are getting worked up. Plenty of people opt for a logo. I am not sure how to rephrase it, but to get all the features, one platform has a fee.
Extended, paid, non-standard. Pick whichever word you feel best exemplifies "not in the base version"

 

Yes, but the vast majority of them wait until they're successful before they opt out of the logo. Your entire complaint that restarted this thread hinges around the idea that you bought it before you actually needed to buy it.

 

I have no complaint. I think you misunderstood me as saying that Unity is terrible, overpriced, and unworthy. If I had a complaint, I would take it to Unity support, not some people in a forum that are just going to argue it for hours.

BTW, I meant a Unity logo. People opt for keeping the Unity logo even with Pro.

 

You had at least six complaints in the post that revived this thread. If you were simply making a comparison post between the two engines it wouldn't have been completely one-sided. Just look at the posts everyone else has made for comparison.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/d...learning-the-api-c.238963/page-4#post-3084100

 

Those are comparisons. UE4 is not a far more expensive or extremely complicated platform. I don't know what to tell you. You seem a little too focused on what you wanted me to say to hear what I was saying.

 

If you say so. They certainly don't read that way.

 

I appreciate your input. The entire purpose of the final blurb was to say it was not to bash Unity, just not the same comparison. I hope you don't lose sleep over it. It wasn't meant to drum up any serious conflict. Have a nice night.

 

And.... done. UT vs UE has been done many times and isn't productive.