Epic's latest buying spree

With nothing better to do during a build I was poking around to see what acquisitions have been happening lately and came across three by Epic Games.

RAD Tools (creators of Bink Video as well as the PS5's Kraken compression system). Aside from statements that their tools will be integrated into Unreal Engine and continue being available to anyone wanting to license them I found no statements concerning pricing changes.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/7719...t-used-data-compression-technology/index.html

Capture Reality (creators of a photogrammetry toolset). Check the spoilers for before and after acquisition pricing which are drastically cheaper and slightly more flexible on the upper end and both more affordable and much more flexible on the lower end.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/7817...s-to-fuel-next-gen-unreal-engine-5/index.html
https://www.capturingreality.com/faq-epic

Spoiler: Before Acquisition Pricing

Spoiler: After Acquisition Pricing

Hyprsense (creators of a facial animation system). I wasn't able to find any information on the original pricing of this company's product. You had to have requested an SDK but the link is no longer functional and for obvious reasons the Internet Archive wasn't helpful.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...s-acquires-real-time-animation-firm-hyprsense

 

Good find. I too searched out Cubic Motion, couldnt find much of anything, short of directly contacting them.

 

Yeah, Epic's not the only ones doing middleware acquisition.

Good on them for the lower pricing.

 

Kind of feels like a kick in the teeth each time they aquire stuff and make it cheaper or free for users whilst integrating into engine and supporting it for years to come with a dedicated team, where when unity aquire something it becomes unsupported after nobody uses it as a result

 

Or they make it an super expensive subscription. Like that machine learning driven art asset pipeline

Edit: meanwhile quixel is free

 

There's a rumor on Twitter that Epic just bought Unity. Or maybe it's a slightly early April Fool's joke.

 

Be surprised or not, but it is in fact true.

 

..source ? That's.. pretty big news, to first hear about on a forum thread not posted by someone who works at Unity. It is April Fools in some places (not here for another hour.. but still).

 

And it will be free for all Unreal users.

 

O gosh, this made me laugh so hard

 

RAD Game Tools' Oodle Suite Free to Use in Unreal Engine; Native Integration in UE4.27 and UE5

Note - the "free to use" is from the link I posted, but I don't see anything in Epic's press release itself stating that it's free.

 

A link was provided by that forum post to the following blog post.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/oodle-now-free-to-use-in-unreal-engine-via-github

 

I read it before but I literally only just now saw "free to use" in the banner (and the url of course).

I saw "licensee" before though so I wonder if that's different in any way. Needing a licence to publish, vs. just using it in the engine.