Full Unreal Engine 4 Developer Kit $19/MO + 5% / Why can't Unity Offer the same!

Actually, either way you're more likely to be out hundreds of thousands of dollars. Licensing is only a small part of the overall cost of making a game.

 

Okay, except... no.

To reach the point where a Unity license's costs (which are not the only factors considered when choosing UE4 over Unity) are the same as the 5% number, you need $30,000 in sales. Unsurprising to anyone who has ever released a game, $30,000 is actually a pretty difficult number to reach. If you're targeting all three platforms with Pro licenses, that number jumps up to $90,000.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE.

See, this number also assumes that you never buy anything from the asset store, but a lot of the best selling asset store programs are there to append features to Unity that you already get in UE4 and even UDK out of the box. To add to this, many of those assets are sold per-seat, excluding art assets. Which means that cost also increases if you've got multiple team members all using Unity Pro, which is also sold per-seat. You can get volume licenses, but you don't know how much those costs. But this basically means that you can assume you're adding another $30,000 to your projected sales per employee.

 

Thing is the entire debate is situational, I need at least 8 licences but I don't develop for Android or IOS. I want Enlighten and FMOD, to get this with UE4 you're looking about 50K before you've even begun.

The only thing I can say for sure is I don't believe it should cost so much for Android and IOS pro, in a market where devs are renown to flop constantly until something sticks. Then UE4 is the better deal IMO..

As for the 3D market, graphics sell games and UE4 out the box or more so CryEngine (I still think CE is the graphics king) is going to add ROI. Now how much is it going to cost your team to pull Unity up to UE4's level (if possible at all)?

If you employ more than one staff member, it seems Unity is the most expensive. Then again, factor it into UE4's learning curve.. No matter your skill set in games, Epic has their own way of thinking and you're essentially starting from scratch with a new API.

As I keep saying, Unity 5.0 will be the benchmark because UT 4.0 isn't in the same ball park.

 

Well Unity is best served integrating AAA middleware such as enlighten Tiny bit better than asset store. If you're going to integrate a solution, pick the best.

 

I think C++ is precisely the reason for most of those complaints. A lot of people seem intimidated by it.

 

Beyond incorporation costs which are actually pretty low these days, if you already have the hardware (like many people probably already do), I think you'd be surprised. As someone who ran my own company for some time, you'd be surprised what you can make due with when starting up.

 

I believe he was referring to content assets.

 

I'm willing to bet that a lot of it comes from what UE3 and UDK were like as tools. They were such interface disasters that FEMA should have been called in to quarantine them.

 

Ah, my mistake, I thought you were referring to non-development related costs, like foosball tables.

 

I decided to get into making a game around the time epic announced there new offering. I had just started playing with unity at the time, but due to pricing I switched over to unreal. After a few months im now back learning unity. The biggest reason is (taking into account im still a noob) unity just has a lot of issues solved for hobbiest/small developers that I dont want to deal with. For example animation. Just seeing that there are animations that can be purchased/shared in the asset store and then applied to your custom mesh is a major relief, even though I'm sure its not all perfect and rosy.

Like others have said if you have a team that can do everything custom from scratch in unreal then ya I'm sure you will get great results. But right now I want to focus on a game and leave basic human animations to the people in the asset store.

I'm a developer that use to work with c++ back in the day. Anyway c++ in unreal is not good. First off the intellisense is slow as hell. Also, having access to the source really doesnt help make your game either. If you start trying to follow the code path for a certain feature in engine source you will quickly find you have 50+ files open and by that time you will quickly forget what exactly you were doing.

I myself spent longer than i care to admin trying to get a memory access error fixed that was happening deep down in the engine. I finally figured out it was some function deep in the source that was casting my object to some other object. It was my game codes fault but man c++ is so cryptic and confusing that it made it seem like it was the engines fault. Anyway I hate c++ now just like I did back in the day. Using it with unreals api does not make it any better.

 

To be fair, your post stated nothing about content. You mentioned licensing and hardware which are actually not the main problems. A development system shouldn't cost but so much.

I don't believe it should cost hundreds of thousands of dollars unless you are aiming high. But unless you are capable of making your own assets, it will be the majority of your spending.

 

That attitude is outdated, and is at the core of what is hurting Unity right now. Comments like that push Unity users, especially hobbyists, to use UE4 instead of Unity.

 

Only partially. The biggest problem is still going to be lack of an affordable price point for those of us who develop games purely as a hobby.

 

As pure amateur trying to make games, i would go directlty to UE4 like many amateur people, for some 20$ and all tools, to make free games and prorotypes.
But why Unity :
- I don't want to dig C++ and complex Classes
- Unity framework is incredibly fast and easy to learn, and simple
- think selling a game : so i don't want to hear about Royalties or have to care about if my game sells or sells a lot and i would have to pay UE4.
- With Asset Store i can have great graphics ( Lux framework etc ...) even on Unity free
- For some Android version of a game i know Unity Free is good enought and Royalties free
- If game sells good i can just buy a Pro license

But the choice is more complicated for people needing last AAA graphics and systems, tools, or more solid engine for big worlds indeed.

 

I don't consider lacking basic engine features, such as rendering to textures, that are expected in pretty much any modern game engine/framework to be "great graphics". Even Blitz3D, which is a very outdated DirectX 7-era game development platform, supports them.

I have no problems with them locking out more advanced systems such as deferred lighting, but the bare essentials for pretty much any modern engine should be available.

It isn't even purely a matter of graphical capability. Unity lacks basic editors for major aspects of the engine. One big example is a shader editor similar to ShaderForge.

Features like these can be made up with the asset store, but it really does begin to feel like Unity is using that as an excuse to avoid the matter.

As for big worlds, Unity can do them just fine. You simply need to load/unload segments of the world and center the loaded segments around the zero point. This is essentially how Bethesda does it.

 

It isn't even a matter of AAA graphics and support for big worlds. Unity can already support large worlds just fine if used intelligently.
Some project not so big , only a big map and stuff on it, and Unity was failing they had to divide level in sections.
Listen at 2:30

What I do find annoying is the lack of certain utilities built into the editor such as a shader system similar to ShaderForge. While there are options in the Unity asset store, it really does begin to feel like they are using it as a crutch to excuse themselves for not having what should really be in there.

I agree Unity is not a small company, why they dont have dedicaced people to each engine part and make the right tools ? shaders and shader editor people , terrain tools and shaders people , 2D tiles editor and other advanced tools people ?Well i'm pretty happy with what is possible even if we must use asset store.
They should perhaps look at what is non specific tools from Asset Store we can find in other engines (shader editor, advanced terrain, advanced particles and physics, visual programming tool like Playmaker etc ... ).
They allready begun improving a lot with new 2D feature, incoming advanced GUI and they already asked what features we would like to see for terrain system.
Who know shader editor could come with Unity 5 ?

 

Well you must of either gotten hold of the 64-bit editor and somehow managed to implement deep level async streaming features. Or you have never tried it...!?

Withholding and scaling back to me isn't intelligent design, it's a trade off because of the tools. The only limitation WE as developers should have is our target hardware. Also to say these aren't issues in CE and or / UE4 begs the questions why it is in Unity?

I'm all for Unity being good at what it's good at, but let's not paint a picture it can do what it can't.

 

Cool. UE4.3 has support for massive worlds right out of the box I don't need to use it "intelligently." Of course, it's not even a matter of using Unity "intelligently" but tricking Unity in to doing what you want. Unity's level streaming has been out of date for years now and it seems it won't be getting its necessary updates until 5.x.

 

Who said anything about Unity's API? ZenGarden doesn't seem to have Unity Pro and I believe async loading is a Pro feature.

Thus I would have to implement my own system for storing and loading cells in the game world. Even better would be to use a database to store the game world (SimpleSQL might do the job). This might also have the benefit of allowing easy modding support.

 

I mentioned Unity's API for a start, fact of the matter is CE or UE4 doesn't fall over when you try to bake lots of terrain neither does it generally fall over when the going gets tough.

You want clustered algorithmic async for loading tile sections, not stitch and load in / hope for the best. I'm not sure why you're saying you can't mod with that functionality? Were talking about swapping tiles / terrain here, not swapping out meshes.

In an open world game, far view terrain tiles and veg are the most important part as a huge amount of the game will consist of it. Deal with that portion effectively and the rest is simple, asyncing meshes (prefabs) / LOD / Culling etc.

Thing is where is the line? Let's say I had Unity's source code, I improve the terrain system and then I improve the particle system. I upgrade physics to improve cloth sim, I want all the fancy features of OpenGL4 so I can publish my game cross platform. Then I sort out issues with the likes of mecanim, I code all the shaders and post and upgrade the renderer / lighting. It never ends..

At some point you need to stop and say hey, am I making a game or an engine here? Because adding / improving toolsets is pretty much what you do when you're making one.

 

Certainly but I would honestly expect CE to be capable of it. Their engine always seemed more ideal for outdoor environments. That UE4 can also handle it doesn't surprise me.

Which at that point you need to ask yourself if Unity's features, especially middle-ware such as Enlighten, make up for the additional headache.

 

Exactly and this brings us all the way around to Unreal 4 and Unity, do you go for initial ease of use and no royalties? Or do you suck it up and take on UE4 and risk the 5% royalty hit on the random chance you make a game that sells. But you've more chance of getting a big game released in UE4, it's all fine and dandy when you're learning Unity.. Issue is when you actually want to start being over-adventurous, Unity is like whoa whoa calm down.. That's it, I'll have none of that!!.

SO! In the ideal world Unity would have the world building / performance and rendering prowess of CryEngine, the toolset of UE4 and keep it's wide range of platform support.

Which may be too much to ask? But Epic aren't holding back, from the recent official threads neither is Unity. All we can do is wait until Unity 5.0 comes out and see what Epic gets up to.

 

This just pushes both companies to do better and create a richer product.
Either way it is a win for users.

 

Epic just donated 10.000 Euro to Blender.

They really care about indies, it seems.

 

Wow they are literally putting their money where their mouth is.

 

Wow, nice!

Before Epic's new pricing model, the 3D pipeline was focused on just the industry standard programs like Max and Maya. Now, with the influx of so many new indie developers, I think they've come to realize just how important Blender support is as well. That's such awesome news!

 

Wow. More proof that Epic is serious about courting indies. Very impressive.

 

Why you think Unity 5 will be so good? I mean.. what exactly is doing better that UE4? Even on paper Unity5 is not impressive at all. UE4 just put GI (besides Lightmass that rocks tbh) in 4.3.. and they are constantly improving. By the time Unity 5 will come out Epic will probable release UE5...

 

Even on paper Unity5 is not impressive at all.
Don't forget a 3D engine offer is not AAA graphics only , it'a also C++ or C#, easy to understand and master framework etc ... and there is also the audience , do you think all indie people target only AAA graphics when they do mobile, 2D games , 2.5D , 3D simple or stylized games (Divinity original Sin, Wasteland 2 etc ...)
Not sure UE4 to be optimized and faster than Unity for medium/small games not needing last gen graphics and needing to run on very large PC range machines ? Same for mobile where Unity is lot better.

From Unity 5 preview and how they organize new physic shader system, it seems they took a look at UE4 and try to make it more easy to handle with some clever easy to use orientation.

 

You are "not sure" then you don't know. Unity better for mobile? That's absolutely false, and depends on zillions of factors. I can make a any mobile device useless with 1 shader and laugh at engine saying is bad. So if you don't take in account bad coding/dev in general for mobile, UE4 is/should be much faster.

 

Any real-world examples?

 

It might not be and in that case I can see a lot of people shifting, Unity 5.0 doesn't need to be better technically. It just needs to be as good and keep the platform reach / ease of use.

BTW I think the opposite of lightmass.

As for UE4 being faster I've found it slow and a GPU hog for PC, even with nothing but base shaders.

 

That's not how their version numbers work. They won't go from 4.9 to 5.0. It'll stay with 4.x and be 4.10.

It'll be interesting to see how Unity 5 performs compared to UE4. Unity 4's performance is probably better compared to an engine of equal graphical ability.

 

Well it was raised as one of my concerns, our target market is PC's with GTX260's and PS4. Sure we can strip UE4 down and cut out anything dynamic. But then, all the tricks to make it look good in the first place kind of disappears with Unity I notice even on lowest quality settings after a decent bake it doesn't look worlds different from highest quality settings.

 

I imagine he is just talking about the speed of development on the UE side. Unity 5.0 release date is an unknown, it might not drop until 2016 for all we know, and by then Epic may have announced and release UE5. Highly unlikely, but the development speed between the two engines (perceived or otherwise) is glaring.

 

Damn. That is one old ass graphics card. Why so low ball on the PC side of things?

 

Sorry they are min specs but still, checking out things like the steam hardware reviews you'd be surprised how much old hardware is out there. The higher the specs, the lower the market spread.

 

No, I'm referring to all of the costs. The largest of which is employing people to do stuff, but then there's also rent on space, utilities, insurance, so on and so forth. Lets not forget that plenty of industry standard software (for instance, 3DS Max) also costs far more than a Unity Pro seat. Even if you're a one man show working from home and not paying yourself to begin with you're essentially spending your potential salary on the project in doing so.

And as someone who has also run their own company yes, I'm quite aware of what you can do when starting up. But I like to get past the "starting up" phase, and at some point - especially for large projects - the chewing gum and balsa wood has to go.

 

Check out what I already wrote on that precise topic. We often buy, test, and discard a widget before building our own.

 

Except that there's so many fantastic games that can be created without needing that kind of tech at all. Sure, it rules out a lot of fully-dynamic realistic-style 3D. Aside from that I can't think of any major way it's impacted my hobby developments.

 

And there are many fantastic games that can be made with specific tech, just because some may not find a case use for specific tech doesn't mean a lot of people aren't interested in some of it. I find 3D tech more of a case use with UE4 as opposed to Unity and the base of use varies quite significantly between Unity and UE4. Epics engine seems to encroach mainly on higher fidelity 3D games.

So if you have no use and you're happy where you are, fantastic. Job done, nothing more is needed.. If not then you have to keep searching and discussing what suits.

 

Sure, I wasn't suggesting otherwise. I'm just pointing out that there's plenty of stuff you can do with the free license, it's not an instant write-off just because there's no render texture support.

I've never understood the mentality of people who complain about what they're given for free. If it doesn't suit your needs then don't use it, find something that does, but don't whinge about other people not giving you enough stuff for nothing. (I'm not saying that either of the posts here were whinging, but whenever people mention this particular shortcoming it reminds me of the many people in the past who've done exactly that.)

 

No comment on the free thing ..

I'm more interested in the pro subs / perp licences and what's happening with Unity 5.0, feedback seems to be rolling. But nothing in the wake of release dates and what's going on?

If it's mid 2015 by the release date, I wonder how many people would hang on?

 

Unity is way, way faster at mobile at present. It's just optimised in so many different ways. No doubt UE4 will catch up. My sources are that I've been serving clients in the mobile sector for years and have my own mobile products out. I have evaluated unreal.

And yourself? Done much evaluation for mobile?

 

So you vote for Enlighten.. OK. What exactly implementation of Enlighten will have Unity 5? You probable have no idea. And you probable do not know exactly how Enlighten works. Looks nice on paper. You have to wait and see how exactly will work inside Unity5.

On the other side, UE4 have ALREADY a superb Lightmass and GI is already here in 4.3 and working. And LPV GI is also under heavy development, and is full real time, no special setup required, you just put it and works:
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Light_Propagation_Volumes_GI

You compare something that do not exist or is only on paper with something that is working already? Interesting..

"base shaders" ? you want to say basic materials in UE4? You do something wrong or you have a super old computer. UE4 material shaders compilation is super advanced to produce best quality/performance per platform. Unless you have a exact example, I can't take you seriously.

 

Voicing our opinions, whether through complaints or otherwise, is important for a product to develop in a useful way. If we're talking about not understanding people, I never understood how someone could withhold their feedback for a free product if it could potentially benefit said product.

Yes, we could go elsewhere. But that only serves to drive away potential paying customers. We want to be paying customers, but as hobbyists we can't justify it when UE4 is such a good deal.

 

Oh I have used Enlighten extensively before, but you're right the *finished* version of Enlighten with Unity is still yet to be reviewed. Enlighten is a good product, so it's not quite paper based thinking on my part.. The LPV in UE4 is buggy and unfinished, don't you think it was one of the first things I tried? Then again, we had it since last year and gave up with it by 4.1.1.

Just because you say Lightmass is amazing, doesn't make it so. Our office runs 780GTX's with I7 3770K's and UE4 on the whole UE4 has ben slow in many regards, whether it's compiling shaders / constantly baking and / or the running of the actual game with base / basic shaders whatever you want to semantically dictate.

Now CryEngine and Unity run lightning quick, more so CE when you start heavily populating scenes. I don't need you to take me seriously, or really care if you do. UE4 is a great product, but it's far from perfect.

If you believe UE4 is the best product, why are you still here?

 

I however, do have a very good idea.

Having used both I'm pretty sure Unity's implementation is totally swag and full of bling. Lightmass is OK but there's a reason people integrate enlighten instead of using lightmass. That reason is that enlighten is just much better. You're welcome to integrate that in UE4 if you want. Nothing stops you from doing it. But lightmass simply isn't as good.

I looked at your post history, Teo. You seem very heavily biased towards UE4, which is no bad thing. It's a great engine. But I must express curiosity why you're here. I think logically, it's because you prefer Unity.

 

I figured that. Also thought that 7/8 year old card by the time Fallen Spirit comes out might be a bit on the old side but hey if that works out then more power to ye.

 

I think this is only true for graphically simple titles. For top notch 3d graphics UE4 can deploy stuff to mobile that would be dead-slow or impossible with Unity 4.x. E.g. have a look at the Rivalry demo or another of the mobile 3d demos.