There's no such thing as free

He said they should generate that much revenue, not that they should get paid that much salary. From that revenue, you need to take away licensing costs, distribution costs, infrastructure costs, marketing costs, etc, etc. Then you have to take away the costs of benefits that aren't included in the salary. I have no idea how much revenue a 25 person team generates. But business income isn't the same as personal income. It goes away quicker than you think.

 

How can they generate a million dollars a day? Even if the game cost $30 and they kept $10 on each game that would mean selling 100,000 units per day. Or 36.5 million units in a year. That would mean 1 in 10 people in America had to buy your game. A little unrealistic?

 

In my previous position, we targeted $200k / person in revenue. Now that was across everyone, support staff included.

Looking at a half a million dollar monthly payroll was a little stressful

Edited: I forgot to mention that this was not a game development shop

 

As with your previous example, you aren't counting the costs associated with running and maintaining a game. Large games have more costs. Think of Clash, it is ~3million a day, with team of 15. Our team is 20-25. (which is actually very big). The large game costs more to produce/maintain, which is is a larger team which costs more money, etc, etc... If you are talking about a team of 25, you are also talking about a large scale operation.

 

I think that is the exception rather than the rule. I don't think every game earns that much.

And really the other costs are minimal. A building to house your workers maybe $250k. $2000 extra for each worker for a PC or dev kit is a very small percentage of each workers salary. And the only other cost is advertising.

Like the other poster said $100,000 for each worker not $10 million is more realistic.

 

100k is too low. Unless you're paying people 30k

 

Wow, that's impressive. I recently saw a list of the top total revenue / employee count and that figure would put you in the top 10, maybe even top 5.

Apple was there (obviously), HP was there (that was a surprise because they have ), Google was there but I think they were in the lower half of the list.

EDIT: Must have been only tech companies in that list, I did a search for it in general and oil & gas companies seem to lead the way with some impressive ratios.

 

Sure it is not common. The most common is making no money at all. But if you have a team of 25, you are talking about games in that range. A team of that size is not make games with revenue of 1mill year. (well, at least not more than once, company would pretty much be done after that)

Expenses are way beyond that. Insurance, staff (non dev), software, data lines, electricity, heath care, taxes, furniture, hosting/backend, and on and on.

 

Well in the UK we have the NHS, so companies don't pay for health care. Electricity is peanuts to run a PC. Taxes is included in the salary. Furniture, a desk and table for each employee maybe $200 each. I still can't see where the expense is.

 

Unity is free while you are not making 100,000 dollars in salary.

 

Few things to consider

1. Good companies do pay healthcare
2. Holiday pay
3. Sick pay
4. Maternity pay
5. Pension contributions
6. Ers National Insurance contributions
7. Office space
8. Administrative fees of having an employee (payroll etc)
9. Recruitment costs
10. Utilities for that employee

Although I agree that with you that I can't see how a team of 25 needs to generate $1m/day. Game development has been occurring for years with larger teams and lower revenues.

 

@yoonitee remind me to never work for you, if the subject ever comes up in the future.

Yes, if you are making games on your own. On the other hand if you are making games for a games company you need a pro licence per seat if the company earns over 100k

 

I know.

 

Very true, they don't need to make that a

 

You've just listed a whole lot of stuff that is covered by the one word "salary". e.g. "sick pay". You don't get extra money for being sick. You just get the same yearly salary. That's not an extra cost. What is "holiday pay"? You don't get extra money to go on holiday. "Utilities". Your scraping the barrel there. How much does a stapler cost? None of these add up to $10 million dollars per worker. "Office Space"? So if you own the building you are charged for the air inside it too? I don't think so. But good try for some creative accounting.

 

Lol that is an agreement between employee and employer. Has nothing to do with salary. Even the guys in the shop that get paid hourly have sick/personal/vacation time that is paid.
Everyone should start thinking before they post stuff that is so far off base it's not funny. Have you every worked? No then you have no idea about the working world

 

This is wrong info, please remove Source 2 engine as you don't know anything about it :
- Royalties or entirely free ?
- Different taxes for games produced with Source 2 for Steam distribution ?
- Right to publish outside of steam ?
- Source access ?

 

But it is so much easier just talking about stuff and pulling things out your rear without doing some research! Where is the fun in that?

 

It reminds me some people trashing UE4 or says Unity doing as good without never trying UE4 tools and features.

What is the goal of this thread ?
- Yes UT5 Free is great
- No it's not the best tools and graphics
- No it is not the best solution for all projects and people

Be happy with UT5 Personnal Edition, but don't say it's the best solution.
Many big companies and indies prefer 5% Royalties, or stay with Crysis.

It's a useless thread once again.

 

Okay the original poster made a very valid point, but I think a lot have people have not really thought through there replies.

Firstly if you run a 5 person team and make £100,000 sure you have to buy Unity 5 times and assuming each user is deploying to all platforms that's 5 x $4,500 (although you'd negotiate discount if you had any sense) which comes to $22,500. But the reality is that in a 5 person team if that's all you had, chances are only 1 or 2 would actually use Unity, the others would be 2d graphics, sales, sound, 3d artists, marketing, video edtiors etc.

And more to the point if you was only making $100,000 in a year, this wouldn't sustain a 5 person team, we have a 3 person team and require a minimum of $200,000 to run the business, we have 1 Pro license for all 3 platforms, but on top of that require Adobe licenses, Microsoft Licenses, Hosting costs, all these add up. (I spent $8,000 on a reporting suite just the other day)

So sorry to say, if you are using $100,000 as the example, then you're only talking about 1 developer. Believe me Unity Pro is cheap compared to the other software we use, especially for what it does.

 

I don't think you live in the same world some of the rest of us do. When people are not at work due to being sick or on holiday they are no longer contributing towards the business needs. There is a cost associated with both of those, wether it be over-staffing to cover such eventualities or covering it through overtime/contract work. This is a real cost.

How many businesses own their building? Office space leased by the m^2. Employees take up space believe it or not.

I haven't said that it costs $10 million dollars per worker, in fact if you bothered to read much at all you would have seen I agreed that I think zombiegorilla's estimate was very high.

Utilities would not cover staplers. That's stationary.

 

There is no extra cost. The cost is in your imagination. If you pay your workers a salary of $100,000 for a years work, you expect them to have holidays and sick leave during that time. (And even take weekends, nights and lunch breaks off too!)

Lots of businesses own their own buildings because it works out cheaper than renting.

Anyway we're probably just disagreeing about semantics.

 

You don't understand one thing : Many people and companies are okay with the 5% royalties.
They seek best features and tools first, they don't seek the cheapest solution.

It's like cars :
- Unity = good char , good speed , simple to drive, for almost all clients , very cheap maintainance
- Unreal4 = Ferrari car, fast speed, harder to drive, more limited clients , expensive maintainance

Some people will drive the Ferrari , it has a cost, but they prefer this car features whatever is the price to pay.

 

Odd... somehow my response post was truncated. What I intended to say:

Just to clarify, that wasn't an estimate or requirement or anything. I was saying that studio/team that has 25 people requiring Unity (or whatever engine), is huge, and should be capable of easily doing that kind of revenue, as much smaller teams make that and more. Anyone putting together a team of that size is going for the big bucks.

The point I was trying to make is that completely nonsense number (25 devs using an engine and making only a 1mil in a year). That is about twice the size of the teams making the biggest games in the market.

Our team is about (currently) 20-25. About 12 actually use Unity (ui/tech-art/eng). The artists don't, and some of designers. Actually, our core team is closer to 40 counting the product and design teams. But that doesn't include backend, tech-ops and shared stuff like BI and IT. And it was a very large game, the mobile equivalent of AAA. At no point did we ever have 25 people working in Unity. The cost of Unity is trivial to the point of being a steal. During the development of the game we easily spent more on beer than on our engine. Our titles are in that range, with tons of games making a fair bit more than ours.

If you look any of the top (not console) games, you would hard pressed to find a title with that many devs working in engine. Hearthstone was around 15, Clash is close to that (around 12 core I think). And those numbers are for the team, not all need be engine users. And if you look at the successful indies you find teams are much smaller. Space Ape for a recent example.

Indeed, your example of 200k is probably pretty accurate for most successful teams. But 25 is twice size of a typical "large" team. As the teams go up in size, so do the costs and not proportionally. The top chart games are spending massive amounts of capital in marketing alone. As it increases it costs more and more to make less. Not only that, but costs curve up sharply by the size of company. The reality is that a small company can produce almost the same game as a large company for a fraction of the cost.

Even for team our size, it cost was the only factor UE would be nearly 10 times that of Unity.

Also, above you mentioned recruiters, I just recently learned what they make. Damn.

 

People, sure, hobbyists, small devs and such. Companies, not really. Royalties on software isn't a common practice, at least not serious/successful companies. Sometimes revenue sharing if there was very direct relationship. But just a percent royalty... not at all common in professional development.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you've never ran a business. Let's say that I have a restaurant. I need two waitresses. So I hire two waitresses. Now one of those waitresses takes off for a few months due to pregnancy. I'm screwed. I go out of business and everyone loses their job because for some number of weeks I am understaffed. In the real world, of course, I would hire three waitresses. Or I would hire a temp during the maternity leave. In both cases, I am paying two waitresses to do one job.

Owning your building makes no difference. You are paying a mortgage instead of a lease. It is still a cost. And commercial property isn't like residential property. In my fantasies, I've budgeted out my future studio so many times I can't count. Commercial property is expensive. It isn't like buying a house.

 

Imagine if Photoshop did the same thing.

 

I would be deeply in debt.

 

That's not true. You can estimate the holidays and some average for days off for being sick but it can still cost you depending on who of the team gets sick and when. For example it can affect hugely two important guys get sick at the same time and rest of the team are dependent of their work.

I don't think so at least for gaming or anything tech related. Investing a huge amount of money to a building or paying a mortgage is a one thing but then owning a building brings a lot of responsibilities. You would have to have own janitor possibly other type workers to do a bunch of extra things and manage stuff related the building. I don't think the dev team would like to manage fire extinguisher validity dates and emergency plans ever few years, go throw sand on slippery road every time it gets icy or get rid of the snow on the walkway or etc. etc.

edit: seems HemiMG posted similar things

 

It's actually even more complex than that. If you lease a building, you can write off the entire cost on your taxes. If you purchase the building, the write-off must be amortized over the life of the building. (You can write-off the interest payments though). So that's another thing adding to the 'which one is cheaper' equation. A lot of it is going to depend on what is available for what terms and how long you plan to stay in that location before needing to upgrade to larger digs.

 

If it is not common,, i imagine that's why big companies or big titles make some deal with Epic to not pay the Royalties, as many people say.

 

Unreal never had royalties until last year. UDK had royalties, that was hobbyist/indie tool. Before (and now) studios just pay the license fee. Unreal Pro essentially.

 

Yup. Here (Silicon Valley ). Office space is always changing hands. We're on our third move.

 

I suppose it's lucky I don't employ anyone then.

How much do you think you'd have to earn before you considered employing someone?

For example if you where earning $100,000 a year, you could employ someone on $50,000. And spend $10,000 on co-working space and $2000 on giving them a laptop. Even if they didn't add any value to your business you could still survive.

I know some freelancers who work in co-working spaces who have so much work they employ someone part time to help out with the work load.

 

The catch is that "free" to you means freeloading off someone else's (in Unity's case, MANY someone else's) blood, sweat, tears and money. It may be "free" to you, but only because they are paying for you - it sure isn't "free" to them.

This seems to be forgotten (conveniently, I think) by a lot of people judging by "reviews" of one star I see in App stores. "This game is bad because it has benefits for people who buy it", "I didn't get infinite for free", "This game is bad because I ran out of levels after 5 months of free play and refuse to pay $0.99 to get 10x as many", "this app is bad because they refused to give me free support and fix a small issue just because everyone who uses it won't give them a dime no matter what they do". And of course by "pirates" which really is just a convenient word for "thief".

Not saying this is you, but saying yes, you're absolutely right - there's no such thing as free, it's always simply a question of if someone is getting compensated for their hard work.

 

Actually, I use both depending on my client and can the same results in both with a little work. It's more like:

Unity - Easier to get results in your game logic, easy to get good visuals, harder to get amazing visuals
UE4 - Easier to get amazing visuals, harder to get good game logic results.

I charge more to my clients for UE4, because I have to pay a percentage and it takes longer to get to the end result. If you can't get great results in Unity, it's your fault, don't blame the tools!

 

I thought work-for-hire was exempt from having to pay royalties for UE4?

 

That depends what type work it is how it will be used. I think the rule was something like if the customer can earn with it someone has to pay the 5%.

 

In my circumstance I'm being paid to provide a completed product for use in a work environment, for example a 3d map on an exhibition booth, Epic see it as I'm being paid for providing a finished product so I'm liable, although I think what sales said is essentially the end user is paying me, so I have to pay them. So be careful of the legalities of contract work!

 

I've downloaded UE4 yesterday but I'll still be using Unity to publish. I'm just looking around.

And what I've noticed is UE4, browsing their asset store, is that the popular perception that since UE4 Engine is believed to be better quality so you can charge more for assets in their asset store although the assets are no better, and in some cases, the same assets by the same makers, as in the Unity Asset Store.

Engine quality I haven't compared Unity 5 to UE4 yet and won't because it'd be a project on it's own to compare apples to apples and implement the same game using the same version levels of openGL and/or DirectX engines so that I could honestly evaluate one engine compared to the other. Isn't that what these industry experts like Gamasutra are supposed to be experts on and have the resources to evaluate fairly and technically competent? And they haven't. With all these free engines they need to objectively and technically evaluate them for their readers.

 

No, you won't get a good visuals as UE4.
For example terrain is outdated, you will need to pay lot more from the Asset Store , while UE4 provides you fully flexible terrain shaders, better effects and graphic features (TXAA, shadows etc ...) , advanced particles, and tools without paying anything.
You are in a particular case , as you are someone doing work for others , so indeed you have obligations and fast results needs. While other indie people working for themselves are free to take the engine they want without any pressure from any client.

 

Yes, UE4 isn't so silly as to let someone that thinks they are being clever, pay themselves CEO salaries and create a game that is a money loser on paper only. Unity isn't daft either.

 

That is the one thing I want to see, I have a terrain taken from satellite data that I could never get to look realistic so I didn't try in Unity. Maybe the reasonably possible in UE4. Just for my own curiosity, publishing wise that doesn't interest me (yet).

 

Well personally I wouldn't use the terrain in either, UE4's terrain system is not great, it's just better than Unitys, as I said you can get the same visuals you just have to spend extra time, write your own shaders etc, I don't use any of the build in shaders in either so, it makes very little difference and I'm used to coding HLSL back from the old days of Direct X when engines didn't really exist.

Basically, everyone should stop assuming about both of them, they are both great engines, when I was a kid people compared comodores and spectrums, NES and Master System, the reality is they were all great, UE4 and Unity are both great, you are the ingredient that makes the game great, try them both, pick the one you find that makes you most comfortable, for me Unity is better for my own projects as to me the gameplay is far more important so I spend more time on that element, which in Unity is easier to get results.

 

Yes there is such a thing!

 

I didn't see this mentioned in this thread which I feel is relevant if you are comparing the Price of Unity and Unreal:

 

But then this company should pay for your Pro licence or you could ask for more as the games company does not own royalties to a 3rd party(as opposed to UE4, where they would have to pay 5% royalties).

There is a small margin of turnover where UE4 would be indeed cheaper than Unity as its $3000 limit applies per project. So theoretically it would be possible for a tiny company to sell several low-class games but thanks to the limit they would have to pay far less than 5% royalties in total.
If this company was located in a "non-western" country with low salaries, Unity's 4500 per seat wouldn't be negligible anymore and licence cost could exceed what they would have to pay for Unreal.

But beside that, I don't see a case where UE4 would be cheaper.

 

It's been mentioned. It is very expensive and you'll want do that upfront. Not an option for most.

 

Ya, give me that problem, that's the problem I would want to have.

 

A lot of people think to seem Unity is free until $100k but that's not 100% true. Unity FREE is only free until $100k. If you want to use Unity Pro or any other license (Android, etc.), you have to buy them even if you make under $100k.