UE4 3k price drop and democratization

They've hired quite a few people since that part of their origin story.

 

IMO Epic is going to die a slow and idiotic death. (Drawn out by their Corporate owners) If the Unity asset store is only making a small amount for Unity then epic can't hope to be rich from theirs or from the new Unreal Tournament. So they must be banking on the revenue share from games which is a moronic idea as only a small portion will make that much.

 

This assumes that Epic will ONLY rely on sales of their engine and not make any more games of their own. Right now, Epic is getting a crapton of paying testers for their engine to help them work out the kinks. Random Indie A finding a bug is less time spent by Epic employee finding that same bug when working on whatever game Epic may be working on at the time.

 

Maybe, some are saying they will have a new game for Xbox One exclusive but I was under the impression that they made most of their money from licensing UE3 not from their games.

 

I imagine custom licensing of UE4 to studios and other entities would still be how most of their income is derived. Keep in mind that UE4 is just the latest iteration of the most utilized engine (for AAA) on the planet. The $19 per month/5% royalty is aimed squarely at hobbyists and indies, and any income derived from UT and other community collaborations is just icing on the cake for Epic.

 

They have a game called Fortnite in development and there is of course the new Unreal Tournament. Epic has been at this awhile, they have ridden out many changes in the games industry. I'm not worried about them making it as they have a track record of not just making it, but leading, something they are once again doing. Remember Gears of War is a billion dollar franchise, one that they sold to Microsoft, I can assure you it wasn't for any small amount of money given the sales and revenue that the first 3 Gears of War titles generated.

Games, technology, and IP. Looks like Epic has a pretty diverse revenue stream. Not a candidate I would pick for a 'slow and idiotic death'.

 

Epic have deals with big companies buying and using their engine. Indie access to UE4 is specific area, like said above i think also having lot of people using it and finding bugs and problems 24/24h will just help them making strong and stable lot more faster. This is solid company doing solid 3D engine, they can do any business they want with it, indie people represents a good side revenue and will make lot of advertising , advertising also for people working on industry company that can try it and could say , ok let's adopt it for our next game.
UDK3 and 50% Royalties didn't worked, people making games didn't moved to it, they just making a new offer that should work now and make more move to it now.

 

And a lot of people trying to get into the games industry will have UE4 skills. That will be a factor in where large companies go for their engine. Things are a lot easier if you can recruit staff and have them be productive quickly.

 

Epic is already about to release version 4.2 of UE4. Lots of new templates including a car template will come with it. I wish Unity updated with this frequency and at a lower price But on the flip side, they will never have my beloved Mecanim

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?6124-Unreal-Engine-4-2-Update-Preview&p=47103#post47103

 

Damn FABRIK part of the engine, vehicle editor looks slick too. They are definitely working to earn that $20 a month.

Very nice looking stylized rendering too.

 

Nice job with the vehicle template...

 

in the end everyone will win. using UE or Unity.
have you noticed the amount of blog posts on unity's site? the amount of unity staff participating in the forum lately? blame UE for that!

also, UE 4.2 already!? and their public roadmap?! aaaaaa epic is on fire!

 

I skipped through 18 or so pages of this thread so I may have missed it, but did those tests include reducing Unreal's visual settings to be roughly equivalent to Unity's?

 

^^ ShadowK PM'ed me and said he is flying now on ue4. If you look later in this thread I think he said Slate UI was slagging them. He explains it much better somewhere in this thread (I think)

Would be nice if he gave an update though in his own words

 

I don't think Epic quite 'gets' the overall appeal of Unity. Someone asked Epic about adding a mecanim equivalent in last week's twitch stream and they said it wasn't on their agenda as if they didn't even see the appeal

 

I haven’t played with Persona much yet, but my impression is that it offers all the same stuff as Mecanim - retargeting, blend trees etc - except that it already has support for state machine transitions, which isn’t arriving until Unity 5. As I said, I may be wrong but to me it appears to be a direct equivalent to Mecanim.

I wish I could join those Twitch sessions, it's 3am in my time zone.

 

Mecanim's big draw is animation retargeting...which UE4 can very well do (even UDK could): https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/intro-to-animation-retargeting-in-ue4

And they already had animation trees/fsms. So they already have something that serves the main purposes of Mecanim.

Edit: ninja'd

 

I thought that this is technology war..

but this is money war?? Tencent is really a huge company

Unity must have a sense of urgency

but quantity is not everything.. like IBM VS APPLE

in fact in many cases Unity Team was defeated by one man team (eg NGUI, PLAY MAKER, A* Pathfinding Project Pro, Shader Forge,TNET, Master Audio, Final IK... )

So Asset Store is the best power for Unity

 

Idiotic slow death? Are you f'king kidding me? LMAO!

Do you even know who's backing Epic Games? They were "partially" acquired by "Tencent Holdings" - the fifth-largest Internet company in the world after Google, Amazon, Ebay and Facebook as of April 2014. These guys got MONEY and they are not afraid to use it as weapon. It is very obvious they got some HEAVY WEIGHTS backing them to take over the game development market. They can literally making UE4 completely free for years to come until the whole market is theirs before they start charging people. This is basically their strategy, on a milder scale. They have the ammunitions to turn up the heat on Unity and UT seems to be completely oblivious to it.

I think the grand strategy for them is to soak up the market share in China which is experiencing an explosive growth in game development segment and they are just starting and is already enormous - and they are using the low cost strategy since most Chinese income are still way below western standard - which means the pricing strategy has to adapt accordingly. They are not just aiming for the western market share, but the WHOLE WORLD - and vast majority of the world's population are not exactly on the same income scale as OECD nations which accounts for less than 17% of the world's population. Vast majority (83%) of the world's population are on a income of less than $10,000 USD per year while the OECD average is $42,903 USD. You can clearly see the difference in pricing strategy and why Unity is still sticking to their $1500 per license model. UT is not aiming for the whole world, they are only focusing on the OECD nations.

Even without their big bucks sugar daddy backers - Epic Games is still making banks WITH THEIR OWN GAMES - Infinity Blade series for example, Gear of Wars series, Unreal Tournament series...etc. By comparison Unity has produce NO COMMERCIAL GAME until last month when they partner up with some small indie studios to produce and publish them. I forgot the names already because these games are irrelevent. Basically Unity has no commercially viable game on market so far. UNITY GAME ENGINE ALL THEY GOT.

I fear it is UT that is dying a slow and idiotic death. They are not responding to the charging market conditions and while it is not immidiately reflecting on their bottom line yet, the boat is already turning - it just takes some time. This is just like Apple vs IBM clone, and the current iOS vs Android, or Torque vs Unity! Unity is basically following the Garage game's foot steps and becoming irrelevent by not adapting to the market conditions when competitors are getting serious (Crytek, Epic Games) and taking advantage of them.

 

It is a technology war. And technology COST MONEY!
More money means more resources to throw into R&D (Research and Development), and hire better and more talented people (bigger salary!).

And right now Epic is winning already - they already have better technology than Unity, the reason why their engine didn't take over the market as much as UT is because of their issue of usability and affordability. Unity had the edge on both before, but I don't think they do now.

You don't think Epic Games will not implement an Asset Store in the future? Unity does not have a patent on putting an online store inside a game engine you know.

 

Dat built in FABRIK....damn :/

 

@I am da bawss
Epic is the world's leading game company, Epic is the best game engine company they have a lot of money
I was surprised to hear that UE is alread UE 4.2 However,Unity released 4.3 six months ago

But What about Unity? Unity is most powerful game asset store company

Of course, I do not know what will happen to the future. the competition is only just beginning

Epic have Best Game, best technology, a lot of money..
Now, Unity have best asset store Just that's it

 

Please...Epic still has option to license engine as before without subscription and without 5%, you just have to pay XXXK$ upfront, and large AAA companies use this option as before.

 

Well, that's where I see the problem of people suggesting Unity add a 19$+5% subscription model. Yes, Epic has that subscription model, but to get rid of the 5% royalties you have to pay them quiet an amount of money.
If you want Unity to have the 19$+5% subscription, they'll have to considerably increase the cost of the perpetual royalty-free license.

 

Am I the only person alive who doesn't understand this debate? Maybe I'm just part of the elitist 1%, but this seems like a lot of speculation and nonsense from people who can in no way influence business decisions. Why do so many think they are entitled to whatever payment structure equates to "free"? $1500 is not a lot of money.

Replace Unity, Unreal, Cry, and Source with ANY OTHER COMPANY NAMES (Ford, Toyota, BMW, Nissan, and VW, for example) and you'll see just how ridiculous this all comes off.

These game engines are dev tools. Buy the right tool for the job and the way you do the job. Don't use a hammer where you need a screwdriver. Stop being cheap -- the universe doesn't owe you free software.

 

I'll say the inbuilt FPS counter can be taken with a pinch of salt, it doesn't reflect the actual performance or latency stats. It's to do with how the slate UI is built and the impact it has on the GPU..

Add a toggled FPS counter to a build and don't worry about performance until you have a game together.

 

No guys, UE4 for sure does not have full blown animation retargeting. You absolutely, 100%, cannot retarget animations from 2 totally different skeletons. This is clearly stated in their docs and in twitch streams. I also verified this myself (I'm a coder by trade, but can animate/rig sculpt as a backup)

Now you can retarget animations between different characters linked to the same skeleton.

Here is the quote, it was highlighted in that link I provided above:

[edit] Now if anyone has ever worked around this I'd love to see it! I would be stoked to be wrong about this lol. Luckily I already have my characters but it would be nice if it supported Human retargeting like mecanim as well

 

I've heard in one of their community spot videos that FABRIK will be their first full body IK iteration and it will support animation retargetting with different skeletons (size and number of bones). I don't remember however which video was.

 

Good news then! Thank you

 

What's not to understand about the debate? Toyota releases a shiny new car with all sorts of new features and an attractive new leasing option, and suddenly people aren't so keen on Ford's old model and paying the full sticker price upfront. Ford promises next year's model is going to just as fancy, and maybe they'll start considering offering better leasing terms. It's not ridiculous--it's business.

Game engine dev tools are (suddenly) a competitive market. Why would anyone stick with a company when they can get a better deal somewhere else? The universe doesn't owe any company free sales.

Unity has a lot of momentum a great product, but they can still fail if they don't make some good decisions. For the first time they are actually running into some stiff competition which is great for customers.

 

@ Captain, very true the only people who stand to win from this is us. It's actually nice to have a choice for a change, before UE4 Unity was the only real option for smaller indies.

 

UE4's road map shows that they expect to have re-targeting between non-identical skeletons included by August. This will be similar to mecanim I think

 

There are folk that are trying to get rid of Unity Free but I think it's more likely buying a perpetual license will cost a lot more if they can establish competiveness with UE4 on big titles.

Most big companies are using mobile for advertising and Unity is an absolute steal compared to traditional advertising costs. So much as smile walking by a car dealership and watch your mail box be flooded with expensive advertising.

Unity perpetual licenses are very low priced for the big companies and as I said an absolute steal for companies such as Disney. Disney produced 2 different DVDs for two different theme parks and included request forms for a copy of the DVD in the United States Postal Service address change requests to order a copy of the DVD. Want to guess want that cost?

 

The asset store is currently thinking of having their publishers signing for exclusivity with them.... I guess their felt that UE4 is heading towards an online content store as well and want to have their fellow publishers stick with unity asset store ...
seems like the engine battle is on all fronts...

 

And the battle will be decided by money. Currently, there is much more money backing UE4.

 

Well that's a load of crap. What are they offering in exchange for exclusivity? People that make content don't gain any value from that deal, in fact they lose it. All the value from exclusivity goes to the platform owner.

 

They're currently thinking of all the privileges and advantages to offer to those who sign for exclusivity. nothing is decided yet. the unity asset store publishers ' Google group is currently brainstorming regarding that stuff. If this happens I guess a whole brand new revisited asset store will appear with more exposure, sales and other advantages for those who sign up... Just a guess as I'm not part of the unity's team.

 

If such incentives come about be aware that it's perfectly fair - you don't have to opt-in if you don't want to. Disclaimer: I don't know anything about it, just my 2 pence on this sort of thing before someone decides it's against human rights and free speech or something.

 

The AssetStore is already heavily biased and favors a bunch of vendors over others.

I really wonder if this has to do with that mentioned Google Group? Maybe if you're a part of that, you get your privileges... Where can I find that Group?

 

Honestly it's easy to setup LLCs and/or use new of these forum handles as a presence in both stores. Indeed, I saw a complaint that asset store owners' assets were being slightly altered and then resold by others in Unity's own Asset Store already. If there were a exclusivity agreement brought into effect, those that want to sell in both can though not recognizably the same product. Refactoring code and the Retopo/Retexture of models isn't difficult. There are only a handful of products that are worth the effort to do that though.

That said, I see many products in the current Unity Asset Store that already look to be small variations of same product. So It maybe be legal for them to do an exclusivity agreement but it's not worth the enforcement efforts.

 

I think that will change if they add in the quality control reporting in the Unity Editor to actual report Asset Store package usage and errors caused by that usage. Rather messy to implement I imagine though.

 

Most of those who publish stuff on the asset store have received an invite to be part of the group... there is no privileges of any kind here. Just send an email to the asset store saying that you'd like to be part of the publisher's google group if you never received any invite.

 

Absolutely, publishers will decide whether or not they want to do be exclusive. Maybe they'll implement that on a per asset basis as well ... who knows...

Edit: As I said before it's something in the air... Maybe it'll take forever to be implemented or even forgotten

 

@Venged, etc

Thanks guys I was unaware of that road map. Very exciting

 

No I don't have special privileges. It's a myth that moderators are somehow special snowflakes with more access. If I know something that's going on, I pretty much won't touch the subject.

If I comment on something, it's usually just as a forum member, ie just my 2 pence Both sides of the coin are still the same coin.

Back on topic: I think it might actually be a good thing to have an incentives program because it might just make it fair. If right now it's staff picks, then this should go in a staff picks section like on google play or appstore, instead of the front page (except for feature). Front page icons should probably be done via some sort of incentives thing + some computer-y decisions.

I don't sell assets so I don't know. But I do buy them regularly.

 

Their retargeting only works with the same skeleton (just different sizes). It's not like mecanim that works with any humanoid skeleton. Not to mention mecanim is far easier to set up.

 

I didn't have too much trouble setting up my animation states. If you have written some blueprints everything should be pretty easy. They have some pretty good tutorials but I just simply followed their example templates and built on top of that

 

On the flip-side of that, mecanim's retargeting really only works with humanoid skeletons.

 

Wow, really? Sounds like UT is scared.
Asset Store is truely one of the biggest advantage UT has right now, but much like what Apple had the advantage before compare to other mobile phone makers - the number of apps in App Store was the selling point for Apple for many years (they even featured predominantly in their ads) but now Google has largely caught up. UT can't expect Asset Store sellers to stick with them if the competitor's market is going to be larger. They can try to sign exclusivity all they want, but if their own pricing structure is not changing more and more people will switch side and suddenly the table will turn on them that they cannot turn back.

One of the major thing drives engine sell is academic institution - people often sticks with software they were taught in school - and institution often choose the options that are cheapest and most cost effective. Since game development has become institutionalized - there are a lot of schools that are teaching people to use Unity. But as UE4 becomes more popular due to being most cost effective - more students (who has little money) will demand their school to teach them UE4, and that will have follow on effect and eventually, most of the curriculums on game development will center around UE - and the market will eventually become theirs as Unity fall into obscurity.

 

Scared or merely practising good business sense?

OK so you release nipple invaders, but a competitor releases teat invaders. All things equal, the market is now divided by 50%. That's not being scared, that's called retaining your market share.

If that's scared, then every successful business in the entire world lives in a state of perpetual fear, including Apple.