UE5

That has happened before...

 

I don't exactly know your use-case but I always use leantween to animate UI. It is a much better system to animate UI. Legacy animation system is slightly confusing plus in my case where I use it to create transition's tweening system is better perf wise.

 

Epic is still a firefest, burning them Fortnite creds left and right. I really wonder how much money they make on the engine.

 

If I recall correctly it was somewhere around 100mln$. But who cares, at least Epic had guts to make game on their engine and they had immense luck with it. Now they swim in money and can do whatever they want

 

And that's only part of it. They recently received $1 billion in funding from various companies that buy into their tech and their vision, including $200 million from Sony.

For sure. Epic has been doing that from the start, way back to the original Unreal. This means the developers there know what the engine needs in order to make production-ready games. Frustratingly, Unity refuses to do the same.

Announcing a $1 Billion Funding Round to Support Epic’s Long-Term Vision for the Metaverse

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/announcing-a-1-billion-funding-round-to-support-epics-long-term-vision-for-the-metaverse

 

They clearly worked hard and made good decisions along the way, but I do think the "immense luck" part should be in bold ^^. The game launched pretty much DOA - before cashing in on the royale trend.

 

So all those wildly successful unreal fps games didn't exist? hmmmmm

 

True they were lucky, but they wouldn't challenge the luck and profit from it, if they didnt try dont u think? They took the risk and developed the game, it paid off, kudos to them. Luck or not, someone made the decision "Hey lets make a game" and then "Hey lets try to add this type of game mode" and it was a success , u need to help the luck u know.

 

Luck is something that happens all on it's own.

WHen you do a lot of hard work and present yourself ready for opportunity, that's called "getting what you deserve."

 

Our school switching in August.

I think for them it's not a separate thing at all. One feeds of the other and so on. Imagine the advertising Fortnight does for Unreal Engine and visa Versa.

 

https://blog.unity.com/games/say-hello-to-the-new-starter-asset-packages
Some faith regained

 

Nice. This should've been a thing a long, long time ago.

 

Y

Yup, a tiny step in the right direction though.

 

I don't see how Epic making most of their money from Fortnite is somehow against them, while Unity making most of their money from ads is whatever.

 

Not moral judgement, just indicates specialty.

Both make a game engine. One makes big money from games made with game engine, other makes money from ads. This proves nothing, but it does indicate something. One small detail fits into bigger picture.

 

However the fact remains that Unity has to make money by selling services, and Epic makes money by giving you services, because your game has to make over a million dollars first.

The business models being so different leads to a different monetisation strategy. If Epic paywalls anything, they're shooting themselves in the foot as they can only gain money if your game earns over a million dollars, and only then on the portion after a million dollars.

Unity has to make money in the classic way by selling these services, including a strategy of selling logo removal, by making the logo less attractive as well as hunting people via analytics and subscription offers. I used to be a big fan of non-royalties, but as time goes by I'm seeing the results of each strategy. Epic's one means you get everything free, big stuff too. Bink, networking services, Quixel, various engine tech and so on.

Unity side, you're given bare bones and have to pay for each value add.

This isn't a criticism of the technologies or engines but simply how a different business model really can offer your game a lot more chances to succeed and it's worth considering when choosing an engine, for example mobile probably is best with Unity, and something more ambitious needing middleware is best off with Unreal.

 

I never thought about that. Well, I've never really looked into it.

Seems like one business model is more likely to empower developers while the other is kind of more parasitic, for lack of a better word. Sort of the same way once you get a little money you buy real estate, then force others to pay rent. People seem to think this is normal but to me it seems like, a high form of evil.

I guess it's not 1:1 because land is a finite resource and having place to live is like, fundamental human right. Whereas Unity has built something from nothing and offers it as a service. But the whole nickel and dime you for every little thing along the way doesn't seem conducive to empowering people to make more money. Seems like will prevent growth and act more like a filter, only letting through those who are already advantaged.

Just speculation but my intuition after interacting with both engines and casually observing from a distance does tell me one has a much healthier culture than the other.

 

Yeah as of right now I think Epic's business model treats developers very, very nicely and Unity's is stressful and grabby. Many features that could empower developers are locked behind paywalls, some quite big and not in proportion to what the thing offers.

Buying Bolt from their own store and selling it back to us was a really sour move. It was a terrible, terrible business move, one that absolutely dented my faith in the company.

 

I didn't even know about that. That's straight bottom feeder maneuver.

Like the other night a drunk guy stops by and wants to mow my lawn cause he is about to get evicted and needs money. Three hundred dollars to be precise. I tell him if he comes back in morning I'll pay him $50 bucks to mow the lawn (it's tiny lawn.)

He doesn't show of course. The whole thing is a farce, he is a known character in the neighborhood.

That's what I call a bottom feeder. Not somebody you would ever depend upon. You try to help him, he doesn't help you.

 

Was referring to to Fortnite though. Launch reviews says it all.

Vanilla Fortnite was very different, meet with a likewarm reception. Seeing the battle royale craze, they basically ditched the original concept and went full on BR. Had they not, it would've been long forgotten.

Everyone was rolling their eyes when a new studio went forward with their version of the BR genre. To Epics credit, they where one of the first to copycat.

Never said it was against them, was simply pondering on its base earnings.

 

Well, that is not 100% true. Epic is just a rich company that is used to throwing money all over the place to crush the competition.

Look at Epic Game Store. It would be absolute fail if they would not offer games for free. And lets be honest, that is the only reason most of Epic Game Store users are using it. Epic Games Store haven't made a single cent in last few years and Epic does not count on it being profitable for next 3-4 years. That is the mentality of Epic Games.

That is true of Unreal Engine as well. Why would the acquire Quixel and so many other companies? Because they have the money to do so. Without acquisitions, UE is pretty much on pair with Unity, with slight differences here and there.

Without the absolute streak of luck that Fortnite is, Unreal Engine would look completely different right now.

Unity just does not have this kind of cash, thats all. But money is not everything and the time will show it.

 

Also Unity. They are not making any money, they get further in debt every year. But all companies that want to grow do that: spend every dollar they make +more.

Uhh, this is more or less completely false.

And for the record, Unity has also gone acquisition crazy.

 

Unity also has money for acquisitions.

The difference is:
- Unity buys tech to sell you this tech as a subscription and generate more regular income. It became Autodesk of gamedev. Either acquired software/team makes money with a little effort/upgrades or it got killed/abandoned.
- Epic buys tech to build a complete developer ecosystem. They got hands on RAD Tools? Great, Bink and Oodle compression are now available for everyone using the engine. Less time spent on optimizing ever-growing content size and memory/loading management.

It's not about how much money companies have. It's about how this money is spent. Epic proves they think in 5-10 year-long cycles. They bought Quixel which plays beautifully with UE5/Nanite. It actually it's often like "oh, now I understand why they did move X like 2 years, it's part of a bigger puzzle".

 

Many tech companies have much more money than epic you don't see a single one of them doing what epic is doing.
I'm not saying epic is good, it's all business one way or another -- but the fact is, what they're doing actually benefits me compared to what literally everyone else has been doing for years.

I assume you mean net-profit, in that case Unity hasn't made a single cent on their game engine. Unreal probably the same. In fact, unity in itself (all of it) is not profitable. They aim to be profitable a few years down the line based on their financial reports.

To answer your quote, that's not how 'epic' is, that's how the majority of big tech companies are nowadays.
They come out not making a profit, with the aim to be profitable by year XXXX. And it works, they have investors and are listed.

Unity, uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Dropbox, snap, and I assume epic games* (before fortnite).

 

I'm not the one to judge. Unity does seem to throw money at random targets for little gain. That said, could they just throw $200 worth of market asset at their users every month?

But like you said, its business, not a friendly gesture. Taking on someone like Steam requires deep pockets and patience, at the moment they have both - having spend about $300m on exclusives and about half a bil on their store.

That said, I never understod the exclusive thing. They basically made a "pro gamer" store that rewards developers with a larger cut, give out freebies - and someone managed to turn the public perception against them through exclusive deals.

 

But this is not how Epic works. If all big tech companies worked like this, we would have stuff for free. In Europe and some parts of US, it is ILLEGAL to sell ,,stuff" for a price that is lower than manufacturing cost. They give away so many stuff for free just to gain traction and user-base. Do you see big Tech companies (as you said) giving away free stuff? No. Of course they invest, but they invest in the infrastructure, development, research. They do not giveaway free phones, laptops, hardware or whatever. I am really surprised that Epic gets away with it.

So no, that was not correct answer.

 

FWIW, Here's a link to my post about the topic in another thread.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/loo...unitys-alternative.415337/page-2#post-7224067

 

Unity Personal says hi? What are you talking about?

 

What?

You said Epic games store hasn't made any money and that's the mentality of Epic Games, the company.
I told you that no, that's the mentality of all big companies nowadays. Didn't mention free stuff.

 

Is Godot really that promising? I feel like Unity and Unreal are and will be the best engines around, and I don't see Godot really closing the gap. But, I'm not really staying up-to-date with Godot news, so I'm not sure.

 

I've kept tabs on godot. I love open source, and love blender, but godot is really behind. Especially 3D.
Godot 4 is taking ages to release, while other engines with their large dev base are getting ahead every few months with big releases.

Although blender made it, it's largely because the competition is fairly stagnant in development, and crazy prices.
Compare that to unreal engine, and unity. Basically free for indies, with large development teams and countless features. And while godot will improve, so will the other 2, and they have more developers and labour power.

I feel like godot will be more for 2D, and so it's competition will mostly be unity & gamemaker.

Unity has been putting a serious amount of devtime from what I can tell in patch notes and github for 2D the last year. (Obviously they always supported 2D, but I feel like even more now compared to before).

 

Agreed. Unity revenue for Q1 of 2020 was $234 million, but the quarterly loss was about $110.9 million.

 

I think your cause and effect chain is broken.

 

What? I am not talking about licences. I am talking about assets with 100% discount and games with 100% discount. There is never 100% discount, it is simply for free. I get that those assets are under licence, which could be made as a free product. But imagine a world, where Apple will give ppl iPhones for free (,,under free licence"). There would be no phone competition in couple of months/years. That is the point I am trying to make.

What I was talking about is the thing that all big companies invest in themselves. Epic mostly invest in its users(free content for it's users).

I don't see what is broken. But I would like to know what you mean by that.

 

You are trying to make a distinction that isn't there.

Assets are licenses too, games are licenses too. Unity gave Pro features to Personal for free. Unity gave free Assets to Pro users (with 100% discount), as part of a program whose name escapes me right now. Unity bought assets and then gave them for free. Apple occasionally gives games for free. Steam occasionally gives games for free. GoG occasionally gives games for free.

But Epic Games Store giving games for free is somehow entirely different from all the above examples, because... ?

 

Sort of off topic, but there simply isn't any way for a new store to survive the arguable-monopoly of steam for desktop without resorting to free offerings and money incentives for devs.

In fact developers selling on steam can't afford to go to Epics store and sell it cheaper or offer it free because steams terms state that you will be removed from steam if you undercut steam's prices, even on your own site.

So if devs are not getting exposure on steam they run the risk of having to price steam's version lower or just not sell on steam. So yeah, I'm not really a fan of how much control steam has over the market, and how much control they have over developers.

 

See, here's a thing. Apple Phone is a physical product, and that one has non-zero production cost.
A digital product, however, has near zero duplication cost, and that's why they can be offered for free.

However, in the world of physical products we have "Razor and Blades" model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
Which is used by, well, razor blades manufacturers, but also by console manufacturers and inkjet printer manufacturers.

In this scenario you offer the base tech at subsidized low price, but then you start selling consumables for that device at high price. It is a widely used model.

Speaking of free IPhones, I believe that some of American mobile carriers actually offer a "FREE*" phone if you pick the right contract with monthly payment...

So, yes, this strategy already exists and has been around for some time.

 

Also, in addition to "Blades and Razor" we have "I am become Facebook" model, where the company offers you free infrastructure, free hosting, free data storage and ton of other free stuff, and then harvests your data, sells it to 3rd parties and peppers you with Adverts. It is a fairly common thing with companies that try to make somethin "social".

Google uses something similar, they throw a ton of free services at you, and then somehow earn ton of money and start building blimps for some reason.

So that world you asked to imagine - we're pretty much living in it.

 

Ok this made me laugh I thought this was a great analogy and then I looked it up. Google made a blimp haha

 

We are being given a product for free. Apple's macOS is a free operating system that receives free updates on a yearly basis.

Meanwhile Microsoft has a history of selling devices with limited releases of their own operating system and then charging you to upgrade to the full release.

 

And a lot of people now don't like google, and they are very wary of that strategy, because of how successful it was, and how laughably powerful it made google.

 

While being a successful approach it's likewise one that has taught anyone wanting to use the service to instead wait to see if the service will have any longevity to it thanks to how quick they are to shutter it.

 

I'm honestly baffled this isn't a package, and only feel that some asset store sample is just an easy out to forget about it in about 3 editor versions down the line.

I feel like this sort of a solution might have been acceptable years ago back when it was just version 4 or 5, but now being listed on the NYSE its still way too little, and doesn't exactly instill confidence. How many deprecated asset store samples have there been over the years?

 

As they're "starter packages" I kind of agree that they shouldn't be presented as an official "part of the engine", which is what being a package should be. I wouldn't want people to feel like they should be using them as a base for their own stuff because Unity somehow expects it, since that's not at all the case.

The language around that should absolutely be cleaned up, though. They're called "packages" but they're distributed as "assets". Rookies find package related stuff confusing enough as it is without also muddying the waters with inconsistent use of language.

 

I find that incredibly misleading. This should be called "prototyping tools" or something. Starter pack implies it is good for anything else than prototyping.

Every asset flip and every user will try to use them in their game. And then will come to the forums complaining why they don't contain XYZ actions / features. And we will need to explain every single time that it isn't a "Game Starter Pack", it's a prototyping tool, which needs to be improved upon or rewritten by them.

 

Isn't that kinda the point?

The starter packages I see appear to be based off Unreal starter kits.

I mean:

Spoiler

Unity:


Unreal:

When it comes to starter packages one example that comes to mind is actually... Arc Survival Involved.

The game process is called "Shooter Game", which implies that at some point someone didn't think much of picking a new name, took 3rd person template, tinkered with it a little, then added dinosaurs.

 

The thing is BEFORE they had the money to buy Quixel, and launch the Epic Games store and give some games away for free - they did things right. They developed a game.... it was called Unreal. They developed the engine to build that game and they decided to make it the best looking game. So they asked questions...what do we need to come up with to make this engine great? They have licensed the engine out to hundreds of "AAA" developers after that based on their technology made for the game that also sold very well.

It continued...they kept adding features to make it look good and more enticing to use for developers. Then they developed more tech...Made Unreal Tournament.....with excellent netcode for the time. It sold very well.
Then they thought ok we need to expand our market to Indie Devs...so they made it easier to use etc. Then made another game, Fortnite, obviously the rest is history. But the engine that built that game was made to be able to do that, they used their own engine the whole time for all their development. So they know exactly what Game Developers, Designers and Artists would need. From their history of developing games and engines, and licensing it out to "AAA" devs, to now.
Obviously a game such as Fortnite has the right - time - right - place -right- game thing going for it as well, it looks like luck, but it's not merely an accident. The game, and thus the engine it's made in Unreal Engine. It runs on all platforms they want it to run, it's capable with networking features etc.
I really don't know why Epic is getting stick - I mean they donate to amazing developments such as Blender and they make these amazing tools available for free - to you and me - the same tools that made Fortnite, Xcom2, Gears 5, Ace Combat 5, Yoshi's Crafted World, Assetta Corsa etc.
That should be applauded and appreciated, not shot down. Why does the epic games stores not making money by giving away free games detract from an amazing game engine?

Unreal Engine is also moving into real-time movies and ArchViz... they are focused on specific clients. This came from looking at the industry, and they first built a amazing renderer and now people are using it because of the power and easy of use - Clients can build sets by using Quixel assets, Lumens and Nanite.
Unity decided, damn we need to also now do some real-time movie stuff because Epic is doing it...but they don't have the renderer in place yet. Again Epic's doings are not accidents.

They talk to the community on the forums a lot from what it seems and I feel like I have a great understanding what they are doing and what I can expect. Do we have the same from Unity? Even Lumberyard...virtually no community and they have some insights from time to time.

Say what you will about Lumberyard, but these types of behind the scenes stuff is quite cool - would be great to have some insight into this type of thing from Unity.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/the-journey-to-prefabs/

I would definitely not agree with you that Unity is on par with Unreal other than the acquisitions of Quixel etc.
As I said before I like Unity and I'm using Unity currently - but I'm not blind to the fact that Unreal gives me a ton more out of the box than Unity, which relies heavily on Assets. I guess that is not in itself a bad thing...but it means I will have to keep on forking out money and also be at the mercy of the asset creator and Unity to play along nicely with all the different updates. That's also ok I guess...however most people are frustrated by the lack of direction and core features that is broken or lacking.

To add....marketing budgets - how much do you think Unity's is vs Epic? Epic donates money with their Megagrants to Blender.... boom....millions of word of mouth and good vibes. More than any marketing ad can do. Hell they even Donated to Godot...why they did that we won't know but I'm sure it will become apparent in a few years.

Epic states:
"Simply put, we succeed when you succeed. We’re incredibly proud of the Unreal Engine community and want to do what we can to grow that community. Epic wants to help you focus more on creation and worry less about keeping the lights on."

So it's in their best interest to help your game successful so it can make more than $1 Mill.

 

They started doing thing right after they they got money.

I'm not sure if a lot of people remember, but Unreal, in general was kina odd. While the Tournament was popular, unreal engine games were sort of odd looking and fairly prone to crashing.

The situation started turning around at Mass Effect 3 time, but even back then the engine had bunch of oddities like that very noticeable specific "Unreal Look" which basically meant everything as brown.

Right, and let's not forget that epic games when their engine was proprietary destroyed a game studio in a lawsuit. They had reasons, but the history is still there.

Also, woudl be nice not to invent people's motivations. Passages like this one:

smell like a pure fiction. It is (probably?) nice to feel passionate about something, but it is likely a good idea not to go into the imagination land in the process.

 

In my opinion its not the engine but the developer deliberately choosing it. There's even a TV Tropes entry for it.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealIsBrown

Below are three examples for each of the first three generations of the engine ordered by date.

UE1
https://www.mobygames.com/game/dr-brain-action-reaction
https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/adventure-pinball-forgotten-island
https://www.mobygames.com/game/disneys-brother-bear

UE2
https://www.mobygames.com/game/shrek-2
https://www.mobygames.com/game/open-season
https://www.mobygames.com/game/vanguard-saga-of-heroes

UE3
https://www.google.com/search?q=Renegade+X&tbm=isch
https://www.google.com/search?q=Fatal+Inertia&tbm=isch
https://www.mobygames.com/game/mirrors-edge

 

While that may be true, there was a specific postprocessing effect that was instantly recognizeable in unreal games specifically, for a time. I think it was present all the way till version 4.12, and only then they finally got rid of it. The effect first appeared in gears of war, then made it even into Mass Effect.

it isn't just tinting everything brown, but specific appearance in autoexposure scenes which resulted in dramatic overly dark shadows. So you had red-brown-black appearance with accentuated detail, but crushed blacks in shadows. It is kinda hard to explain.