Unreal Engine 4

I think it's fair to say that what needed to be said, has been said once posts start popping up discussing the meaning of life, 42 and if the 3 musketeers should be called the 4 musketeers, and if it's better just go with plurals.

But as a summary:

1. enthusiasts and hobbyists rightfully complain they will need to spend a lot more money to enjoy their hobby to the full with unity vs unreal. It is likely unity will lose their custom and asset store purchases.

2. business-minded customers are still OK with the price. Obviously royalties get considered as well as excessive book keeping required plus giving epic the right to track your title.

3. people working on their first title won't switch if far along but those frustrated with free's capabilities are considering switching.

4. Unity cannot simply price match because Unity's business model is both royalty free and charging for development, not release. This is the primary reason sub prices are so high - it is better to drive to paid.

5. people want unity features to be FINISHED in the same version of unity they pay for, rather than forking out for features to be finished. While this isn't always possible, more can be done here, and Unity is listening.

So really at this point I would urge people to wait for more details involving Unity 5 before committing to a final judgement. It could very well be incredible, or run a lot faster - these are huge game changers. So much is unknown and simply waving hands and speculating can't help. If anything, an official response from Unity will go a long way, but that response cannot be done without carefully considering

 

Eeeeee, no? I don't want to pay a cent as long as I do no serious developement!

Furthermore, this suggestion is a no-brainer. Have you ever thought about cancelling the cheap subscription right before your release and get the royality free one?

 

Exactly. The features here now are buggy, and it has only gotten worse as more are added. I'm struggling to see how Unity can get out of this problem, but a full source code release to all Pro users would be a great start to getting the bugs fixed (it also mitigates the weak docs a bit).

 

"Running a lot faster" would be huge for me. Also maybe coming with some default scripts that aren't garbage. FPS controller and mouse look sending 240b to the GC, anyone?

 

royalty-free doesn't mix well with royalty model, different users would use different versions.
The most logical path would be this:
-they keep unity free- if something is free it attracts folk-most likely they won't pay ever, but a small percentage will
-unity pro subscription 10-15$

both free and pro pays the same royalty:
for lets say up to 5-10k gross income the royalty would be 5-8%
above the 5-10k part it would be 4-5%
and then possibly there would be a cap somewhere.

A system similar to above would fit for many:
-one can jump in and learn unity for free.. even make money.
-more serious folks could get pro subscription for an afforadble price and pay resonable royalty
-big companies who sell for big money would pay relatively less royalty

 

If Unity does run a lot faster, and can manage more going on in the scene, it does mean they've got grounds to not change the price. Since this time round, Unity has strong console support out of the box. This means AAA is likely to start hovering around. Previously, AAA didn't care much for Unity because console sales are their bread and butter and UE supported console while Unity didn't really have much ground there.

If unity gets the speed right, we're going to see justification for them sticking to their pricing. And worry that it doesn't go up. It's a bit of a shocking thing to say, I know, but speed is probably the single most important thing considered in cases like this. AFAIK ue4 uses doubles just about everywhere. This is in fact, slower. It also targets next-gen heavily and runs like a total pig on mid level hardware. That means steam quality of life is low, and mac owners are out of luck.

So I'm looking at Unity 5 being much more interesting than 4 was to AAA. Stranger things have happened, and AAA isn't loyal to any one engine. If Unity starts becoming the go-to place for AAA, then the price is justified with ease.

 

Agree that would be an issue.
What about Unity Pro for indies (< $100.000 income) + all add-ons and no royalties $19.99.
Unity Pro for large companies (> $100.000 income) + all add-ons and no royalties $49.99.
The subscription plan would give indies the option to cancel subscription anytime while keep using the engine (no updates though). Large companies would be commited to an annual plan.

 

Not sure how they can improve performance further without switching to OGL4.1 or something. Isn't most of the performance related stuff is caused by the driver overhead at this point? Maybe they could optimize frustum culling, but I doubt there'd be significant increase in the performance.

Plus, if they had really improved performance significantly, it would be #1 topic of the Unity 5 reveal. Afaik, they only mention non-uniform scaling improvements, and the job queue system, neither of which can increase the performance of a well built scene significantly.

 

Correct, which is why your suggestion doesn't work: there are already people with shipping games made with Pro. In your system, how do they get bug fixes going forward (suddenly start paying royalties on top of many thousands already paid)? My game uses nothing from Unity 4, yet I was forced to upgrade for bug fixes.... only to have even more bugs pulled in (Cloth was adequate in U3, now it is so buggy I disabled it in my game). Without source code, I've been beholden to UT, and for this reason, I would not to start a new project with Unity.

 

It would only apply from a big fresh release.. but yes as a second thought it wouldn't work well.

 

From the standpoint of a university student who can not, in the real world, motivate spending a minimum of $1500 on anything, much less a software package which I use as a hobby to learn how to code, I am constrained to the free version of Unity.

My ambition with things like Unity is not so much to create a game, as it is to try to pick at a vision I have in my head, fully realising that I'll never finish it. What I would like is a software package that allow me to learn while I pick at that vision in my head, a little bit at a time.

For that reason I am quite solution agnostic. I'm not here to defend Unity to my last breath, or to damn it. I think I have a fairly dispassionate view of the system, and I can only look at it from the point of view of a guy with my particular background.

Since the release of Unreal 4 my analysis of things is that Unity now has a problem of scale. What I mean by that is that the scale from zero to everything with Unreal is very low, the scale from zero to everything on Unity is very high. In comparison.

While I could never motivate spending $1500 on the pro version to get out of the dire constraints of the free version, getting Unreal means skipping four pints of beer at the student pub. With Unity the scale is too big for progress, but for Unreal it is now trivial. So, while those who have invested time, research, assets, and code-base in Unity is probably advised to stay, the incidentals like me are probably better advised to take up Unreal. And that is your problem.

If people like me add to the numbers of users on the Unreal side, then the narrative will be that 'nobody uses Unity any more, go with Unreal'. Unless you change, the perception will change things for you, I think. That may be unfair, but that's life. I don't think it's going to work to hold out the very limited Unity Free as a reason for people to stay. It seems your best bet is to allow people like me to add to the bulk of users of your system by providing an as trivial barrier to the real goods, ie Unity Pro, as possible.

 

They mentioned non uniform scale performance increases - and scale does tend to get messed with a lot. There's also the jobs queue thing for editing, 64 bit editor and an entirely new shader pipeline.

Speed and new visuals. They could have let the new visuals slow right down, but no - the ubershader is self optimising - it only takes up power for that which is used, and this is also speed.

We're not saying "Unity 4 got faster". We're saying "Unity 5 is faster than Unity 4 is with bells on" - which is the same as a large speed boost, especially since the whole point of going 5, mostly is the amazing visuals to come.

Lets take a look at this:

Come on guys, it's better lighting than ANYTHING on xbox 360 or PS3 - it looks better than Halo 4 (technically, not art resource wise) and ... runs on hardware not as good as those consoles.

Runs on a tablet. Seems fast to me.

 

It would be great if they went to a lower subscription or forced subscription model for Pro, and at the same time offer an extended pro trial for anyone needing a free version, watermark and noncommercial rights with trial so people can check the engine out before subscribing, but enjoy the full engine just not commercially.

 

My own take on licensing

I think the true solution here for Unity (and this is my humble opinion, not representative of Unity staff) is that the trial version of unity pro does not expire, but also has zero export and you have to either be locked into the 12 month $75, or pony up $1500 to build. You would still be able to build and release with Free, but you would not be able to mix free and paid licenses.

This way, hobbyists still enjoy the development process and fork out $1500 when it matters, asset store still gets heavily used and people generally have no reason to use free, as trial does it all. It would have to completely block creating standalone builds, but something has to give - this is just an idea personally and in no way part of Unity's plans - just from me as a user.

Thoughts?

 

Thats pretty cool.

And fodder for the "Chinese Copy Hater Squad!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0zL0OcGxLo

 

I dunno about the 0 exports, there's gotta be a way to watermark or put a callback to their servers with app information into the builds for a free version probably easier than gutting the export parts, maybe not. Maybe even self destruct exports after 5 installs...some sort of wrapper on exports that shows a trial screen with installs remaining or something.

For a monthly price I'd jump at $100-$150/mo as an individual a lot easier than $225+tax... maybe they should throw it on the asset store and discount it a few times a year like mixamo always does.

Another note on the long term pro trial is if you build your game with it, you probably have a good shot (gorgeous demo) at finding 3rd party funding to get the licenses required....

 

Out of all the practical ideas thrown out in this thread (I.e. not "give it away for free"), I like this one the most. I would prefer a shorter contract (3-6 months) but I would deal with a year if given no other choice.

 

This might seem fine for hobbyists as well as established developpers.
But what about people trying to make their first commercial game ?

I'm one of those, member of a small team working on a first project, and the low fee / royalties model seems much more attractive.

 

Then there is Free, something has to give somewhere. For those doing the first time, I refer you to the sacrifice my brother and I made in order to afford Unity pro and iOS pro - financially it was grim for us but we tried, we passed around the hat and we paid for it. It costs money to make money, and let's face it, by this point you've probably had a glorious run through many versions of Unity for free, using pro tools and so forth - how could you not? $1500 would be made back in no time.

Or do you not have confidence that your game will make $1500? I think to be reasonable, something has to give, or alternatively people have to learn C++ and get by without an asset store. The grim reality of UE4 is that is in order of magnitudes harder to finish a game in for the little guy. Once the dazzle wears off, people will realise this.

 

It's a floor demo, of course it's going to look ideal. However we won't know what kind of performance is reasonable until people start using it in production on real games, and not floor demos designed to flatter the solution being sold.

It certainly is exciting though! Imagine what kind of possibilities the K1 will allow!

 

I think we can all agree here that the in-editor performance and build performance both differ enough that this would pose some serious problems. If they go down this path, it'd probably make more sense to let people build, but only to PC/Mac/Linux but put a big "NOT FOR COMMERCIAL RELEASE" watermark in the bottom right.

 

It becomes very interesting to have NOT FOR COMMERCIAL RELEASE splattered all over it, but still represents a huge challenge financially for Unity - hobbyists and enthusiasts regularly purchase Unity Pro - with this they would not, and Unity's revenue would be less. Which may mean Unity can't afford delicious middleware like enlighten and fmod studio so much for us all.

Seems like none of us have the information Unity has so our suggestions are all just pie in the sky really.

 

People are comparing it to pro because Unity free isn't really free. If you are going to realistically make a game using Unity free you are going to spend money on the asset store. Unity free is designed to get people in, get them started but make sure development is uncomfortable enough to spend money to alleviate some of that discomfort. It kind of reminds me of a 'free to play' game actually.

And here's the rub, it's pretty easy to hit a point where you spend $20 in the asset store, now which is more value Unity free and $20 of assets? or Unreal Engine 4 and a month of service? I know what I would choose.

 

How about scrapping the $75 subscription entirely, and only offer a $17.99 + 5% deal? The $1,500 license would still be an option.

Both options all-inclusive (platform support).

 

The plan was to sell an eye or an arm at some point to be able to buy a Unity pro license... Then UE4 came in.

Right now Unity still has its asset store and a strong community. Epic is building that too.

I'm not a programmer, so I don't realy know how awfull c++ is compared to C# / JS...
But from a 3d artist point of view, this is a no-brainer.

 

"Drop" free.
rip U4 model, Include a 20$ (or similar 10-30$tops) month sub non mandatory fee --> wish is almost free since you can buy once and use that version to publish. + royalty. Want no royaltys ->pay full price.
Everybody as all the features, hobbyist can play for 20$ 40$ 60$ or as mush they want to give per year.

 

IMHO A.R.T isn't a patch on Mecanims auto matched rig setup, and Playmaker is more geared to making entire games in than assisting development like BP is. Plus Unity is way more forgiving with various FBX files. We've been evaluating hard, and Unity comes out easier each time.

If there's one thing I learned from making tools and so on - making a great tool is time consuming and expensive. A great tool should cost more, exactly the same as great tech should cost more.

I'm not saying Unity shouldn't adjust it's price, I'm saying in a lot of ways it's worth more than UE4 is.

 

The $75/month subscription never made sense, and it definitely is not attractive after the $19/month UE4 announcement. What was especially frustrating for a lot of people was the $75/month for Pro plus $75/month for iOS plus $75/month for Android. For mobile developers, the Unity subscription is currently $225/month compared to Epic's $19/month plan. If Unity wants to have a successful subscription service, then they need to meet or beat Epic's offer.

 

Not for $75/month. I pay less on a per monthly basis for certain things that are critical to living (aka heating, or electricity, etc) and some other non-essential services. (And I live in a country where cost of living is 1.3x higher than the USA). So to me, personally, I cannot justify paying $75/month on Unity, and Unity will definitely lose me as a Pro owner customer. $25/month - $30/month (max) would be more reasonable, with only rolling month by month payments .... no contracts.

People who have mommy and daddy pay for everything, or people who have funding from publishers/console manufacturers/govt and business programs will say "oh $100 to $200/month is cheap" ..... yeah, but for people in the real world with realistic life budgets, its not!

 

I totally agree on $75 - I think it doesn't really make any sense to me. 2 years is $62.5 so it's overpriced to begin with immediately. That is something I just don't really get. But the problem is now UE throws it out at $19, people all think Unity should be $19 as well - and this is a little odd for various reasons since there's no royalties, however there's a lot of people in development for different reasons.

 

I don't see the present developments either in Unreal 4 or Cryengine as an existential threat or even a significant threat to Unity although it sure is something to think about.

Apart from some professional game developers a big chunk of Unity's users are hobbyists.
You can give either Unreal 4 or Cryengine free to the hobbyist and they wouldn't know what to do with these engines.

The pricing structure perhaps needs to be fine tuned but other than that I think Unity should continue to do what they are doing and not get distracted too much by all this.

As far as I am concerned, the single biggest reason Unity is where it is today boils down to once concept - Ease of use.
Ease of use especially wrt to any kind of game that is within the scope of one or more hobbyists. This is also the reason that visual scripting assets like playmaker are on of the most popular assets in the asset store.

 

I could accept $75 a month if it came with a revenue share and an "opt out at any time and still retain functionality" thing. Honestly, the only things keeping me attached to Unity right now are hundreds of dollars worth of Asset Store purchases (to recreate UDK functionality :v); workflow knowledge; and the fact that, much as I love it so far, UE4 is buggy as hell. Unity's Asset Store right now is the biggest draw for me. It's absolutely a huge deal, but even I end up realising that most of my purchases are so I can replicate the features that other engines already have.

 

Dropping the Free version is a bad idea. The Free version is a no risk way for people to jump into the Unity ecosystem. If anything, Unity should juice up the Free version with the Pro features to entice even more people to try Unity. Unity makes money off of the Asset Store. If Unity gets rid of the Free version, they will reduce the number of shoppers in the Asset Store. If the number of shoppers decreases, then many Asset Store sellers will move their efforts to the UE4 Marketplace. Dropping the Free version of Unity would basically guarantee Epic's success.

I agree the Unity needs to offer a Pro level subscription comparable to Epic's $19/month offering. But I see the Free version of Unity and the Unity Asset Store as critical to Unity's long term success.

 

That Editor looks awefully like a hybrid of Unity and UE4 Editors...

http://www.genesis-3d.com/index.html

By the way it does not really help that there's Genesis3D "rendering environment" as well, to add to confusion, which is not the same as ChangYou Genesis-3D.

 

Straight up what's the point of them being in business if they can't even afford to pay their staff? We really have to remember that Epic is an entirely different entity, they earn money from games and a lot from the AAA sector. Unity don't, so you keep saying you'll only pay $20 - $30.00 and no royalties (Actually probably indy royalties are worthless to them) well it's never going to happen. I'd most likely suggest if you want to go down that road then UE4 is the perfect engine for you.

It's fine expecting more from Unity, I think with Unreal breathing down Unity's neck they have no choice in that regards or lose a lot of custom. I'm talking Bug fixes, support and features. Keep it rollin, help us to make games so we can pump more money back into Unity!..

But we have be to reasonable with a company this size.

When I was 16 and a trolley boy I could afford $100.00 a month? Seriously if you want to be in the gaming industry be prepared to spend a little bit of money.. Most students are whizzing this sort of money up the wall on nights out every friday.

 

If Unity stopped letting you export to Android for free I would stop using it at once and start to learn UE4 so that would be a bad idea!

Their model at the moment is that it puts a Unity splash screen if you use the free version which gives them lots of free advertising. This is fine by me.

The Unity Pro is too expensive for me and the only benefit is not having the splash screen on Android (and shadows which don't work on Android anyway!).

I hope that UE4 gives a wakeup call to Unity to hurry up with things like the new GUI, the networking code for Windows Phone/Store and other thing.

Question 1: If you subscribe to UE4 and then unsubscribe can your RE-subscribe when you want to release your game? Because I am thinking of doing this.
Question 2: Does UE4 have a good GUI system?
Personally if the free version of Unity went up to a $19 one off payment. It wouldn't trouble me TOO much as long as it has the new GUI features.

Also, I will continue to use Unity for Windows Store as I don't know if UE4 has this option.

 

You can drop a subscription at any time and the only thing you lose out on is access to their Asset Store equivalent and regular updates. You don't even need an up to date subscription to release a game if you don't want to.

 

I think I'll give it a go then! Pity the download is so gigantic! 8gb someone said?

 

I'd hate to see Unity fall apart. That's what I worry about. Lowering prices is great, but they need money to keep going. I don't want them to have to lay off half their team, slow development even more, and maybe even die off in the end due to offering their products for too cheap.

In my opinion, their main focus should be in providing a superior engine that the others can't compete with. Then I don't think the pricing is as important.

I will happily pay 75 / month if the engine is superior and I can get a lot more than that back from selling my games.

 

1. From what I could read on their website, you can unsubscribe and subscribe back anytime. You don't even need to re-subscribe to release because you already paid for whatever build you got - just won't have the up-to-date code.

2. I am not sure, but I know Scaleform is available. Coherent UI will also be available, apparently.

 

The major problem with the UE4 is the editor instability. Multiple crashes a day.
Another one is the hardware necessary to run it well.


Did anyone really tested it on real mobile devices? I think most of android and ios devices are not supported yet.

 

I will gladly agree to pay Unity $25 - $30/month PLUS royalties for Unity Pro.

I would pay every single month .... why? Because I like it, I would value its worth, and I'd like to think I was continuously supporting Unity as company on a monthly basis.

What I dont like is being told I must do this, or I must to do that. So being forced into a contract really ticks me off. I like choosing and being open to choose something, and not have it forced down my throat. If someone is financially okay, they will have no problem paying it and actively keep paying it, because they know it gives people jobs ... and if someone isnt financially okay, then they wont pay it on a ongoing basis, they'll pay once or twice, and then stop, but probably will pay if their situation gets better .... and that should be okay. I think Epic is using that human mentality aspect to their advantage, hopefully Unity does too.

 

Epic did say that this is an early-adopters version, so I would guess that it will get far better than it is now.

 

Exactly.

1500 bucks might seem a lot but perhaps that is what it takes to produce a quality 3d game engine that even hobbyists can use as opposed to mostly professional game developers.

Unreal or these other engines may or may not have more graphics features etc but Unity's value lies in its accessibility skill wise to a wider user base - the effort that has gone into producing such an engine - this is what users are paying for

 

I don't know if this is a transition UT can realistically make without extreme restructuring. Epic is a company with game production at the core of it's culture, the needs of production are ingrained into everything they do. This is why they take bugs so seriously over there. This is why they make fixes available immediately. This is why source access is standard for UE. In the eyes of Epic providing a game engine is a service, not a product.

It's a totally different point of view, and not everybody wants what that entails, it's a good thing to have competing business models.

 

Did you even try UE4?

Blueprint is far, far better than playmaker.

 

UE4 is exceptionally accessible.

 

yes i can understand the importance of maintaining a free version. IMO having one single version would outweigh the loss of free
One other solution could be offering one previous version as free. So 4.x would becomes free with the 5.x release, while still offering a low cost option to get the latest version.

 

Since everybody's coming up with all sorts of pricing schemes for Unity, here's another whacky suggestion:
$500 for Pro, add-ons made a thing of the past, and yearly upgrade cycles.

Can they do it, realistically? Heck if I know! UT are paying for a lot of neat middleware, which you don't get with UE4's monthly price, so it's a whole different world. I'm sure more people would be interested in paying $500 at least every other year, though

 

I think you forgot to add these lines:

I see no reason to pick this up. I would rather design my own GUI instead of "that terrible license scheme".