Epic Games To Update Unreal Engine Pricing for Devs Outside Game Industry (gamedeveloper.com) 27
A week after laying off almost 900 employees, Epic Games has said that it's increasing the price to use Unreal Engine -- just not for the game development community. From a report: The news came from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney himself in a presentation at Unreal Fest 2023. In a video captured by Fortnite Creative developer Immature, Sweeney explains that developers using Unreal Engine in the film, TV, automotive, and other industries can expect to start paying a per-seat licensing fee. He claimed that the pricing model will not be "unusually expensive or unusually inexpensive," and that its pricing structure will be similar to subscription services like Maya or Photoshop. Sweeney said he wanted to announce these changes now in the name of "transparency."
He also shed some light on the business decisions that led to the company making unexpectedly significant business shifts in the last week. Apparently Epic Games began running into "financial problems" about 10 weeks ago, meaning that the company was facing some sort of financial downturn from late July through September. Evidently, all of Epic Games' business had been "heavily funded by Fortnite" in the last six years, and different parts of the company became "disconnected" from their revenue streams. It adds some context to previous comments made by Sweeney about the impact of declined Fortnite revenue -- if the company's signature game had started to not turn a profit, other parts of Epic Games may not have easily been able to make up for declining revenue.
He also shed some light on the business decisions that led to the company making unexpectedly significant business shifts in the last week. Apparently Epic Games began running into "financial problems" about 10 weeks ago, meaning that the company was facing some sort of financial downturn from late July through September. Evidently, all of Epic Games' business had been "heavily funded by Fortnite" in the last six years, and different parts of the company became "disconnected" from their revenue streams. It adds some context to previous comments made by Sweeney about the impact of declined Fortnite revenue -- if the company's signature game had started to not turn a profit, other parts of Epic Games may not have easily been able to make up for declining revenue.
Epic has the most expensive loss-making business (Score:2)
... notably buying games and then giving them away. They'd have to be making a ton of money off license fees to be able to sustain that.
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And so far I've yet to buy anything from them, and probably never will. I do have an Epic account with some free games, though.
The problem is they don't have anything I want badly enough to pay what they're asking for it, and for the stuff I like I've mostly found it through Steam sales.
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The browser is just horrible and takes up a whole gigabyte somehow. Furthermore, I literally have to go to Steam to find out if the free games are any good.
When the games are loaded though, it cuts itself down to about 200MB and many games are even playable without EPIC loaded. Steam takes about 500MB for itself these days, though there are third-hand efforts to stop it loading all the bloat.
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I don't see how, since it's free to play... are people really spending that much on skins? Apparently they are.
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I've heard from people who are parents that showing up in Fortnight in a base skin that comes with the game is considered poor form by kids nowadays. One of my buddies actually played the game a bit with his kid and their friends and caught a raft of shit from the kid's friends for playing in a base skin.
Stupid I know. Kids did similar when I was young too though.
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Skins, dances, and battle passes.
If they are so low on cash, they can put it back on the iOS app store.
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You're absolutely right -- loss-leading to establish competition in a market that Steam effectively had a monopoly in.
Pay monthly to use Unreal Engine? (Score:1)
If so, it is probably the best possible news Unity could have wished for. If that doesn't turn the tide of devs from Unity to Unreal Engine, then nothing will.
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Why would it turn the tide of gaming devs, when this pricing model doesn't apply to gaming?
Unlike Unity, UE is actually used in other fields as well, and that is where the pricing changes hit.
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I don't follow the logic you're putting down. It explicitly indicates in the story the biggest point that Unity fucked up on.
Because Epic is not changing the amount of royalties it collects for games made on Unreal Engine
Unity fucked up badly. Now that's not saying Epic is the hero in all of this, far from it, but in terms of fucking up. Epic spilled some milk, Unity fucking pushed a red button and leveled three small nations. There's a massive difference between what Epic is doing and what Unity is doing.
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Unity is a game engine, nothing more. They aren't being used in visual arts of film production unlike Unreal Engine. No one will switch to Unity as a result of this change.
Also game engines aren't swappable. Just because Unity exists doesn't mean it is best suited for the game you want to make. If you're picking your engine based exclusively on cost, there's a good chance you don't have a clue what you're doing and won't be releasing a game worth playing.
Yawn (Score:2, Insightful)
Proprietary software gonna prop.
Re: Yawn (Score:1)
Show a comparable open source option
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There's always Godot, the engine we've all been waiting for.
Local man closes doors after horses bolt (Score:2)
"I'm not worried", he says "I've a cousin who works in PR for videogame engine companies. He's certain those horses will be back and in greater numbers!" Up next is sports with Darryl.
Have been waiting for this (Score:4, Interesting)
My current job uses Unreal engine pretty heavily in a non-game environment (film production) and I've been wondering when Epic was going to stop letting us just use this thing for free.
On the other hand maybe they will get them to put a bit more love into those non-game tools (like nDisplay and Switchboard) where they kinda feel more like game mods than full supported features now.
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I'm genuinely interested, other than free what does Unreal bring to the movie industry over the traditional players like Maya? Coming from a visual and process restricted real time graphics business (gaming) wouldn't it represent a step backwards compared to traditional animation and rendering? What's their hook?
Re:Have been waiting for this (Score:4, Interesting)
Specifically I work in virtual production so we use LED video displays as a backdrop for filming.
One of the hooks is you can build an environment in Unreal, basically a game level and use that as your "environment" which let's you adjust the scene lighting and virtual set pieces real time.
Combine that with a tracking system on the camera and you can have the field of view of the camera (the frustrum) and Unreal can match the perspective to where the camera is moving.
Basically watch the behind the scenes for "The Mandalorian", this was done before but ILM did it for that show and that's when it got really popular.
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I believe we did it first on Gravity ... It's basically just fancy rear projection. Very fancy.
csw
Re:Have been waiting for this (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked at a VFX/Animation house up until a couple of years ago, at the time we were looking into migrating some of the shows to Unreal.
The plan was to start with our visually simpler children's shows for which Unreal was good enough already, and the seen if it can be scaled for higher quality stuff.
I believe these were some of the considerations:
Unreal was free, and even with the new pricing I doubt it would be anything close to the thousands of dollars per seat per month for stuff like Autodesk software, render nodes, etc.
Near real-time render requires fewer computers, faster iterations with supervisors and clients.
What the animators see is what the final render should look like, so less guesswork and surprises with lighting, hair, switching to higher poly models, etc.
The aspiration was, at least with the lower quality shows, to have no post production, just slap on the color grading and effects in engine.
Exclusives not paying off (Score:2)
Epic lays out cash for certain developers to release exclusively on their platform first. Where does that cash come from? Mostly Fortnite.
Separation of concerns (Score:3)
It's a really great example of why a business needs to be careful of what pies they stick their fingers in. I'm willing to bet the engine on its own is actually profitable if it didn't have to prop up things like the store. The store may very well be profitable if it didn't spend all its timing giving away free games payed for by Fortnight. Fortnight is surely profitable, but not when it has to cover the costs of everything *else* the company might be doing. Each small chunk on its own though is likely a great business that could be run extremely well if they were separate businesses. Combined though they're pulling in such different directions they're cannibalizing each other.
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