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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 14 2020, @03:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the vendor-lock-in dept.

Unreal Engine is now royalty-free until a game makes a whopping $1 million:

Since the rise of Fortnite as a popular game and Unreal Engine 4 as a popular game-making toolkit, Epic Games, the studio behind both, has been keen to capitalize on this momentum. That has included an aggressive push to lock down game makers in its ecosystem, and Tuesday saw Epic announce its most generous developer-specific offer yet: a massive increase to its "royalty-free" grace period.

As of today, any game or software maker who uses Unreal Engine for commercial purposes doesn't owe Epic Games a penny until a single piece of software exceeds one meeeeeeellion dollars ($1,000,000) in gross revenue. This is on top of the company's existing policy to not charge Unreal Engine users a monthly fee, whether they're using the software suite for commercial or educational purposes.

Previously, Epic offered a royalty-free grace period for a game or app's first $50,000 of revenue, then began requiring payment of 5 percent of the software's "worldwide gross revenue" from that point on, including DLC, crowd-sourced fundraising related to the software, and other related revenue streams. That 5-percent fee still applies, but it now leaves game makers unaffected until a $1 million threshold is hit.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @10:16PM (#994419)

    Blender is not a game engine, it has a game engine but that is not it's main function.

    Gogot has potential and it's free software.

    https://godotengine.org/ [godotengine.org]

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday May 15 2020, @02:04AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday May 15 2020, @02:04AM (#994479)

    How good is Godot in absolute terms though? Given that their promo images look like something that came out of Unreal Engine circa 2000, I'm not filled with confidence. Maybe they have more to offer under the hood?

    I'm a big fan of open source, but for game development it's pretty much always been a choice between using a proprietary engine, or using something that looks like last-decade's technology (if you're lucky), and is probably a much bigger pain in the ass to work with to boot. Open source engines used to have the advantage of being free, which probably got them a lot of users. But now that some of the best cutting-edge proprietary engines are free to use unless/until you're wildly successful? In that environment you've got to be a pretty hard-core OSS enthusiast to go with the option that's technically inferior in every way. Especially since you can get full access to the Unreal Engine source code to tweak it exactly as you like, which was the other big draw of OSS. Unless you want to integrate some other non-public-domain OSS code into your game, the only benefits of using an OSS engine are for the down-stream developers. And in the software market those developers are also your competitors - competitors who you are generally required to give your entire game's code to if you use an OSS engine.

    I think the big issue is that game engines are probably the pinnacle of cutting-edge consumer software - and by and large OSS just doesn't do that well. Lots of great cutting edge stuff in behind-the-scenes business infrastructure - stuff where the software isn't the product, but instead is the infrastructure you use to make money on other things. It's dramatically cheaper to spend money to make an existing OSS product do what you want, rather than develop your own in-house product from the ground up. But get into consumer software, and OSS has never really been able to keep up with the proprietary alternatives. LibreOffice? Great stuff. Looks and works like a product from 20 years ago, but that's okay because office software was already mature and hasn't seen much but useless (even counter-productive) bells and whistles (and broken compatibility) to convince customers to keep buying new versions of what's basically the same product. (I strongly suspect that any software that moves to a subscription model is admitting that they don't expect to make any improvements that are actually worth the cost of buying upgrades)