Three game engines, free in a row!

[Major Cooke]

Yes, I did that topic title on purpose.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. *Ahem...*

HOLY SHIT!

[Big C]

Okay, I can *mostly* forgive Valve for not having a Half-Life Episode 3 by now.

Seriously, this sounds like it's going to be a good year for developers.

[Major Cooke]

I always thought that developers kept struggling not so much because of time, teams or other things (granted they're definitely a massive contribution to it), but because they have to learn all the tools and experiment. Well, engines like UE are now more honed, sharpened, and able to help guide users a lot more easily than before.

Epic had a couple of folks able to design a full game in just a few days -- I DONT KNOW THE DETAILS ABOUT IT. Just quoting what they said, and it looked pretty neat too.

[GooberMan]

Honestly, I think it's great that high quality engines and tools are coming out at very reasonable prices for everyone.

But I do wonder if the long term effect would be like that of Tesco - the big giant that eliminated smaller competition. The cost of writing tech from scratch is now far more than using one of these engines, so I can't see this doing good things for diversity in the future.

[Enjay]

For years, people have been saying that the games of certain companies were merely tech demos of their engines with a view to getting the engines out there and licensed to people who actually wanted to make a game. Is this the ultimate extension of that?

[MG_Man]

Honestly, I think it's great that high quality engines and tools are coming out at very reasonable prices for everyone.

But I do wonder if the long term effect would be like that of Tesco - the big giant that eliminated smaller competition. The cost of writing tech from scratch is now far more than using one of these engines, so I can't see this doing good things for diversity in the future.

I would argue that the man-hour cost of making a new engine with similar features would cost way more than the original prices of the engines. But, I'm not in the business, so I can't say for sure.

More likely it will be harder for people to license new engines, but as far as a company making their own for their own games I don't think it will be very different. Even before this, the business of licensing game engines pretty much only belonged to the big guys anyway, so I don't think it makes a big difference. The smaller guys made engines based on niche or very experimental features (like voxels, procedural generation, and so on), which can still set them apart from UE4 and give them a reason to be sold.

For games themselves, I think this is a good thing. Indie devs have access to the same tools that AAA devs use. I think this will drastically change the landscape of indie games as the technological gap between them and AAA will decrease.

[Arctangent]

Well, at least someone can.

[wildweasel]

It makes a lot of sense for Valve to make Source 2 freely available. Considering that the Source Engine SDK base has been freely available to Steam users for a few years now, and there are a not-insignificant number of games that are available through the Steam storefront - either for free, or reasonably priced (like The Stanley Parable) - that are Source-based.

[Kinsie]

You can play with some of the tools right now if you want.

[Kinsie]

For reference, here's a little summary I've compiled of how much these three new "free" engines cost.

Unreal Engine: Free until your game makes $3000, at which point Epic asks for a 5% royalty per game per quarter.
Unity: Free for solo developers until you reach $100,000 in sales. Anyone who achieves more than that, teams and folks who want specific bonus features require a Professional license ($75 a month, or $1500 outright)
Source 2: Free, but requires a Steam release for your game. You can release on other stores and platforms, but there has to be a Steam release too.

[Nash]

Kinsie: you forgot to add that Unity has a $100,000 threshold (and IIRC they collect anually?)

[Kinsie]

Cheers, added.

[scalliano]

So, even more cut'n'paste Early Access/Greenlight guff shitting up my Steam homepage then.

[edward850]

Greenlight content doesn't touch the homepage, though? Only Approved.

[mallo]

Which one is the best tho? Since it's apparently hard to get on steam, I feel like Unity is the best option (because what is $1500 when you have $100,000?)