This is the first place where Crytek fails. Draconian uniformity.
Mark Rein is the guy you really want to talk to at Epic for licensing U3. He sets the price of the license according to the size of the game you are building, your distribution methods, expected revenue, and he even considers other software taxing your budget and cuts fees where he can.
Simply one of the best guys in the industry. You get the same license and support, regardless of your project, but the price is adapted to your studio.
The second place Crytek fails is they have the worst support...ever. You will get assistance from other developers on the dev forum before someone from Crytek finally gets around to fielding your inquiry. They have no system of tracking requests. A request on the closed dev forum, restricted to licensees, can set for two weeks until you figure it out yourself or some other developer sees it and says, "Hey, this worked for us." Atrocious customer service.
On the other hand, Epic has the greatest team for handling issues I have ever seen. When something pops up it is assigned a tracker and then placed into the hopper with a specific person tracking and handling your problem. It gets fixed.
"Mark Rein is the guy you really want to talk to at Epic for licensing U3. He sets the price of the license according to the size of the game you are building, your distribution methods, expected revenue, and he even considers other software taxing your budget and cuts fees where he can."
I didn't know that.
I thought it was a flat 500k rate, which I think is exceptional considering how great flexible Unreal Engine 3 is. Cryengine 3 is phenomenal as well, but no indie developer really needs it or could afford it at that price.
Going back to some of the above posts, I'm fairly confident that the price is adjusted based on the studio and type of license purchased. Not sure how the Nexuiz guys would have afforded it if it was at a flat rate of $1.2m ;)
Going back to some of the above posts, I'm fairly confident that the price is adjusted based on the studio and type of license purchased. Not sure how the Nexuiz guys would have afforded it if it was at a flat rate of $1.2m ;)
Whats the difference between a UDK or SDk or the 1.2million one? I never knew it worked like that. And big ups to Morganfell for explaining the way customer service works with these companies and actually making it clear to understand. I never knew that either, thanks
Epic uses the UDK for indie devs and there will be a UE4 version of the UDK after it releases so you can build high quality games without paying a dime.
There are also engines like Outerra and Unity which are also indie-dev friendly.
The price above is for commercial use from multi-billion dollar corporations. $1.2 for them is like penny and dime chump change.
Next-gen games SHOULD NOT have higher dev costs with all the cost-effective tools being released to cut down on both gameplay mechanics, infrastructure stability and asset management.
Pubs will no doubt use this kind of misinformation to get people to believe all game development is rising like a mofo and will charge you an arm and a leg because they can (sort of like what Capcom is doing brainwashing people into thinking disc-locked content had to be done otherwise they wouldn't make any money).
It won't cost that much for an indie developer. Also 1.2mil is not realy expensive for an engine for a larger studio, and is in line with most engines (unreal 3 included)
$1.2 Million probably covers the cost of 7-8 good software engineers for a years time. Considering that the alternative of do-it-yourself would also cost a bunch of testing time, the engine is definitely worth it.
Pretty sure the royalties are for the free version of UE3. Both UE3 and CE3 have a free indie SDK that allows small companies to use the high end tools without having to fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars up front.
No it's not. Just because you can download UDK and work with stuff in it, doesn't make it free. You can download CE3 for free as well and develop in it without paying.
What costs money is to be allowed to PUBLISH a game that has been made with it. You have to pay a licensing fee to EPIC, to use they engine in a commercial game, same goes with CE3.
I was about to say "woah, that's crazy", but I suppose when you consider the cost of game development these days and the profit that can be involved it isn't that bad.
In anycase developers would have to spend money if they wanted to create an in house engine to this spec anyway. Probably more than 1.2 mil as well.
As someone above stated, I bet it cost Crytek a lot more to develop it.
And you're right, it cost Guerrilla Games upward of $60 to design their engine and game from scratch (KillZone 2). Some studios do this because they have specific goals that they want the engine to accomplish.
But $1.2 million for a commercial use is a good price for an AAA title given that like BF3, ME3 or COD, these games make hundreds of millions in sales revenue.
O.o
That seems really steep for the price...
Oh geeze... Wonder how much the Unreal engine cost then.
Yikes... now I understand why it hasn't been so popular outside of Crytek.
I imagine it cost Crytek multi-millions to make it.