This isn’t huge in the grand scheme of things (I mean, compare it to salaries), but it’s less friendly to the reality of game development than the royalty license. If your development team has ten people, you’re paying $1500 per month for Unity - and if you suddenly need to expand that team to thirteen, you’ll need to find space in your budget for another $450. For any given project, you do not need to account for the licensing costs of the tools, only your prospective returns.ī) Unity’s license is per-seat, whereas Unreal’s royalty is per-project. There are two fairly important points that I’d consider in terms of the costs themselves Ī) Unity’s cost is up-front, meaning it must be taken out of your development budget whereas Unreal’s cost is a royalty based on release. But if you hit big then Unreal is going to cost a big truck of money on royalties, but from my point of view… it’s fair enough. If you don’t have a team of professionals who actually know what they are doing then Unity may cost you much much more because you will not be able to finish a good game in just 1~2 years.ĥ+ years of Unity Pro monthly subscriptions x10+ seats ain’t cheap. Unity is taking your moneys, when you use it, doesn’t matter your fate/outcome. If you have a team working on stabilished product with a fanbase waiting for the new game, fine, Unity may be much cheaper depending on many factors.īut, for most cases you are actually saving tons of wasted investment in case you use Unreal (which is much more advanced software by the way), because “if you succeed then Epic succeed with you”. If you sell anything, remember that Steam’s 30% is already a huge cut you have to deal with. Why pay for years of subscription fees when you can’t even know if your finished game is going to sell ANYTHING at all. Last bit of advice, and secret sauce of Indy development, take a few small business course usually offered by your local collage or university…and of course write the fee off on your taxes. Rule of thumb is always consider companies that sell off the shelf software products as being snake oil sales man and learn to amortize your costs. Up front cost will kill you and could land up losing money.Īs a business you do not want to own your gear or equipment as you can write such items off as a business expense or even as a loss. Out of scope in this case would be using UE4 for example as a real time rendering platform to produce a full length animated feature film for which you would not have to pay royalties. Unreal 4 product support is free and the scope of the royalty is limited to video game development. Unity’s licensing and support becomes foggy as to up front costs from paying for product support or licensing fees for out of scope use (IE fair use that is not game related) If your rate of return is $100,000 week then for the year is $52,000,000, with out considering falloff.Īngry Birds is said to gross 1.2 million per month and Rovio Entertainment having a market value of 4 Billion.Įpic only makes money when you make money so your up front costs is zero If you release your game on Steam and with in a week your rate of return is $10 bucks your game will probably lose focus on Steam. $100,000 is an arbitrary number as to a fixed point as to a rate of return. If you make “anything” as a product for the Unreal 4 engine and make a return of $100,000 bucks in a year I say good job…dame good job. The idea that one can make an AAA game and not pay for the good stuff, and meaning no disrespect, gives me a chuckle.
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