But this also tells us something about Epic: It tells us they’re scared, or at least concerned, about the role of their until-now B2B licensing model. An expanding codebase and usable assets shared between content creators will further drive movement to Unreal Engine 4 over other technologies, as more support often does.
It shows that Epic is taking risks, but also that they’re confident in their codebase, functionality, and in the community’s ability to support them.Įpic wants to appeal to the open development community and encourage technology sharing among game creators. Going from millions in licensing (or in the case of Adobe, thousands in purchasing) to a monthly subscription is a very scary, potentially dangerous move especially looking at Epic, who’ve released their entire accompanying source code alongside the $20 monthly subscription. That’s a big change, but if you look at Adobe, it’s a model that’s seeing attempts by serious developers. Custom licensing agreements must be negotiated for consoles, so this applies primarily to PC right now. It is no longer a requirement to develop a more limited internal game engine.Īnd so we see Epic’s new licensing model: $20 per month for full, 100% access to the game’s engine and accompanying tools – and the source code – accompanied by forfeiting 5% of the game’s gross revenue to Epic for the engine. Indie games have sort of seized the day in a lot of ways, too, and access to the CryEngine and Unity have vastly improved the reaches of what an indie game is technologically capable of implementing. Just look at Mozilla’s recent partnerships with Unity and Unreal Engine – running game content from a browser has heavy implications for accessibility (as Nick Pinkerton discussed in his Mozilla article). The games industry has trended hard toward accessibility from a monetary and hardware perspective.
Bioshock: Infinite, the Batman games, Borderlands, Dishonored, and several dozen other major titles have all shipped on Unreal Engine, giving an idea as to just who has been using the UE tech up until now.
Historically, Epic’s Unreal Engine has been catered to “AAA” studios with millions to spend on licensing it’s still cheaper to drop a few million on someone else’s engine than develop an in-house solution of similar caliber (there are also time concerns), and so Epic has made much of its fortune in dealing in direct B2B environments with major studios. Unreal Engine 4 has taken ambitious steps to up its aggression in the rapidly-advancing engine market. Unreal Engine 4 GDC Press Conference & Tech Demo