Epic throws down the gauntlet; Free money to developers of projects with promise

No strings attached, no required equity stake, make a good looking project in Unreal and get a share of the 5 million dollar giveaway to developers.

As far as I know, Epic is the first major software vendor to actually use such a deal to attract new users (at least with no conditions at all). This is also something that a FOSS organization has no chance in heck emulating (even the BF).

But as far as sucking the oxygen out of all the existing FOSS engines are concerned, the idealism that a lot of their users have mean that such a scenario is probably unlikely. However, it stands to really turn up the pressure against Unity Tech. and other commercial vendors less Epic becomes the next company to virtually tie up the Indie market for itself (and it could even be seen as a shot across the bow for sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo as well).

Thoughts?

its going to make them money in the long run. they get developers addicted to their engine and charge royalties after the game is finished past a few thousand. it will make developers more comfortable and faster with unreal so when major developer hire people for a major project and it turns out unreal is the fastest mode of production they will choose to go with unreal. more licensing. and you have to subscribe to get the unreal engine. very few games are developed over night so it will have users paying for the engine. sure its only $20 a month but X how many people? their $20 a month plan was the shot to unity.

i dont see why it would be a threat to kickstarter, etc…why couldn’t you do both and get even more money? the epic money would be in addition to rather than instead of. some kickstarters get wads of cash, more than epic is going to go throwing around. if there is a threat to kickstarters it would be from valve/steam. they want developers to stop giving keys away which is a major source of attracting kickstarter funding. i guess valve does get their cut for copies sold before it goes on steam, well they get their cut of zero since the game is a return gift for your gift but valve is looking at it as lost money. how you can be losing someone elses money is an unethical claim to be, but its business class not ethics class i suppose.

Well, Epic offers $5k to $50k grants for projects that have working prototype. What “working prototype” entails is a different story. If they want vertical slice, than it’s quite a lot of work to do. So most indie wip project won’t qualify. Also, what determines how much money your project will get? What if I need $50k, but Epic will qualify me for $5k ?

I also wonder if UE4 is still quite raw, since I haven’t seen any indie projects released using UE4 yet (unless I missed it).

Either way it’s a good deal. No one will give you at least $5k to work on the game, without strings attached. So $5k, even though most likely not enough to fund the development, could go into marketing/PR budget.

Note that mighty Tencent stands behind Epic now. They have all money and power in the world to ensure UE4 is #1, widely used and brings $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ profits in a long run. If one of such conglomerates to back up FOSS engine, similar scheme could be possible :slight_smile:

Indiegogo is … not as good as KS. For games at least. And there is a chance you can get a way more than $50k on Kickstarter. So the nice scheme is to get $50k from Epic, use part of that to make great KS campaign, and get moar monies !!! :eyebrowlift:

FOSS engines only beneficial when they have gamecode supplied with them (and assuming devs go for PC only). Otherwise it’s no use for more or less serious project for a small team without solid game dev experience (that even goes for Unity and UE4, despite well documented APIs and training materials).

Warmachine Tactics. Can’t say it’s a ringing endorsement of the engine but that’s down to bad decisions on the part of White Moon Dreams (the developers) not engine capabilities.

moto a huge advantage on ue4 is it does the porting for you. you only have to write the game once to pc, xbox, playstation, etc…and as long as its not too complex even mobile. some good games come out of it. red orchestra was a make something unreal game.

Looking at the forum, the biggest thing I’ve seen right now which might turn people off is the sheer speed at which the engine is being developed.

You may think that’s actually a good thing, not so much if there’s constant reports of workflows and projects being broken because of the truckloads of general UI, graphical, and functionality changes going in with each release (even if it’s ultimately for the better). This type of thing can lead someone to argue that the dust hasn’t quite settled yet and as such decide to wait a little longer. There has also been the occasional unstable release which might cause you to lose a lot of work, but they seem to be working hard on trying to prevent that.

To note; I hear that all assets obtained from the Epic marketplace will have to be replaced in version 4.7 if the version dates back to the initial beta period, so there’s the whole idea of these rapid changes leading to no choice but to break backwards compatibility as well despite efforts to preserve it when possible.

Also, I’m concerned that their community in general is already developing an inkling of fanboy culture (where the philosophy and the plans for the engine is defended voraciously which has already happened in a few threads, with even the moderators involved)… Hopefully it doesn’t become a full-blown toxic soup towards anyone who has a critical view of certain components as their userbase continues to grow.

Have you personally worked with it aiming at consoles, as an indie?

That’s what they said about Unity - make for one platform, release on many. However, it’s far from the truth. Especially for consoles as you’d have to worth with native APIs via C# code. It’s sure easier than writing engine from scratch, but it’s not something small indie team can handle (unless “indie” is going to apply for a small team of seasoned veterans who made several titles for consoles prior going indie).

Same goes for UE4. Running on Android is broken, iOS isn’t as good as with Unity, Linux is unstable, no one who works with UE4 knows about consoles because to even get close to consoles you need to be a registered developer, and even then it’s all under NDA. So if UE4 isn’t even close to be consoles ready by now, no one can spill it to the public.

Come on, you should be more aware than that. UE4 is a great engine. However it’s not a magic wand and using UE4 to be on consoles could be equally challenging as using any other engine.

Going on consoles, even in this gen, is no joke and can’t be taken lightly. Perhaps releasing on PC/Mac first, getting traction/money/experienced programmer on board is a first step. Then getting devkits (that cost money) and getting game working flawlessly on them is another. And then there is certification process !!!

But before all of that, you still need to make a good, working like a clock game! :slight_smile:

To be fair, one should really wait a year or two jumping to UE4. It’s good to get into it this early, and learn it, but for production it worth waiting. Also, they might change the pricing scheme and the early adopters will grandfather $20 / 5% deal, while new users might have to pay more (I am just speculating).

It’s kinda odd saying about fanboy culture with Epic, since they are #1 in the engine market. So I doubt they will listed to a bad petitions. After all, they aren’t really after indies per se, but bigger houses who would get different deal and bring larger profits.

Every engine has its own poisonous culture (except maybe Quake - that was one cool crowd back in the day and somewhat still is) - such ecosystems don’t like outsiders, it’s just natural.

And there’s also the subscription philosophy, I heard people here say “no big deal, I just sign for one installment and use the version I get until I need to upgrade”. The extreme speed of development would put a dent in that, canceling the subscription for even a few months risks putting you way behind the cutting edge (which only makes it a bit more work to bring your project back up to speed when you do a version jump). You also have no chance of getting early dev. versions and giving important feedback so as to make sure your needs are covered.

Sure, spend 20 now and wait maybe 6 months, that’s going to be a difficult prospect. Things are set up where you almost have to stay on subscription monthly.

For learning purposes $20 is good enough. Also one can always build up content before going for production ready code.

They’ve actually stepped back on version updates since 4.6 came out. Yo have to remember that the engine was still under heavy development when it first came out, it was never the complete version of the engine, one of the main reasons why they have source access to the engine. They are at a much more stable place now, so they’ve locked 4.6 down and now if you want to use work in progress code you have the ability to download the latest dev builds straight from the UE launcher. As a game dev unless there is something you desperately need in the latest version of the engine you stick with the stable one until your project is done. The same with Blender. 2.74 or whatever may be cool but if I’m working on something and 2.72 is working well, I’m not upgrading to 2.74 unless there is something I really need in the later version. This is more feasible with UE 4.6 since it’s much more stable than previous versions of the engine. I don’t have to upgrade to 4.7, unless there is something I really need there.

When i tested UE4 the shaders were constantly compiling. So i dont know how do you work like that.