I was just curious how much a license for the unreal engine would cost assuming they would give it to you. Do they take royalties from your games?

If they will license it to you good luck. But if they are currently using it they won''t license it to you yet.
I am guessing a buying price then a selling license will be big!

you can buy it actually but it's around 50.000 $ i think
[edit] here are the prices [/edit]

-www.penten.tk-
"The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?" -xterm-


[edited by - PenTen on February 18, 2004 8:09:38 AM]

thats quite cheap for what you get. not forget you get the power of the unreal brand behind your product and that is priceless.

I would look at the serious sam engine as that might be cheaper and is a nice multi-platform engine.

Are you a company or just one person making the game?

-www.penten.tk-
"The problem with America is stupidity. I''m not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don''t we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?" -xterm-

Thanks for the replys. And the link from penten. I was just a little curious. My team has been working on our own engine for about 2 yrs but its far from being as good as unreal.

I think you misread that page. The cost is $350,000 dollars for the first format and $50,000 per additional format + a 3% royalty.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions (www.obscure.co.uk)
Game Development & Design consultant

http://www.epicgames.com/licensing.html

They won''t just license it to anybody. They only want experienced, proven developers.

There are lots of other options available, too. You may want to take a serious look at some of the other engines currently out there - CatMother, Irrlicht, Torque, and Ogre all seem very good and are either free or extremely cheap ($100 per developer for Torque for a small indie studio, $10,000 per title for a major studio / publisher). Torque has been proven in commercial products already, which is a plus... and it''s a complete game engine, not just a 3D rendering system.

You can currently obtain a commercial license the Quake II engine for $10,000 (or free if your project is GPL), and I expect Quake III will go the same route a few months after Doom 3 is released.

None of these might be exactly what you are looking for, but could give your team a solid foundation to build / improve upon. None of them perform as well as the latest & greatest Unreal engine, but they are still quite powerful. From there, you can have your programmers build & enhance & optimize to best meet your needs. One thing to remember ... there is no such thing as a "silver bullet" when using a third-party engine. It''s unlikely that it''s going to be EXACTLY what you need right off the shelf... and it''s going to take your programming team some serious spook-up time to understand the code and figure out how to customize it. Your modeling / level-design team will also need to learn how to build around the strengths and weaknesses of that engine (or at least how the engine WILL be when your programmers are done with it).

Here''s a somewhat recent list of available 3D engines. I think its missing some of the latest ones, but it''s a good start to begin your research:

http://www.cyberloonies.com/game-engines.html

Some other engines out there
www.cgengine.com
Am still researching some of the "commercial" grade engiens.

Mojo