About Source Engine.

sure, anyone can liscence it, but its not the kind of thing you can just go and buy in the store...

expect to pay LOTS!!!

you could always make a mod for it first, but you won't be able to make any profit from it then.

You can sell your HL2 mod if Valve approves it. However, they demand 50% of the sales.

Source Engine Licensing

It costs a lot (hundreds of thousands of dollars plus royalties) to license.

It is no replacement for actually knowing how to write a game; engines are not "game makers".

Last time I looked, Valve discusses licensing only under NDA, which means that it is probably out of your price range. The good news is that the Source SDK is available for free, so you can develop modifications all you want.

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Last time I looked, Valve discusses licensing only under NDA, which means that it is probably out of your price range. The good news is that the Source SDK is available for free, so you can develop modifications all you want.

The *bad* news is that the SDK is buggy, and almost entirely undocumented. You're better off modding virtually any other game in existence.

I'm going to throw in a plug for OGRE which is free! and is capable of any of the effects seen in the source engine such as HDR, bloom, depth of field, soft shadows... You can even plugin a free physics library (like ode) to get some of those remarkable physics effects!

With all that said... it's very hard to do a game with anything except a full production team. (like, what's up with team fortress 2? going on something like 6 years of development? this industry is deep...)

Sure source engine looks good but it also usses allot of the computer im a Source Engine player myself and sometimes i still play HL1 Engine (quake engine but modified a bit) games because the gameplay there is better.