UE4, CRYENGINE, and UNITY 5: Will it work?

I just bought a license to the Esenthel Engine: http://www.esenthel.com/

$200 total, no recurring fees, no royalties. Seems like a good deal to me.

Sure getting money is great, but if you are like me and are working on your first public game, chances are it will be non-commercial.

If you work on your first game and don't plan to make money, why not use one of the older engines (UE3,Unity4) with a license model which suits your goals better ?

To benefit from new engines, you need to have accordingly art ready, which is one of the most expensive parts in game development. If you go for more stylized art, then you don't really need all this physical correct lighting models etc. from top of the art engines.

Cryengine charged you crazy fees.

CryEngine had a free version that had a similar royalty percentage to the UDK. Before these changes, Unreal/Cry had very similar terms .

Sure getting money is great, but if you are like me and are working on your first public game, chances are it will be non-commercial.
Now UE4 is up on charging money.

With UE4 you can pay $19 (per person on the team) one time, and then release your game. If the game makes $0, then you pay $0 in royalties.
Educational institutions can also pay $19 once, and then let all their students use it, which is great.

P.S. there's already 2 threads about this...

As far as I see it, with UE4 you're paying for alpha testing although some would argue beta, unless you become a late adopter by which time the license model may have changed. So you're likely to have to pay more than $19 + 5% as in n x $19 + 5% just to make sure you have something stable to release.

As for Unity, hard to tell as it's not available yet, but might be stable enough that you'd really only need to pay on month subscription so worth the higher price point.

CryEngine? No idea, maybe it will fall in to the same state as UE4 but cheaper, have to wait until May to find out.


But if you look beyond the bullet price points. Playing with UE4 at least, maybe CryEngine as well, what you'll pick up with these could be beneficial to go work for some company in the industry, else to create games yourself Unity depending on scale of project and target audience.

But as Ashaman said, more than likely you can work with existing tech for a lot cheaper.

Source 2?

I have not found any official document where Valve describes license terms of Source commercial use. I would like to use Source in my project (that is open now), but the fact that I know almost nothing about the terms keeps me away from the engine.

Does anybody have an experience of Source commercial use?

I have not found any official document where Valve describes license terms of Source commercial use. I would like to use Source in my project (that is open now), but the fact that I know almost nothing about the terms keeps me away from the engine.

Before these recent game-changing announcements from GDC:
"CryEngine free" and UDK had publicly available terms of ~25% royalties, aimed at hobbyists and indies... but you wouldn't find any description of the actual professional terms for Cry or Unreal anywhere. If you wanted to license Unreal Engine (not UDK) or CryEngine (not CryEngine Free SDK) you would introduce yourself and negotiate with them.

Likewise with Source - you have to ask for a private quote.

This discussion does not belong in Game Design. Moving it out.

Cryengine : $10 per month. This allows you to access all new features plus there are no hidden fees and its royalty free.

http://cryengine.com/news/crytek-announces-its-cryengine-as-a-service-program

Finally. Thanks for this.

What exactly do you need in an engine for your projects?

There are a number of open source engines that can be put to great use and won't cost you a dime.

What exactly do you need in an engine for your projects?

There are a number of open source engines that can be put to great use and won't cost you a dime.

Most indies would never use any/all the features but somehow I think it might be a good idea to spend a bit of money to get familiar with tools you could be using in your professional career.

I just bought a license to the Esenthel Engine: http://www.esenthel.com/

$200 total, no recurring fees, no royalties. Seems like a good deal to me.

Can I ask what kind of game you are making. How do you compare this engine to Unity and the other big AAA engines, any features missing you would like, does it support large open worlds?

What exactly do you need in an engine for your projects?

Sometimes what you really need is just a great toolset, which these engines excel at.

I just bought a license to the Esenthel Engine: http://www.esenthel.com/

$200 total, no recurring fees, no royalties. Seems like a good deal to me.

Can I ask what kind of game you are making. How do you compare this engine to Unity and the other big AAA engines, any features missing you would like, does it support large open worlds?

It's the reverse. Esenthel (it's called an open world engine) supports open worlds better than Unity but Unity has more features.

I just bought a license to the Esenthel Engine: http://www.esenthel.com/

$200 total, no recurring fees, no royalties. Seems like a good deal to me.

Can I ask what kind of game you are making. How do you compare this engine to Unity and the other big AAA engines, any features missing you would like, does it support large open worlds?

It's the reverse. Esenthel (it's called an open world engine) supports open worlds better than Unity but Unity has more features.

Can you state what these features are?

I just bought a license to the Esenthel Engine: http://www.esenthel.com/

$200 total, no recurring fees, no royalties. Seems like a good deal to me.

Can I ask what kind of game you are making. How do you compare this engine to Unity and the other big AAA engines, any features missing you would like, does it support large open worlds?

It's the reverse. Esenthel (it's called an open world engine) supports open worlds better than Unity but Unity has more features.

Can you state what these features are?

The link above states what i know. "Unlimited Sized Worlds".

Unity 5 : $1,500 up front or $75/month. This allows you to pre-order Unity 5 and to hold you over you get Unity 4. There is no "free" option for Unity 5, but a lump sum option is available.

https://store.unity3d.com/

I'm 99% sure that there will be a free Unity 5 Option. You should be able to send Unity $0 to preorder it and get access to Unity 4 until it's released ;)

Crytek is interesting, but does it offer the full C++ code ? Otherwise I would go with Unreal.

Perhaps someone could check out unreal and finally confirm how many lines of code it has.

Personally, I think the Unreal Store is going to be extremely beneficial. The idea of sharing Blueprints as starting points is game-changing. Uploading art assets and textures beyond just the samples that Epic will provide is invaluable to beginners.

I also think the 5% royalty isn't that big a deal. If UE4 is as friendly as they claim, the speed at which you could release games seems to be significantly faster. If a developer could build 2 games in UE4 at a speed comparable to building 1 game in another engine, then you're getting much more money in return even after you factor in the royalties.

Obviously that's dependent on a few things, but I really think the Unreal Store could change developement in a drastic way.