Probably because most devs stopped making their own proprietary engines, so the supply for solid engines is at an all time low. With less options they can crank up the price, as there aren’t really any other options for most devs.
Most devs never would have made their own proprietary engines. With ready availability of engines to use, the number of developers skyrocketed as it lowered the bar of who can make a game.
There are a lot of game engines out there. Godot is a good engine if you’re jumping from Unity because it’s a lot more similar to Unity than some other engines and they both can use C#.
Because China is increasingly looking broke, so daddy Tencent's purse is tightening.
On top of that, the world's banks now have interest rates to look after again, so their free money streams have ended too. Meaning that companies have to prove their profitability.
But the rich want to keep their free money train going, so we're all paying now.
Tim Sweeney alone owns 50% of the company, he can pretty much make his own decisions independently from Tencent. Also China is slowly catching up to the US’s GDP with way less government debt, what are you talking about?
The most current projections is China will never catch up to US GDP. Just for posterity, China GDP per capita is under $14k, while US is above $80k. There is no conceivable path to closing this gap. Not with an authoritarian in charge who shuts down entire industries on a whim and murders political rivals who disagree with him.
Or taking advantage of that happenning with the competition, to enhance profitability.
Make money is the point of pretty much all companies, and financially there are only 2 thinks stopping them from upping their prices:
If there is competition it will lead to losing customers (though thinks like branding subvert this quite a bit) which means the money they make with higher prices might actually be less.
If prices get too high people will choose the “do without” option.
Anyways, the point being that if there is a broader shift in pricing in the market, even companies that are not under the same financial pressures to up prices will still do it as the 1st of those price limitation is relaxed so they can make more money.
As recession looms, you have general inflation and increased interest rates. This affects overhead and loan repayments. That and probably other factors all contribute to the need to raise prices.
It’s not just the gaming sector. Almost all other sectors are raising their prices or adjusting their service plans. Eg. shrinkflation and/or lower quality on products and services.
This is particularly for people using the engine to write film rending software which gets bought one for a lot of money but low volume, and gets used as a huge cost savings for mid-high end production that can save on lighting and comp passes or even render time.
High volume software(games) probably won’t change much at all.
Because like all the tech industry, they grew massively on the back of low interest rates since 2008 where investors saw better returns putting money into companies than sitting on it, now the interest rates have shot up again post Covid, they need to show their investors they can make better returns than the 5%+ they’d make just leaving the money in the bank. Hence the cost cutting by sacking staff and gouging of customers by price increases.
I suspect that Unreal 5 is going to make Epic so much money in the coming years. Taking 5% after the first million dollars doesn’t seem like a lot until you remember that the next Witcher and Cyberpunk are both Unreal 5 developments.
The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn’t bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I’d be thrilled if that happened).
Seems like a fair move to me. If Hollywood studios like Disney are able to use it for free right now to save time and money producing shows and movies why shouldn’t Epic get a fair fee for the product that enables those savings?
cool, then it’s 20% of your “games” revenue if you want to do that.
Epic generally let companies self report, when using the engine you have to agree to allowing them to audit if they think your self-reporting is incorrect but that’s not a very usual situation
Unity gave them a fantastic opportunity here, they now have an excuse to raise their prices as well and still look like the good guy by doing it somewhat reasonably
Difference is that Unity was generally favorable, until the recent blunders, while Epic has generally been disliked for quite a long time now, because of Tim acting like a complete cunt to a lot of people on the industry, including the consumers for his own products
I’m pretty sure Unity showed, quite clearly, that a bait and switch is a bad idea. Plus, Unreal is going after big titles. You don’t fuck with companies that make big titles.
Unity was too greedy at once. It tried to make devs pay retroactively. Unreal just needs to not do that and can still be greedy. Who’s to say they won’t do incremental pay increases over a few years to make devs more accustomed to price increases?
No. Previously if you used unreal but didn’t ship any engine code to end users you didn’t have to pay anything (games obviously ship engine code, so they’re already paying once they pass a certain revenue threshold or upfront if they want a support contract, and the announced pricing changes explicitly don’t effect games)
Unreal has been pushing hard into film and virtual production workloads, but they weren’t getting paid anything due to the existing license terms.
Now if eg. you’re using a virtual set (like the Mandalorian) or doing in camera previs (basically previewing approximately what a scene will look like with CGI, either between takes or even viewing it live on a second monitor attached to the camera as you film) with unreal you’ll have to actually pay.
Yeah a game engine saving a studio hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per episode on lighting, comp, rendering, and set building or travel costs to shoot on location is not representative of the license fee paid
Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
Wait, so youre really telling me me Epic giving away a ton of free games on EGS every single month and free unreal engine marketplace assets to devs as well as regular epic megagrants was never a financially sustainable move?
Psssh. In other news, salt is salty. 🤭
I honestly believe Tim is not going to f–k this one up though, as a former one he clearly cares about the game dev community and as majority shareholder he isn’t needing to be driven by profits as much as publicly traded Unity head John Riccatello is.
Plus, fortnite is still a goddamn cash printer, just not printing as fast as they expected.
They should’ve stuck with Steam instead of going exclusive through Epic Games. Epic’s predatory practice of PC exclusives makes it hard to survive something like this. If they existed on a broader spectrum of services, this would be no big deal.
I guess by making it work you mean not having a significant change outside of the introduction of tournaments and knockout ltm both of which were launched years ago. I love the game to death but Psyonix isn’t doing shit besides making cosmetics and supposedly migrating to Unreal 5 which we’ve not heard a peep about in ages.
I wish they would’ve actually kept developing the game but its a cosmetic collectathon now.
You still can’t get Rocket League on Steam on an account that didn’t already have the game bought before it was F2P. Is this the case for Fall Guys, or did they go further and stop updating the Steam version?
It’s cool how you can be providing the labor for a company and then that company gets bought by another company and the shareholders who don’t actually make the thing get rich and then you get fired because the other company has a bad year even though the thing you labored for is incredibly successful.
Tangentially, I haven’t played in ages but they should have made it local coop so we can have fun on the courses without having to play through the same few opening courses and deal with lobbies.
Yeah, them deciding that no stage is sacred and not allow for any offline or private play was extremely frustrating and made it so that I just lost the ability to give a shit at all about the game
Custom lobbies (i.e. the exact feature you’re asking for) were launched in December 2020, in beta mode, then March 2021 to everyone. So the feature you wanted has been there for over 2.5 years.
It’s always fascinating to me to see highly rated comments that are pretty out of touch with the actual subject matter.
To me it just shows that they made the change far too late for anyone to even notice. It’s not reasonable to be a subject matter expert in every game one’s ever played.
Exactly this, I see this a lot in the Joe Rogan…“I bet you haven’t watched all his shows, so how can you say you don’t like him” you should’nt need to know everything in detail to form an opinion
Doubling down on what exactly? Man why are you so weird accusing me of editing comments and “doubling down” when all I’m doing is no changing my view based on an irrelevant reply from you.
And I compared the argument that “you can’t have a view on something without having an intimate and indepth knowledge of topic” especially when that view is whether or not you take part in the piece of media.
As someone who has played the game from day 1, and almost every day since, it’s a shame that this game that already is on auto drive will be crippled even further. If you have a bunch of friends who just wanna chat and don’t wanna play something competitive it fills all those roles.
I guess we should expect even less changes and content going forward… I know the level creation was just created to allow the community to provide free content so I wonder what else they can do to continue this or if the game will just die off.
I played it obsessively for the first season and got pretty decent at it.
The second season started, I got disconnected from my first four games about 3 rounds into each. Played it once more on the day that you could cheese the Infallible achievement by running Hoverboard Heroes over and over.
Never played it again. Certainly never touched it since it went “free”.
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Aktywne