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?
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).
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?
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
This bit got me: 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.
…Did you not see this coming? Have you really not had a plan for when Fortnite started to lose momentum? I get that having a product blow up will leaf to a period of manic spending because your cash flow suddenly feels infinite, but come on. You’re not a small player in this, Epic. You’ve been around since the 90s. You know better than to mindlessly ride the wave of a success.
Of course the Fortnite money was going to run out. That’s why you invested so heavily in UE5, right?.. Right?
But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!
Not to mention the amount of money they literally burn through EGS. If I remember correctly, the plan was that it wouldn’t be profitable for another 3/4 years (by 2027).
Fucking idiots. I swear, i dont know why we place CEOs and richer folks, in general, on a pedestal so much. Minecraft has longevity because its basically digital legos. Fortnite is a FPS with buildable aspects.FPSes come and go with the winds.
People have this tendency to associate wealth with knowledge, or business savvy. For many companies, it’s just a matter of “creative accounting” coupled with a psychopath CEO and lucking out. Epic lucked out with Fortnite Battle Royale, don’t forget their original “save world” was a total flop as a paid product
Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
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
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.
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.
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