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Programming Games

Should Developers Still Pay For Game Engines? 125

Nerval's Lobster writes: Game developers no longer have to pay for the software they need to make great video games, because the tools used by some of the biggest and most successful studios in the world are available to everyone, for free. Among the existing major engines, there is one holdout that does not offer a free version: Crytek continues to charge everyone for CryEngine, and is intent on continuing to do so. That's not to say Crytek is being unreasonable. The company introduced a $10-per-month subscription last year, making it accessible to indie developers who can't afford the higher-priced package that includes full source code. "With CryEngine, Crytek is going to the high-end," Crytek co-founder Faruk Yerli recently told Develop, a news site for developers. Unity3D is going for the low-end while Unreal is aiming for everything from low- to high-end, he added. But according to some developers queried by Dice, there is little reality to the idea that the big three engines are divided between low, mid-end, and high-end capabilities. If you're a developer, is it still worth paying for a game engine?
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Should Developers Still Pay For Game Engines?

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  • They're not free (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02, 2015 @09:32AM (#49600103)

    You end up paying either way, assuming your game actually has any sales, since the "free" and subscription plans all include a pretty healthy royalty for the engine developer. So, what's $10 a month?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      This...

      Unity 3D costs at least $900 a seat per year or $1500 a seat per edition if your company earned $100,000 in the last year. That does not include Android or OS X, both of which are equally expensive add-ons.

    • by durrr ( 1316311 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @10:10AM (#49600265)

      $120 a year and it's a needless cost for anyone trying to get into gamedev. The pay-when-you-make-it approach of UE4 and Unity is much easier to stomach when you're new.

      • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

        by AuMatar ( 183847 )

        If you aren't in a position where you can gamble 120 dollars a year on your business, you shouldn't have a business. There's a reason why royalty deals are considered bad decisions for small businesses.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        $120 a year and it's a needless cost for anyone trying to get into gamedev. The pay-when-you-make-it approach of UE4 and Unity is much easier to stomach when you're new.

        True. But the answer to

        If you're a developer, is it still worth paying for a game engine?

        Is equally simple.

        If it benefit you more / give better results / save time which out-weights the price then sure it is.

      • $120 a year and it's a needless cost for anyone trying to get into gamedev.

        It's pretty cheap and if you really don't want to spend it then use something else. But the $99 entry cost to iOS development doesn't exactly deter people, even hobbyists that make free programs for that platform.

    • by shione ( 666388 )

      Yea, that is right. They're free at the start but developers have to pay 5% after they make a certain amount of sales.

      There's also another big name engine which is coming and will be free. Valves Source 2 engine has no royalities, the only cleveat being that games made in Source 2 must have a version for sale on steam.

      The timeframe for Source 2 is unknown but don't expect Half Life 3 until Source 2 is out.

      • WRONG.
        Unity does not use this model.

        And if you think there is not value in the time-value of money then you need to study business more...
        • by shione ( 666388 )

          "And if you think there is not value in the time-value of money then you need to study business more..."

          What? Where did you get the idea I thought that?

    • CRYENGINE has no royalty cost attached to it. Unlike the other engines, you can make and release a game without paying a single cent of royalties. The very minor cost of $10 / month is basically chicken feed to anyone able to afford a PC and is just to keep the lights on.

      By contrast, you will be hit for massive amounts of cash the second you go over a set amount with Unreal. Unity hits you straight up and again in the rear.

      • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        If you have a good component and charge a reasonable sum for it then it's a good way to ensure further development and still not limit the usage.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        The $10/month Cryengine license is a pretty nice deal. It doesn't include full source code access, which is a pain, but I think this is similar to most Unity licenses? From our evaluation of it, the tools in general are nowhere near the level of ease-of-use and comprehensiveness that Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 offer, never mind the much smaller community around them; if you have a very small team which can't dedicate programmers to tools/pipeline this is a big problem.

    • All of these engine releases of late seem to have very reasonable terms. From the Unreal Engine 4 FAQ [unrealengine.com]

      How much do I have to pay for Unreal Engine 4?
      UE4 is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products. Read the EULA FAQ for more details.
      I’m a consultant. Do I owe royalties on consulting fees?
      No.

      I think the reason for this is they all want to become the defacto-standard, they are all very keen to create a developer community around their toolset. Personally I like the UE4 / PhysX sales model since you don't pay until you make money from it. I'm interested in playing with these engines as a hobby but have no interest in writing a commercial game, If I was serious about developing and selling games

  • There's some 3rd party assets that probably are worth paying for on the associated asset stores, but with both UE4 and U5 free there's really no reason to pay for engines.

    The only reason is if you're already competent with a paid engine and don't want to learn it all again.

  • by west ( 39918 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @09:43AM (#49600161)

    If one is talking about a hobbyist/near-hobbyist project (budget < $100K), then free (= low upfront cost) is good. But for a real programming project, the up-front cost of the engine is pretty small compared to the possible difference in programming time. If a fully-outfitted programmer is $10K/month after tax and tip, one is in danger of costing the project dollars (of programmer times) in order to save pennies.

    In other words, evaluate the engines based on their qualities, not the up-front costs.

    (On the other hand, lots of game programming nowadays does involve hobbyist-level budgets, in which case the real criteria is "if they're not being paid much, will the programmer's at least have fun using this tool?")

    • But for a real programming project, the up-front cost of the engine is pretty small compared to the possible difference in programming time.

      And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?

      With good tools, one or two programmers can produce software that's better than a dozen programmers. And good tools should support exactly doing that: greatly reducing the requirement for people on a project.

      Of course,

      • by west ( 39918 )

        And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together?

        By "real programming project", I mean were all the participants are being paid at market rates and the budget is large enough to produce a product of the quality (polish, size, art quality, gameplay, etc.) that is expected by current iOS and Android customers. My suspicion is that budget is in the hundreds of thousands, but I low-balled it at $100K.

        I'm not denigrating hobbyist projects, after all, that's all I've ever been involved in. But my point (which I think you agree with) is with a real programming

        • But my point (which I think you agree with) is with a real programming project, the up-front engine cost is trivial compared to the cost of employees.

          If you actually were running a business, you'd realize that there are no "trivial costs". For any expense, the question is not "how big is this relative to other expenses", but "is it going to make me more money than I spend on it".

          When the premise is "this tool is expensive because it's useful only with large teams and you won't notice the expense in your bud

          • by AuMatar ( 183847 )

            Of course there's trivial costs in a business. If you're worrying about the costs of pens and whether you can get them 10 cents cheaper, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost savings of turning the thermostat from 70 to 71, you're wasting your time. If you're worried about the cost of something that is less than 1% of your budget, you're wasting your time- even if you reduce it to 0 you'd have saved more by focusing elsewhere. A good businessman realizes whats worth being concerned

            • by Cederic ( 9623 )

              You're fucking insane.

              10 cents for a pen sure. Saving 10-20% on a $800k stationary bill however..
              Changing the thermostat, again, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars across a multinational.
              1% of your budget? That's fucking massive. Where I work that's several tens of millions of dollars.

              A good businessman focusses on everything, because you can, and it works out better for you, and your stakeholders.

              • by west ( 39918 )

                A good businessman focusses on everything, because you can

                I cannot.

                I have to say that I disagree with this philosophy, because no-one I've met *can* focus on everything. Mental energy is finite, and I'd prefer that it be focussed where it can do the most good. (Over my career, my few fights with management were when their priority was "everything".)

                That said, I have seen small things get bigger and bigger, but because the incremental change was so small, people didn't want to deal with it, so it's worth c

                • by Cederic ( 9623 )

                  You're conflating focus with prioritisation.

                  Any business bigger than a sole trader can focus on more than one thing.

                  Shit, one company I worked for saved 10 cents on pens by stopping buying stationary. It was that or go out of business. They stayed in business.

          • by west ( 39918 )

            When the premise is "this tool lets you reduce the number of programmers you need from 10 to 2", that's a good premise.

            I want to know about any tool that makes programmers five times more effective!

            Moreover, we've probably both seen cases where the philosophy was "this tools is expensive, so it *must* be good".

            But I've seen a lot more "A thousand dollars is a lot of money" when I see it add 5-10% to a 100K programmer's productivity. Admittedly, it *is* hard to measure productivity, but my general philosop

            • I want to know about any tool that makes programmers five times more effective!

              R for statistics, Matlab for numerical programming, Simulink for simulation, Lua for game AI, etc.

              So, with respect to the topic at hand, I strongly believe if you have decent employees, then they can probably tell you what engine will work best for them.

              If you ask a bunch of C++ programmers about what tools you should buy, they are probably not going to recommend tools that they don't know and that would put most of them out of a

      • by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @10:54AM (#49600491)

        One of my and my group's major sources of income is cleaning up after those "one developer" projects. The "rone developer" often has no idea how, or no willingness, to set up a testing plan before releases, to integrate robust security, to make software high availability, or to scale it behind a certain very modest size.

        The result is that the first project or demo works well and is very lean and agile in the performance sense. But as the number of customers grow, or as people find and report bugs, scaling up and keeping it working well is much easier for the larger, more cautious team. Ideally, they code reviewed each other's work and pointed out where a fix here broke a feature elsewhere, or pointed out the edge cases that also need to be handled. As an example, what works on a laptop sitting next to the server running the multi-player game may not work so well behind three firewalls, NAT, and an overburdened local cable network setup. Lone developers often are not expected to spend time on those issues.

        • The "rone developer" often has no idea how, or no willingness, to set up a testing plan before releases, to integrate robust security, to make software high availability, or to scale it behind a certain very modest size.

          My point is not that "lone developers" should tackle problems that are too large for them. My point is that if you are using a gaming framework worth its money, all of that should already be taken care of, since these are standard problems in game development. Justifying an expensive tool by

          • by Anonymous Coward

            Cool, now you only need to convince game developers how network communications for multiplayer games are a solved problem they should not bother around and instead buy PRODUCTXXX to do it. Right.

            • I can think of half a dozen companies I worked with in the last decade, all of whom thought they'd re-invented network protocols. All of them found that by the time they'd implemented necessary error correction, buffering, and re-transmit protocols for missed data that they'd actually _lost_ performance. It never showed up in the early testing because the inexperienced, "key developer" didn't know the history or the available technologies, so they'd never tested it under realistic circumstances.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        And by "real programming project", you mean a bloated project with dozens of programmers wasting their time arguing and figuring out how to work together? With good tools, one or two programmers can produce software that's better than a dozen programmers. And good tools should support exactly doing that: greatly reducing the requirement for people on a project.

        I can beat a dozen clueless developers, I can't beat a dozen people like myself. If you can there's something horribly wrong with your cooperation, communication and coordination skills. Most of us work on systems that are bigger than one man can build and maintain and if I tried to get my paws into every corner of the system I'd only be the whirlwind trashing things on my way through for the rest to clean up. I've reached my natural scope at the level of detail that I work, if I wanted to increase the widt

    • This is pretty obvious to professionals, but seems lost on laymen. An engine is not a magical solution. It does not turn lazy workers into hard workers, it does not turn Random Joes into creative people.

      Furthermore, engines come at a huge efficiency cost. Instead of knowing your own products, you've got to master someone elses. It takes substantial time to learn a tool chain and become efficient with it. It also takes time to adapt the tool chain to do what you actually want. Not to mention time spent dea
      • Engines can be free all they want

        Or at least they think they can, they think they can, they think they can.

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        Furthermore, engines come at a huge efficiency cost. Instead of knowing your own products, you've got to master someone elses. It takes substantial time to learn a tool chain and become efficient with it. It also takes time to adapt the tool chain to do what you actually want. Not to mention time spent dealing with bugs in the engine itself. All time that for many devs could have been spent making their own tool chain exactly how they want it.

        Yeah, that's why everybody writes their own engine instead of using Unity, or one of the Unreal engine incarnations, or Source, or Crytek.

        Oh wait. No. They've done the careful cost analysis and the productivity benefits of an engine and being able to get big swathes of the solution domain out of the box works out a fuck of a lot cheaper than hand crafting everything.

        You're right, time is money. Learning an engine takes time. Writing your own engine takes time. Hiring someone that already knows an engine is

      • Furthermore, engines come at a huge efficiency cost. Instead of knowing your own products, you've got to master someone elses.

        Seriously that is the same stupid argument industry newbies and old fogies make for not using the C++ STL, the boost libraries, etc... and is the primary driver of NIH syndrome. Can you actually provide some statistics or real examples of cases where it is more cost-efficient to write your own comparable engine rather than licensing an existing one? I'm sure there are some for niche cases that mainstream engines don't serve (say you want to do primarily sparse voxel octree rendering) but for the most part y

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Upfront cost? Most engines are charging percentages of revenue which means they can quite readily chew up 100% of the profits ie if your margins are only 10%, then 5% of revenue means they will be demanding 50% of your profits. How can programmers be so bad at math. If anything the crytek models looks suspiciously cheap. Can a programming house with 100 programmers get one subscription or do they need 100. How far out into the future will the subscription and its conditions hold, ie at least 3 years and pr

      • Upfront cost? Most engines are charging percentages of revenue

        Of the game engines mentioned in TFA, "most" = "one"?

        Unity: $1500 (or $900/year) per developer.

        CryEngine: $120/year per developer.

        Source 2 (upcoming): Free (for games released on Steam).

        Unreal: 5% royalty.

  • by Squapper ( 787068 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @09:44AM (#49600163)
    You still pay a 5% royalty, which is a rather high price if you make high-end games. For indies and students it might be a good deal, but if your studio is into AAA, paying up-front is a better deal.
    • Or you can pay a flat one-time fee of $1500. That also gives you the right to buy the next release, when it comes out, for half price. And since, as a dev, you want to keep the ownership of your toolset instead of leaving it in the hands of your boss, not only because you can take it with you when you leave, but also because you can tinker with it on your own time, it's better for you to buy it outright rather than let the company pay it.

      After all, the day you're out of a job is not the day you want to for

    • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      I've worked on several h-games, and 5% might seem steep and depending you're right. It really depends on the market your making your games for, I can only speak from experience in the h-game scene so I'll toss out what I can. If you're paying a monthly fee, and your project gets delayed for whatever reason you can be negative very quickly. If it's per-sale after X amount, you're probably better off. Professional h-game developers that make 250k+ on each release and do 3-5 releases a year are going to fi

  • Those engines aren't free. It is true that you can download and start developing without paying a dime, but you pay royalties once you start selling the software you've created with the engine.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    ... paying for engines made sense, but no longer. The costs of AAA development are through the roof and it just makes more sense to have game engines as infrastructure that everyone can look at the code and see where bugs/bad design is. Just because someone licenses a game engine doesn't mean it is well designed or designed for every type of game.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I am so sick and tired of reading about how hard it is to chose a game engine these days, as if you don't have a choice. News flash- most of the engines out there aren't that complicated. You're paying for the editors and development tools, which is where the real power lies. Maybe that's worth it if you're building some giant triple A title, but not everyone is doing that. If you can figure out your own workflow, then you can write your own engine. To date, I've worked on 11 projects that did exactly this.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Just want to point out, OGRE is not an engine. It's just a really bloated wrapper for rendering APIs

      • While there is some truth to that, you haven't been keeping up to date with Orgre's design and architecture changes:

        Orgre 2.0 Pitfalls and Design Proposal
        * http://www.mediafire.com/downl... [mediafire.com]

        They ditched OOP and incorporated DOD (Data-Orientated-Design) for a 5x performance increase!
        * http://www.yosoygames.com.ar/w... [yosoygames.com.ar]

        Mike Acton is a respected programmer in the video game industry, and he's right. In fact, if you were paying attention I listed his famous Typicall C++ Bullshit [smugmug.com] as reference in my Ogre 2.0 pro

        • It wasn't Moore's law that kicked us in the butt, it was the differential between the increases in the speed of CPU / GPU vs memory access speeds. As CPUs kept increasing at a decent pace, the memory lagged massively behind leading to new strategies for fast code.

    • This is pure rhetoric and chest thumping until you tell us exactly which engines you wrote and the products that used them. Making 11 shitty low grade projects that no-one cares about is a little different to making even a single AAA engine.

  • If they're worthwhile (by whatever metric you want to use that's important to you), yes. If not, no.

    Everything else is mental masturbation for the sake of political argument.

    • If they're worthwhile (by whatever metric you want to use that's important to you), yes. If not, no.

      Well, o.k., since the question was "Should developers still pay from game engines?"...

      Everything else is mental masturbation for the sake of political argument.

      But what about social justice?

  • I've somehow managed to go my entire career without working on a third party licensed engine. It's always been developed internally by the company I was working for. And even when I went indie, with just me working on my own little game, no commercial engine had the specialized features I wanted, and ended up spending a couple of years writing my own. Plus, I liked the fact that I was able to build my game engine to work exactly the way I wanted it to function.

    Using a commercial game engine makes a lot o

    • You can help the discussion by telling us the name of the engine you created, and the list of commercially released games that used it. We need some perspective.

  • ... over on Reddit [reddit.com]. It keeps getting rehashed:

    * Game Engine Design [reddit.com]
    * UE4 is now completely free [reddit.com]
    * wishlist game engine from scratch [reddit.com]
    * differences between Unity and Unreal [reddit.com]
    * UE4 vs Unity Faceoff [reddit.com]
    * More AAA games using unity? [reddit.com]
    * AAA are all free [reddit.com]

    There are still 2 reasons to "roll your own" game engine:

    - To learn. i.e. See this uber diagram [imgur.com] of all the components of a modern game engine!

    and

    - The popular engines still do a terrible job of dynamic terrain management, instancing, meshing, etc. Rolling your own such as Proc World [blogspot.com], say using dual contouring [blogspot.com], etc., means it is easier to fit into your rendering pipeline instead of trying to figure out someone else's architecture.

    • bro, you need to stop going to reddit, bunch of dummy poopy heads there. go to hackernews

      if you get confused by the results when you google for hackernews, you don't belong there. stay on reddit

      • Get off your high horse. I've been on /. for 15 years, and Reddit for 7 years. I've been helping people there for years. While reddit tends to be (more) immature, you don't know what the hell you are talking about WRT to /r/gamedev.

        Instead of complaining about the community what are _you_ doing to improve it?

        • I gave up hope. there are people who need to learn that they need to look a bit harder and apply more of their own effort, and helping them actually damages their potential for growth

  • by Anonymous Coward

    And Slash's latest slashvertizement is about game engines. If you order NOW you get not one, but TWO copies of the source code. Can't afford that? No problem we have an easy $10 a month subscription. Why get what you want for free when you could pay us money? Don't wait, order NOW.

  • There are a significant number of 'missing features' in the free version of Unity3d...for example, render-to-texture. That's a pretty serious omission for any kind of serious software development - so the $1500 (or $75/month with a 2 year commitment) is necessary if you are really serious about game development. In a typical game company, $1,500 is roughly the salary of one programmer for a week. So over the life of any reasonable commercial game, the cost of buying a full license for each worker is es

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )
      Evidently, the free version of Unity *does* have render-to-texture now. In terms of functionality, only differences between the paid and free versions of Unity seem to be that the free one doesn't let you use a custom splash screen and no multiple developer support.
  • And it works quite well, for all platforms.
    • I second this. I am used to creating my own engines so getting used to Godot was a bit odd at first, and it has a terrible lack of documentation and a few rough edges, but it's a pretty capable engine to play with; it's trivial to build/install/maintain, and very easy to export to another OS.
      I wish it had better documentation though, but if more users get interested on it, it might happen.

      • by Thluks ( 4100403 )
        Documentation is not very nice, but you find much help in the forum and on facebook. Never had a real real roadblock for long. And it's open source. You can research in the code or enhance the documentation. :)
    • by Pouar ( 2856763 )
      I would actually pay for Godot as long as it stays open source
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Game Engines take significant development time to build. For some companies their primary product is Game Engines. This is literally demanding that a company give away one of it's primary products for free.

  • Use Crystal Spaces [crystalspace3d.org] and forget about it.

    On the other hand, if you're going to publish your work on XBox Live! or PSN Network, the 3D engine cost is the lesser of your problems.

  • The process of writing your own engine gives you both insight and more creative freedom... Most people aren't successful at writing their own, and even if they are of course it wont be as graphically impressive or comprehensive as the leading AAA engines - but it's the process that's important. There is more to writing games than just filling in story and content, i'm not saying that is worthless but it's only one of the many creative avenues to explore in games, the engine gives you ultimate control over m
  • Am I too old that I remember when "game developer" meant actually developing the game engine too?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Programmers USED to actually WRITE CODE (and UNDERSTAND the code they wrote, of course).

    Nowadays, however, it seems that the majority of people who fancy themselves as "programmers" are actually just "integrators" who hook together lots of code other people wrote into a haphazard product which they can never fully debug and never truly complete - because they do not even know how it all works, having not written most of it. This hit a nerve with me because I have been in design review meetings with younger

    • by nhat11 ( 1608159 )

      Sure maybe for something simpler back in the SNES days. Nowadays it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel especially with the cost of game design (unless its indie and nothing AAA, etc) I'd rather have the team focus on making a good game and not spend years making an engine.

  • Sure there might be some reason to build an engine from bottom up if its something specific or other reasons but if a team can just focus on their design and creation of their game, as a consumer, I would rather have the developers focus on making a good game.

  • Free can be nice. But do you really want to live in a house built by the lowest bidder? Maybe not...

    The vendors can choose whatever price they want and the buyers can choose whether to buy it or not. But it only is a success if there is a balance.

    And as is mentioned here, It is not that simple. There are many costs involved. And one that should be considered is: might the vendor dissappear just as you really need it?

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