They would also take a 5% gross revenue royalty on what was made. UE4 uses C++ or visual script languages to accommodate both coders and designers.
Epic still expects some to want a more personalised licensing arrangement with the company, but they firmly believe this new model will benefit large and small devs.
“We’re seeing a renaissance in game development,” Epic’s Tim Sweeney told PCGamesN. “We’re about 30 years straight from coin-ops to Xbox 360. Games doubled in complexity every few years, and budgets would go up and team sizes would go up. But this revolution has reset everything.”
“We’re very much motivated by that. We wanted to bring this engine that was brought up and forged in the AAA world to everybody. And a business model that’s affordable and fair.”
”We’re very excited about making our tools available so a new generation of artists and designers can come up learning Unreal,” he continued. “That’s been a big driver of our business model.”
There have been criticisms that Unreal Engine 4 features a lack of programming language diversity, but the company feels C++ lets you do anything you’d need or those who prefer to not touch code itself can instead use visual-based programming to get things done by using the Blueprints system.
“There are two levels to implement game functionality in UE4,” explained Sweeney. “These are different worlds. Designers tend to dislike programing and programmers tend to dislike visual scripting languages.”
The Unreal Engine platform is no longer the near-undisputed middleware it once was as Crytek’s CryEngine and Unity have been chipping away at its huge market share for years and securing their own following. The great news is that indie teams now have another affordable triple-A engine to work with to pursue their ideas.
Visit the official Unreal Engine website for more.