The licensing changes target big commercial usages outside of game development. (With revenue thresholds, similar to how it already works right now for game development.)
For example, up until now Unreal has seen use in vfx for movie and tv production. The licensing model for Unreal was primarily oriented for game development, which meant that this wasn't generating any revenue for Epic unless that company opted into the optional support plan.
Unlike the crazy situation with Unity, these changes are being announced in advance without affecting usage of previous versions of Unreal.
(Not saying I like or care for subscriptions for software. But context helps understand what's going on here.)
I'm surprised they didn't make this change sooner.
Based on your bullet points here, I'm not sure what you find misleading?
The headline doesn't specifically say outside of games, but I don't think that makes it misleading, especially because the "for all" makes it clear that it's only about some cases. And people generally know that games pay.
Being announced in advance, not affecting previous versions... none of that is implied otherwise by the headline.
The title, especially in light of the stuff that went on with Unity, makes one think that this will affect a much wider group of people than it actually does.
Unreal was never "free for all". For game development, there has always been revenue thresholds.
The new licensing is around commercial use outside of game development, and will also be revenue threshold based. Meaning, just like with game development, if your project is making you money over X threshold, then the licensing kicks in.
> The title, especially in light of the stuff that went on with Unity, makes one think that this will affect a much wider group of people than it actually does.
If you look at the title and think of a different company, that's not the headline's fault. It doesn't even try to reference Unity.
Also what I said in my previous comment is relevant here.
> Unreal was never "free for all".
I accept that it's bad wording, but I don't see how that misleads anyone unless you thought the engine was completely free.
"no longer free for all" implies that it was "free for all" and the change is making it no longer "free for all". In other words, the title is presenting information to the reader that is literally not true.
For your personal reference, here is how the dictionary defines the word "misleading". (Cambridge and Merriam Webster, respectively)
> causing someone to believe something that is not true
> to lead in a wrong direction or into a mistaken action or belief often by deliberate deceit
> to lead astray : give a wrong impression
I would say that the title manages to hit on all 3 of these definitions, with a possible note that perhaps the author "misspoke" rather than intentionally creating a deliberate deceit.
I think the sense in which the title is being criticized for being misleading is not the interpretation where the engine was completely and entirely free. I'm sure a few people thought that by accident but it's not what people are talking about when they bring up comparisons to Unity. That particular wording issue is not something that gets a top comment callout. There isn't any motive to cause that particular confusion on purpose.
> If you look at the title and think of a different company, that's not the headline's fault. It doesn't even try to reference Unity.
Things don't happen in a vaccuum. The Unity fiasco is still fresh on everyone's mind. For any company anywhere in the gaming sphere to change their prices so soon - is going to draw comparisons to Unity. The fact multiple people are discussing this with you should prove that.
Do they need to explicitly contrast the situation with Unity in the headline to avoid being misleading?
Headlines don't have a lot of space!
And as I said in a different comment, the subheading seems to address the main complaints, and in most situations you'd see the headline and the subheading together.
I think the mere fact this is an engine license change happening so close to the Unity fiasco that yes, it is impossible to talk about this without automatically invoking thoughts of what Unity did. Some news and blogs will take advantage of this association and use it for clicks.
I just read through this chain of comments and I do think there is a lot of talking past each other.
I do not think the author was purposefully being misleading. I do not think they need absolution for anything. I think it may be interperted as misleading by some (as it did for the original commentor) based on the reader's recent experiences with Unity and the latest drama; which is not a property of the article, the headline, or the author - but the reader.
"Unreal Engine starts charging for non-game development".
It's not about space, and we know it's all too easy to bury the lede and leave the internet to lash out as it is oft to do. But I don't blame the author. I know in larger sites editorial will make the title without context of the writing independent of the contents in order to maximize traffic.
> If you look at the title and think of a different company, that's not the headline's fault. It doesn't even try to reference Unity.
Being aware of current events and how they may shape how people come to conclusions is a skill that not everybody possesses I suppose.
The headline is most definitely misleading and poorly worded. A better headline would be "Unreal licensing change targets tv production use cases" or something like that.
As the other user pointed out, Unreal Engine was never free for all. So wording it like this misleads the reader into thinking about the most commonly talked about use-case, video game development. And when they read "no longer be free for all" it leads them to believe that people that currently don't pay for Unreal Engine may now have to. Hence the title being "misleading." But hey, journalism is a skill that you work on over time. The editor should have caught this.
It was very much intentional, don't blame yourself. Or I don't know, blame yourself for not reading the article? Either way, this is why an accurate non-click sit headline is necessary, there are many many more people like you and some like to shout and spread misinformation on social media.
"Unreal Engine will no longer be free for non-gaming companies" is 100x less misleading. You are right in that technically speaking it's not misleading, but to me it feels like it's skirting the line of lying by omission. Obviously now with hindsight I can see how the "for all" changes the meaning, but it wasn't obvious (at least to me).
Please explain how this headline connects to Unity at all?
Yes we can assume a lot of people reading the headline will know about it... but I don't see this blatant connection. Would they have to explicitly say it's not like Unity in the headline to escape this?
They even put "non-gaming creatives" in the subheading. Maybe whoever posted should have copied that? If you post the link on most social media you'll automatically see the headline and the subheading.
It's very obvious clickbait. It's clearly exploiting the Unity news.
Clickbait can only be analyzed in terms of the title, not the sub header or content. Because the title is what gets reposted and makes people follow a link.
The headline assumes the point. If Unreal Engine will no longer be free for all, that implies that, right now, it is free for all, like e.g. Godot. Which is just emphatically untrue.
It's like saying (to use the classic example), "I will no longer beat my wife." I never did, just like Unreal was never free for all.
Rather than make excuses for more revenue, I think it's apparent that programmers cannot trust commercial engines or their business models to not up and change one day to suit Epic's revenue.
In-house development doesn't suffer from this issue, and you'll have full control over the code.
Unreal doing this around the same time Unity pulls its shit isn't a coincidence.
As an aspiring game dev I kinda want nothing to do with these tools that want to jerk you around on pricing and aren't absolutely crystal clear on costs.
>In-house development doesn't suffer from this issue, and you'll have full control over the code.
Proprietary engines suffer from plenty which you haven't stated
- can be a mess to read or understand; many hacks done to accomplish a certain feature because it helped ship X feature
- tons of tribal knowledge. If you've worked with a proprietary engine before, you already know documentation will be lackluster and to little fault of the engineers - there's so much to know about the engine that developers don't have the time to chart out what everything does in the engine while pushing out fixes and features.Often, you need to poke the principal programmer who's been with the studio since its inception to understand how a certain long-existing feature works. That's a major point of weakness for the studio!
- Engine limitations! Ask the bethesda devs on their experience building multiplayer for Fallout 76[0]. Imagine building multiplayer in an engine that has never needed to support it. That's a huge refactor and a ton of time spent doing that when it's already handled by Unreal Engine. Developers will need to maintain that engine in the future so the pain doesn't stop after the game gets shipped!
Your post sounds like someone who hasn't worked in game development before. I advise listening to GDC talks, noclip documentaries, and more if you want to get a better understanding of what game development actually looks like. It's a lot more complicated than "your change in price policy makes me mad" (by the way, most AAA studios already have contracts/price agreements with these engines given the amount of revenue they generate for Unity/Unreal).
Game development is not exclusive to business, but you are correct I have not worked for a firm to make a game. Nothing about that arrangement attracts me, especially given the abusive nature of the industry and the frequency that they go through crunch, lack any real worker protections, no unions, etc.
The way AAA studios make games and do business puts me off as well, so pointing to them as an example doesn't really change my outlook. I already don't buy their games and disapprove of their business models.
If I was interested in being exploited for my passion I would consider entering that industry, but as it stands I will be going solo dev.
No game dev company out there seems to treat its staff well during a game's development, so even if I wanted to work on a game as part of a team, I'd be looking at a poor work/life balance and a stressful work environment. I'm too old for that kind of BS.
If I can't build and release the game myself, then it simply isn't good enough to release. I cannot trust collaborators to not take control of my projects, nor would I entrust creative ideas to a for-profit entity without my cut.
Long story short, I might work in the industry if it was a healthy one. Because it's not, and I still want to make a game, it falls to me and only me to make it happen. That's kind of comforting, knowing your failure or success ride on your own action instead of someone else's. Nothing is more disappointing in a group project than failing because of someone else's fuck up.
>Nothing about that arrangement attracts me, especially given the abusive nature of the industry and the frequency that they go through crunch, lack any real worker protections, no unions, etc.
I'd beg to differ on this point. Lots of changes have been made in game development culture including less crunch culture[0]. Worker protection/unions aren't exactly something that's afforded to many white collar jobs in the first place, not sure why that would be an expectation here. Even so, there have been improvements to this - e.g. the Game Workers Alliance. I encourage you to ask developers this question today.
>No game dev company out there seems to treat its staff well during a game's development, so even if I wanted to work on a game as part of a team, I'd be looking at a poor work/life balance and a stressful work environment. I'm too old for that kind of BS.
There are game companies that do treat their staff well! I don't think it's fair to make blanket statements like this when there are a ton of studios with a ton of varying cultures. It's not like solo development isn't stressful or immune to crunch either, even if you choose your own hours. Solo development calls for highly varying skills - it's one of those things you underestimate until you've actually tried it.
>If I can't build and release the game myself, then it simply isn't good enough to release. I cannot trust collaborators to not take control of my projects, nor would I entrust creative ideas to a for-profit entity without my cut.
Nothing good in this world gets built in a vacuum. A hyperbole, potentially (e.g. Stardew Valley, Rainworld), but game development really is a road best driven with a team - people to help out in different disciplines, lighten the load on others. Finding a good team is hard, but once you do, it's hard to want to forgo them. I don't think I can convince you on this front, but the vast majority of solo developers who don't release a game should be proof enough.
No hard feelings from me - I just wanted to clarify what the game industry is actually like today. The Kotaku articles can be frightening, but talking to people in the industry today and getting thoughts from different roles (e.g. producers, designers, engineers, QA, artists, etc.) and different industries within game dev (indie, AA, AAA studios,etc.) would help form a more informed opinion.
I appreciate your input but I'm not in it for a career. I'm in it for personal satisfaction. If I can't build a game on my own then I'm not good enough to call myself a game developer.
A team can't bring that satisfaction to me. Kudos to those who enjoy working in groups. For me, I end up doing more than my share of work and correcting others' mistakes. At that point, you may as well make it yourself. People are more of an obstacle to my progress than they are an enabler.
In my case I haven't fallen for anything, but this community seems to have a problem with pointing out it's mostly businesses doing this behavior. If you stay away from commercial software, this crap disappears.
It shouldn't be normal to expect to be exploited imo.
It was a rhetorical "you" ;) Businesses will do business things, I don't think we should really be surprised when they decide to not subsidize everyone anymore.
In other words, a company giving you a "free" product like Unreal should be assumed to be a loan that you will have to pay in the future.
It isn't a coincidence. But the situation is larger than unreal nor Unity. It's the beginning of Q4/end of Q3 and this tends to be when companies make new initiatives and it's been no secret that big businesses's low interest rate borrowing has been done for months now.
Same reason why we have yet another flurry of layoffs happening.
>In-house development doesn't suffer from this issue, and you'll have full control over the code.
Yet many AAA studios have at least dabbled with Unity/Unreal. A few have switched entirely. Engine programmers aren't cheap to keep in house and it's much easier to have entry level workers come in with existing engine knowledge than teaching them on the job. Even if this all feels shitty, full control for a business may not necessarily be the answer.
>As an aspiring game dev I kinda want nothing to do with these tools that want to jerk you around on pricing and aren't absolutely crystal clear on costs.
I wish you the best of luck. That's my endgame. But I'm not at a point where I can disengage from big corporate and I have bills to pay. I'm laying the groundwork slowly but maybe in a decade.
>Blender is free and can do a ton.
Blender isn't a game engine. And lender's attempt at making a game engine is exactly why it can be harder to switch from big corporate than it should be. It's a lot of moving parts and is hard to maintain. Open source's biggest weakness is interest, since there is no financial incentive to keep supporting a free product.
That said, look into UPBGE as a spiritual successor if you rely a lot on Blender for development.
I am in 2D for now, so anything SDL based is enough. But, part of what's put me off of 3D is the business side. Modeling tools are difficult to use and take years to learn adequately. I'm not interested in paying for a sub while I'm learning, and terms in a license that are subject to change do nothing to inspire confidence in any particular solution. This is a social and ethical problem imo.
As you pointed out, doing it correctly requires experienced developers who will stick around. I think that's a more rewarding and better cost to spend money on. At least the worker won't try to modify the terms of what you're building on.
I'll check out that project sometime. 3D is still a ways out for me but any libre software that can make it easier to learn sounds great.
Honestly it makes sense. I was always a little confused that non-gamedevs had to pay 0. Of course that could've also just been the plan to get VFX and other industries onto Unreal Engine so Epic Games could start charging them later.
I'm also confused how Epic Games has become unprofitable suddenly. I think I read somewhere it was in the last 10 weeks but I could be wrong about that.
They probably overhired during 2020-2022 period like everyone else did.
Additionally, AFAIR there were tax rule changes going in play this year that would change the accounting balance sheet. [0]
But, the biggest one in my mind, realities of inflation/shrinkflation are setting in. I'd have to guess that my food cost has gone up enough that I could have theoretically purchased at least one or two skins with the extra money I'm spending on the same or less food [1]. I think this is a factor that is easy to be insulated from in tech, however my friends in various luxury service industries are feeling the pinch; folks cutting down on "spa days" and fancy restaurant trips.
[0] - I know earlier this year a bunch of changes around how Capital Expenditures/R&D were allowed to be deducted, and in some cases it would lead to a large increase in the cost of engineers.
[1] - I don't do Fortnite so I have no clue what stuff costs, broadly speaking however 10-20$ a week is a light estimate.
I don't know about suddenly, but Fortnite makes more money for Epic than Unreal Engine and Fortnite's numbers are going down. Seems pretty easy to extrapolate from there that dials need to get turned until innovation occurs.
The strategy is to worm your product into companies and make people comfortable with (or depend on) your tools. When there is enough adoption, you slide in and claim a piece of the pie.
Which is a good strategy when you don't do it retroactively, and you do give time to switch. If your product is best of breed (which UE5 is) it would make sense.
It's not that they suddenly became unprofitable, it's that they're (partially) owned by Tencent, and Tencent is calling in their dues. Epic took their money to try and unseat Valve, which clearly did not work. Now the economy is taking a dip, so they need money.
Burying this six paragraphs deep seems a little douchey:
Sweeney has now clarified that there will be minimum revenue thresholds for commercial projects that have to pay for a subscription and that student and educator use of Unreal Engine will remain free.
I'm not worried at all about Disney paying more licenses. I'm honestly shocked to realize that the Madelorian was made and the engine behind it got nary a penny for it.
I see that I accidentally a word above. It's the word from the quote that I wasn't sure of ... "The three most expensive - One of (endeavours, enterprises, occupations, hobbies, pastimes, things) are"?
Hmmmm just given the recent Unity news, maybe this headline is a bit misleading as it seems to be focused on VFX users, and not game developers? Maybe "Unreal... be free for animators"?
I'm guessing because engines like Unreal have game developers in the bag. VFX, on the other hand, has been a long term pursuit of Unreal and can have a large payoff for them. Based on some second hand insider knowledge I have, the VFX and animation industries are all over the place in terms of tooling, and a lot of pipelines are more or less bass-ackwards, especially when it comes to the pre-visualization stage of production. Even big studios are relying on tools that would appear "legacy" to many software engineers and are inferior to game engines in a lot of ways. The status quo often remains because these studios are already making enough money and have little incentive to address their internal bureaucracy that prevents them from making legitimate improvements to their pipelines. There are plenty of technical directors and artists out there pushing to use things like Unreal Engine, but these efforts often go nowhere for a variety of reasons. I know of at least one major animation studio that pondered over utilizing Unreal for over a decade, and there's another major studio I'm aware of where they're trying to use Unreal but the organizational support just isn't there.
Another problem I see in adoption of Unreal in animation is that the entertainment industry historically hasn't valued its engineers in the same way that Silicon Valley does. Unless you're working directly for a company like Unreal or Autodesk, why would a software engineer go work on some shitty duct-taped pipeline for a studio that will inevitably pay them less and make them work more hours, unless said engineer is particularly enamored with movies or shows? Based on what I know, I believe that the entertainment industry struggles to find and hold on to engineering talent, and not in the cliche way we hear from every company out there.
However, if Unreal reaches the same level of ubiquity and vendor lock-in within VFX that Autodesk has, for instance, then it would be a humongous cash cow for them. They want to keep their engine free to that industry for that reason, and it's a big incentive considering the exorbitant costs typical to VFX software.
No, it doesn't affect game developer hobbyists (actually, if anything, it makes them more secure, since Unreal would have a broader pool of paying clients and less beed to squeeze low-revenie games before they can afford it.)
Unless you mean, e.g., movie-making hobbyists where they go from never having to pay to having some (probably, as currently exists for games, based on a revenue threshold) some condition where they would have to pay, which might drive some of them to a different toolchain, though if it is setup similar to gaming, it won't affect most hobbyists unless they have way unexpected success, so probably shouldn't rationally affect hobbyiat choices much.
Tim Sweeney confirmed on Twitter there will be a revenue threshold just like for game dev. Small time studios or individuals won't have to pay unless they make money.
Lots of enterprise customer paid before already anyway for Epic's (questionable) support
What incentives are there to learn Unreal if the money you make with it will be dipped into? That percentage is subject to change, too.
I don't want the success of my game to ride on paying my game's protection/engine licensing fee. It's hard enough to make money with a game and Unreal makes it harder.
Looking at it from the otherside, what incentive is there for them to pay teams developers to build Unreal Engine, and then let you use the technology for free and get nothing when your product takes off?
By all means, if you don't like the terms don't use the engine, but it's hard to take it seriously when you make it sound as if you're doing them a favor using their engine for free.
Oh I understand it's a business. I'm just making it clear why I'm not biting, on the off chance Epic employees are here.
Businesses should study their markets. Sadly, many people in the market are completely fine giving away things to get shiny, even giving up revenue. So until standards of customer treatment rise, we'll be dealing with various levels of SaaS.
Except some of us just aren't buying anything, due to the terms and lacking perceived value.
If Unreal works for you that's fine. Why do I have to like or buy it?
Unreal can make your game possible in the first place depending on your required functionality, timeline, and budget. That can be a mightily powerful incentive.
An unreal amount more. No - seriously. It practically has everything you need to build a game. I guess a clear and easy way to learn it though.. that it cannot seem to provide.
I think this doesn't change the equation for hobbyist/ game developers.
Unreal is starting to get traction as a 3d model tool (free unlike the pricey: Cinema4d or Maya). It was used on set for "virutual rooms" used in productions like the madolorian. This use of Unreal wasn't being charged for.. But now it is.
But Godot seems to have a lot of traction for game dev anyway. It seems to be a lot of places.
Unreal is a big giant tool, with tons of leavers. They have a robust marketplace of assets and such that makes life easier for companies and such.
Seems like every company these days are trying to figure out how to increase the rents that they collect. No actual value add, just trying to optimize to make that top line number go up. It feels very end-of-business-cycle.
Not sure you could argue that Unreal Engine hasn't provide any actual value, it basically helped spawn a whole new area in film production via the whole "Virtual Production Sets" that you can build with Unreal Engine.
I'm saying this pricing change doesn't add any value. I would be literally impossible to argue that UE doesn't add any value, which is why I'm not making that argument.
So if someone builds something of value but doesn't charge for it until 2 years later, you'd say that they aren't providing value with this change?
I mean, I get what you mean, but seems needlessly pedantic to just "forget" the thing that is being charged for and because there was no other changes made with the new price being added, the change itself isn't adding any value.
Regardless, I get what you mean, no value for you that they start charging. True.
What I'm saying is that in the aggregate that as more companies are doing that it begins to look like the proverbial "rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic" or "everyone looking for their seats before the music stops". This is because macroeconomically everyone's sales numbers are someone else's expenses. You can get down into the weeds where even though this is just resource allocation of capital that it is doing useful work in the economy to correct a misallocation of capital, but my point is more that this is a late-business cycle signal. Businesses are looking at their finances and looking at the interest rate environment and trying to squeeze more sales out of their existing customers. That is an indicator that the financials at Epic Games probably weren't trending in a good direction. And I'm unsurprised to find this fairly recent news article:
Even with the success of UE and Fortnite they're still a money losing business. They've probably been surviving off of cheap debt since 2009 but that has now ended. Multiply that by all the businesses in the Russell 3000 or whatever that have been doing exactly the same thing.
In this case it went from completely free to pay something. The completely free tier clearly could not last. The company has to pay the bills somehow. They wanted to gain market share in the sector and now that they think they want to recoup some of the cost.
You have cases where companies jack up the prices out of pure greed but i would not count this as one. Why should studio not pay a license fee for high quality software like the unreal engine?
Please read the other thread completely and particularly my last comment.
I'm making a macroeconomic comment, you're assuming I'm arguing about the morals of the microeconomic decision making here.
Arguing about the morality or ethics or greed involved isn't useful. Just like it wasn't useful to argue about greed involved in our recent spike of inflation.
This fairly large company is still just another cog in the macroeconomic machine and their behavior is almost deterministic.
The more interesting question to me is what it indicates about the macro climate and if there's stormclouds on the horizon or not.
Yup. A good time for open-source alternatives to re-assert themselves in the market. Low interest rates made commercial software unnaturally cheap for a long time.
Will also be interesting to see how well subscription-based software fares when people start tightening their belts due to inflation and rising interest rates.
They have a revenue limit ($1M) but also currently only apply that to people who use the engine code in the delivered product (which is apprximately gaming uses, but could include some other interactive non-gaming use), not people who use the engine to produce things like movies that are distributed without the engine code.
Using the word "enshittification" is a great way to get a comment pinned to the top of an HN thread, but this is not that.
This is Cory Doctorow's definition of enshittification [0]:
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Note that he's talking about platforms, specifically middlemen. For Doctorow's enshittification to be a thing, there has to be a dichotomy between "users" and "business customers". Enshittification is the cycle of luring in users to make yourself valuable to your real customers (the "business customers"), then abusing those users to make your business customers even happier, then abusing your business customers to extract the absolute largest amount of value for yourself, then dying because you forgot who payed the bills.
Unreal Engine is not a platform in this sense. Epic doesn't have "users" that it needs to lure in in order to appease "business customers", it just has business customers. It brought a lot of business customers in by offering the product for free for non-gaming use cases in order to demonstrate to those non-gaming business customers that it was actually a viable product for their needs. Now that they don't need to make that case any more, they're doing what every business eventually needs to do and actually charging for the product.
Here's Epic's Enshittification Journey as a platform. Let it be known that it didn't have to be this way. Epic (Mega)Games was a mild-mannered game development company that sold a popular engine used in many AAA games.
Act I; Users lured, moats built: Epic pivoted towards Games-as-a-Service. They took investment [0] and guidance from Tencent to the tune of 40% of the company. Fortnite and the F2P Unreal Tournament reboot were developed and released in this timeframe. These free titles would bring in the gamers into the Epic ecosystem.
Act II; Users exploited, business customers courted: Fortnite adds subscriptions in 2017 (Battle Pass Season 2 [1]) and makes money hand-over-fist. At the same time, the Tencent deal allowed them to relicense their engine away from the high upfront cost to "Free" until a certain point [2]. They also charged a far less cut than Steam, used hundreds of millions of dollars of their own investment to bring other developers to the ecosystem, as well as publishing a number of games that used the engine. This lured developers to the platform with their own dreams of Fortnite revenues. More investment poured in.
Relating this back to the original article here, in 2019 Epic gave a grant of $1.2 million to Blender [3] to develop their tools to integrate Unreal Engine, including those for visual artists and film.
Act III; Everybody is shafted: See my original comment.
Its not obvious at all how this is enshittification.
UE5 was previously provided for free in non-video game contexts, as they clearly were trying to expand their presence in say film production. Now they've succeeded, they are charging for it, what is so unfair about it? Are they expected to provide the engine for free?
UE5 is also constantly trying intensive innovation. So the product quality is going up, not going down.
Unity was bombed because it was trying some inane pricing model (imagine UE5 charging moviemakers by number of viewers). And the fact that Unity Engine itself was being heavily neglected.
And fundraising is not relevant when their core business, Fortnite, is declining. Sorry fundraising != charity for employees.
> imagine UE5 charging moviemakers by number of viewers
Actors commonly demand a percentage of revenue. The main software package used for all the special effects demanding the same doesn't seem unreasonable.
> UE5 was previously provided for free in non-video game contexts, as they clearly were trying to expand their presence in say film production. Now they've succeeded, they are charging for it, what is so unfair about it?
The problem here is that "providing for free" to gain adoption and then suddenly charging is a bit of a rug-pull.
The same argument was made for Unity, it's not the customer's job to make your business model work.
> Are they expected to provide the engine for free?
If you choose to grow your market share in an unsustainable way (like giving your product away for free), and then later on go "oh shit we can't keep doing this!" then you should expect that some of the customers who adopted your product based on the previous terms will be unhappy with this switch.
Many might be fine with it, but the idea that everyone should just accept this switch is bullshit.
Lots of companies are clear up front that their product will be free for some time (like during a beta or early access period) but that customers should expect to be charged at some point in the future.
I'm not sure this is what Epic did. But I don't follow this space closely so maybe they did set that expectation? Some other commenters seem to be saying this was "expected"..
Unity was different because the pricing was insane for F2P titles. Some successful titles only manage $0.50/install, going from 0 to 40% revenue share was insane.
Way more importantly making it retroactive was unheard of. Unity even had promised to support "pick your license" for released titles in perpetuity but then during this change said "we never said the runtime was free in perpetuity".
Charging more for your product isn't great but it always happens.
Also on that topic Unity got started as the "no revenue sharing" option and was paid for by very expensive per seat costs. So there was a bit of "you are double dipping" feeling too.
In this case Unreal is charging for a new market is the goal which makes sense.
Certainly the bait and switch of free now not is a bit sour but how sour depends on the cost.
I don't really see this as "enshittification". This is completely expected and people knew for years something like this was coming.
Epic has been trying to use the money from Fortnite's success to build a more stable platform. They've dumped endless amounts of Fortnite money on paying developers for Epic exclusivity, lower cuts from developers, developing their storefront, developing Unreal Engine, etc.
This was not done out of the goodness of their hearts. They wanted to see a return. They needed to break into the market more and now they have.
Now that they've firmly planted themselves with a lot of games on EGS, and a lot of games using Unreal, they want that return on investment. Not surprising.
Layoffs are often unrelated to a company's financials. They are a way to increase margins. See it as you will but they have no obligation to employ people they don't need.
> Speaking at Unreal Fest 2023, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said Unreal Engine would become “a licensable piece of software like Maya or Photoshop” with a subscription-based pricing model.
SAAS is rent-seeking at its worst. It’s predatory, anti-consumer and downright annoying. I hope this backfires on Epic.
SAAS pays for continued development and support. One upfront license fee returns us to the Microsoft Office 13, 15, 20 etc. world. Marginal differences, little to no support, and new releases for the sake of new revenue. SAAS is far better aligned to customer and business interests.
In other words, the developer has to produce a worthwhile feature to charge me for it? I don't have to pay for Office 20 when it's the same as Office 13 which I already own?
Which interests are those, and how is a subscription better than a one-time purchase?
I smell dishonesty. SaaS is aligned solely to the business's interest. They control the code, they control whether you even access it after paying, etc. The customer gets no rights or considerations, so it's a one-sided transaction.
Just like Netflix and friends. I only do one subscription service and it's to play online with my niece and nephew. The rest of the subscription world can suck it, they want rent for Internet-bound software that spies and tells on you so they can sell data on top of your subscription.
Business cannot get software sales correct. Game makers did back in the 80s, 90s, and 00s before DLC became a thing.
One purchase, one perpetual license, no phoning home. Too hard to do for the modern commercial developer, it seems.
In contrary I like PhpStorm (and other Jetbrains software) which has a nice SAAS license. You always own the old versions or you keep subscribed and pay for upgrades. With evolving software (aka never finished) someone has to pay for the upgrades. In the best case its the existing user base. But true, most SAAS is just cash cow milking.
SaaS means someone else runs the software and your access to it is mediated by their service (usually a networked service).
Some SaaS tests:
If you can keep running it when your subscription runs out, it's not SaaS. If it runs on your own hardware, it's not SaaS.
This concept creep elides the extraordinary level of alienation inherent in SaaS, which is exceptional even for proprietary software. This overly broad usage of the term can make the tradeoffs involved¹ in actual SaaS seem less severe than they are.
Seems fair to let those pay who make significant money with your product. Especially when they screw over other themselves with their creative accounting. At least as long as there are significant costs for the product, like ongoing development.
The licensing changes target big commercial usages outside of game development. (With revenue thresholds, similar to how it already works right now for game development.)
For example, up until now Unreal has seen use in vfx for movie and tv production. The licensing model for Unreal was primarily oriented for game development, which meant that this wasn't generating any revenue for Epic unless that company opted into the optional support plan.
Unlike the crazy situation with Unity, these changes are being announced in advance without affecting usage of previous versions of Unreal.
(Not saying I like or care for subscriptions for software. But context helps understand what's going on here.)
I'm surprised they didn't make this change sooner.