Epic announced today that Unreal Engine 4 can be used for free.

The only time you pay is if you make any revenue, in which they will take a 5% royalty.

Welp I guess Unity has their work cut out for them. That is a game changer.

Finally, now I can make those sweet next gen games now that the man is off my wallet.

Look for Battlefield 5, from me, next year.

Just got an email from them. That's fucking awesome. I would definitely use it more, but I just don't really like using C++ that much. Granted even though Unity supports C#, JS, and Boo, it's actually translating them to C (or C++, can't remember which one), just being able to use those languages makes things go so much faster.

Pretty sure unity just compiles to the .net common runtime language.

There are projects out there that let you write games in F# and vb.net etc as well as managed c++, boo, js and c#.

Awesome news about UE4, I've been meaning to check out the new stuff for a while now.

ahh cool. saves me that $19 a month now.. yay.

Also.. RE: c#, c++, vb or whatever. I've been doing most of my "coding" in Unreal using Blueprints. It's amazing what you can do without having to write any code at all! And the performance hit doesn't seem too massive.

@amafi said:

Yeah, Unity is mostly written in C++ but it compiles all .NET code, including UnityScript, to CIL.

Ah yeah I misread the article when I went to look. The objects themselves are pretty much wrappers for the C++ objects, but it still compiles to CIL.

The refund for current subscribers, and for anyone who has paid for the engine is pretty terrific.

Hopefully this means more people can experiment with and use Unreal for different and exciting ideas.

@thatpinguino: that depends, an unity license is a single payment of 1.500,00 USD, your game can sell 2 million copies and you're never giving unity another cent, but this you have to pay 5% of your total revenue PER QUARTER, which means you'll be paying them forever as long as your game sells over 3.000,00 USD per quarter, so even if your game nets you like 50 grand in a quarter (very meager earnings by any measure) you will already be spending 1 grand more on engine licensing than you would with unity.

I still think unity is financially the better option, for smaller projects at least.

That said it's still cool that's it is 100% free for non commercial use, I'll be messing around with it for sure.

Neat. I'm gonna download this. I hope I can find some good tutorials online. Maybe a book.

@onarum: But is the quality of the engine, support, and tools the same? I've heard nothing but good things about Unreal 4 from a game dev friend of mine.

I've had good experiences with Unity, but I have no idea how it compares to Unreal 4.

This great and could be really interesting in the long run.

My game "Grey Box That Moves Around" will be at Steam Greenlight in 5 months. It will be very cinematic.

I haven't used it that much, but I thought their modeling tools were much smoother than Unity's.

This seems totally nuts but cool beans, I'm sure there will be many XBLIG/Greenlight equivalent Unreal masterpieces in the future.

@thatpinguino: Well, I'm sure you can make way better looking games with UE4, as for the workflow comparison I can't really say since I have 0 experience with UE, I always heard that it was considerably more complicated than unity and more geared towards bigger teams, what i can say for sure is that unity is ridiculously easy to work with, it streamlines so much and makes a 1 person team much more feasible.

Here's the thing though, you can have the most advanced engine in the world but if you don't have the man power behind it to make everything look pretty it won't do much for you at all.

But really for me just the financial aspect of this already makes unity a much better option still, you earn a million on your game with unity you spent 1.500,00 on licensing and that's it, you earn the same amount with this it's 50k you'll be parting with... and unless you have a considerably big team I don't think the quality of the game would differ much between both engines.

Didn't expect something like this from likely the most powerful engine on the market. Sounds like a great idea.

Don't know how to make games, but now I might mess around with it just because.

Yep, and just as I expected you can now, at no cost, download that Unreal Tournament thing that the community is building. You hear that @jeff@brad? You guys need to play some UT on UPF along with every other broken unfinished game you guys do.

This is pretty neat! from a business and just gamer perspective I'm trying to figure out their angle here. Very RARELY do businesses do something nice for the sake of being nice, usually thats financial advantage. This seems like a great PR and brand/ image moves.

Do they expect a huge increase for the engine to be used in games that their royalties cover the difference lost from subscriptions? Either way this is really cool and I may download just to mess around and see if I can create anything cool looking.

@charlie_victor_bravo: but will there be stealth sequences??

@lead_dispencer said:

Unity is their angle. Unreal Engine 4 has a bunch of features, like the Marketplace, designed to complete directly with Unity. However, storefronts like Unreal's Marketplace and Unity's Asset Store are only appealing when the platform has significant developer marketshare or mindshare, and Unreal's subscription model was a barrier to that. Eliminating it opens up the engine to everybody while still giving Epic a revenue stream in the backend. Plus, they get a cut of every Marketplace sale, so they're still making money when games are in development.

Unity is kill. I repeat: Unity is kill.

@conmulligan: You are probably right. Since the barrier is so low now, I am interested to see how this develops and see how many indie developers jump ship and go away from unity or other engines. It won't be for another year or two until we see though. I'm not a game developer, but if I was I would be very excited with this news!

Alright. Time for me to save us all and make The Last Guardian.

Nice! I messed around with Unity for a bit but the concept of building a game from scratch just seemed too daunting. Developing a UT map or something seems far more doable for a novice like me. And i've always loved UT so that also helps.

Looking forward to seeing what comes out of this.

Shame I'll never know how to work it, so no home-brewed Boogerman reboot anytime soon :(

Nice

Where do I pre-order a copy?

Look at this damn engine. This is from the latest UT Alpha:

I can't find the Make Minecraft Clone button....where is it?!?!

I've been messing around with Unity for about two years now. I like it, but I'm always open to new stuff. Definitely giving this a go. Super cool of them to do this.

Edit: Hah! One of the first tutorials that pops up in the client is "UE4 for Unity developers". Smart stuff.

Off to make my Gears of War text adventure.

@shindig: You'd be better off making that in Twine.

Gotta have some of that made in a weekend indie horror game money.

Here is your choice. You have no choice.

Does anyone actually know if this compares with Unity? I feel they have been adding so much stuff the last couple of years that its basically impossible to compete with them.

That is extraordinary! Quite literally a game changer.

There's really no reason that any creative with even a little bit of spare time would not at least download and play with the tools to learn them, adding another string to their bow.

As an After Effects user, I'm really interested to get my teeth into the VFX tools like Cascade, Matinee and their post-processing editors... all without the burden of having to add another monthly subscription to the ones I already have.

Now I'm even more pleased to have recently upgraded my system.

Not if I want sweet, textured text constructed out of polygons.