And $99 up-front to use the free engine for commercial purposes
Epic Games receives a 25 per cent royalty rate on all games that use the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the group has revealed.
The Unreal Engine group offers out its UDK at no charge, and today the indie giant has lifted the lid on costs for using the engine for commercial business.
Developers working in a commercial capacity will have to pay Epic $99 up-front, and will take 25 per cent of revenues from games built with the engine. The first $5,000 earned by a developer is however free of charge.
The UDK itself, downloaded for free from the company’s website, has proved to be remarkably popular with the PC indie and mod scene. The engine was downloaded over 50,000 times in its first week of release.
However it remains unclear how popular the egine is in regards to commercial use. Few companies have announced their use of the engine, though Florida-based Trendy Entertainment said it used UDK to develop a game in just four weeks.
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Elsewhere in the company’s summary report, the firm revealed that businesses using the UDK internally, though not for game releases, will need to each year pay Epic a license fee of $2,500 per ‘UDK developer seat’.
The free to use engine space is already become hotly contested, with Epic and Unity both offering their engines to the market.
Crytek has also stated its intentions to release a free version of its CryEngine.
Now it's the time for Valve Software to join them!
How is this news, this information was available when the UDK launched last year :¬?
Also on the MMO front, www.bigworldindie.com is available since GDC this year
I'm sure I read this when UDK was released last year? Why is it being re-reported now?
This was reported last year but Epic haven't at that time allowed commercial development. The UDK website displayed a "comming soon" in the licensing options.
This is great news, I actually thought it would take much longer and that they would add a lot of extra conditions to be licensed. They haven't.
"Now it's the time for Valve Software to join them!"
Valve's Source SDK is free and has been for some time now.
Only the SDK, not the engine itself. Epic also offered the Unreal ED for free, but not the engine.
Valve only let you publish games made with their sdk if you publish it on steam. And your Game Will only be available on a special channel, separate from the "normal Games". It is very limited At best.
And don't forget the rather openly defined 'UDK related revenue' in the licence agreement, which doesn't sound so great for indies reliant on trickle and long tail income:
"UDK related revenue includes, but is not limited to, monies earned from: sales, services, training, advertisements, sponsorships, endorsements, memberships, subscription fees, rentals and pay-to-play."
Valve only let you publish games made with their sdk if you publish it on steam. And your Game Will only be available on a special channel, separate from the "normal Games". It is very limited At best.
Not true, garrymod is a good example
I just read the agreement on their site to make sure I wasn't mistaken. I thought it said they take 25% of all income from all games made with Unreal after the $50,000 mark is earned by 'developers'.
Maybe I don't get it but if you develop a game for the Apple app market, won't Apple take 30%? Then Unreal will take another 25% (almost another 30%)... then after taxes...it just doesn't sound too lucrative to work with Unreal.
They have an impressive engine, ect and it's worth the money, but paying 25% on every single game is not how you make money. It isn't. Imagine if Angry Birds had used Unreal. I read they initially earned $20 million and gave Apple their cut, which was said to be something like $8 million. THEN they would have to turn around and hand over ANOTHER $4-$6 million (or somewhere in there) to Unreal Engine (ongoing).
That doesn't make any business sense to use the engine.
