Unreal Development Kit

By: Derek Yu

On: November 5th, 2009

Wow. Shit. Epic Games just launched Unreal Development Kit, putting their extremely expensive Unreal Engine 3 in the hands of the masses – the kit is free to download for non-commercial use! Otherwise, there are two licensing options available (coming soon):

1. If you use the kit internally at your own company, it costs $2,500 per developer seat per year.

2. If you sell a game or application made with the engine, the first $5,000 you make is royalty-free. After that, Epic Games gets 25%.

With Unity Indie going free last week and now this… dang, the level of tools available for independent developers just rose dramatically. Good times!

Posted in Developers | Tags: EpicGames

Paul Eres

i wonder if that’s 25% from what the developer gets or 25% of the game’s profits (which could be different, if you use portals and such). since some portals take around 70%, leaving the developer 30%, that could potentially only mean 5% for the developer when used in combination

still, nice; i wonder if it’s as easy to use as unity though, i imagine it’s intended for experienced programmers rather than amateur game devs
Matt

Good point. But still, it’s technically free to use. And I’m sure this is just Epic’s way of trying to channel all indie developers their way. They did buy People Can Fly and Chair.
It only makes sense that they’re opening up their platform to a broader audience than just the ones that will pay (what was it?) like $250k for the unreal engine license.
Valve has been smart in letting people use their Source SDK for a while, and now there’s this. Not quite the same I understand, but still it’s a start.
Radnom

Is 25% of all profits a lot for the engine? It seems like a huge portion of the profit, but perhaps that money would be spent on engine development anyway?
http://ghook.speedrungames.com SpeedRunGames

That’s really awesome. UE3 has a great art pipeline and tools.
Documentation is a bit outdated in the UDN, as far as I know. Epic should hire 1-3 technical writers.
But even when someone doesn’t use the engine for your project, he can learn a lot about how to do things right.
DYH

2 GB system RAM required, dang :)
Really cool news still, I just hope there will still be games with reasonable system specs.
DYH

25% is probably alright considering normal engine development often takes more time than “game” development itself. And this engine has the power of multiple of those normal ones.

It sounds outrageous if portals take 70% of profit, hmmm which are those?
Paul Eres

a lot of them. unfortunately there are contractual obligations where you can’t reveal the % any given portal takes. i can say though that they tend to vary from taking 30% to 70%, with an average of about taking 60%.
http://arm42.com/ ARme

I wonder if you can build 2D game like in Unity ? I know it’s hard and more intended to 3D but I’m just wandering…

2GB… Think I need to update my machine :s
http://ghook.speedrungames.com SpeedRunGames

@ARme:
The Unreal Engine works best for game ideas, that are similar to Unreal Tournament and Gears of War. A lot of know-how from these games are part of the engine. The engine is also optimized for this kind of games.

This means, when you want to use the engine for a different genre, there is a lot of specific code, that is useless for you and may even disturb you.
Unity is a general purpose engine and more flexible.
UE3 is for sure some of the best choices, when you want to create a 3rd-person- or first-person-shooter.
http://xspblog.com XSportSeeker

Read about it on independent channels and via game developers list!
High expectations to see what the indie community will come up with this.. hmmmm
AmnEn

Well there’s always pseudo 2D like in Trine. Although using the UE3 for a 2D Game seems a little bit like throwing Atom Bombs on innocent little birds.
http://th3w-san.deviantart.com Thew

@ARme: You could make a 3D game that is played in 2D. Shadow Complex did that in UE3, as did the UT2D mod for Unreal Tournament 3. I haven’t done much with UE3 outside of playing around with the UT3 editor a bit, but I don’t think there’s anything stopping you from making a game out of textures mapped on to screen-aligned quads, like you’d do in Unity or XNA. You would be kind of fighting the engine, though, because I’m pretty sure there’s no built-in 2D collision detection system.

I’d also disagree somewhat with with SpeedRunGames about UE3 being specifically designed for shooters, however. Mass Effect is UE3, and that’s much more of an RPG than a shooter. There have been UE3 racing games (okay Terminal Velocity sucked, but it WAS a racing game :P ), the aforementioned Shadow Complex is a Metroidvania-style action-adventure game. I’d argue that Mirror’s Edge is a platformer, also.
http://iterationgames.com jph_wacheski

Wow again! Another engine goes free to dev. yippy! Virtools next?? any others?

Yeah, this is a large complex engine, and a whack of tools to boot.., Lots to learn and much time required to do so.., Whizzle is a 2d gameplay game built with UDK, and looks very nice. Although it is over 100mb to try,.(d/ling now) and the UDZ is over 500mb itself. I am testing it now and will see what I can do with it.

You still gotta lov the ZGE (ZGameEditor) though 1.6mb editor, 33kb game size, and never any fee!
havchr

Quite an interesting move. All the tools in the hands of students now, it’s crazy. There will be creativity explotion because of greater access to tools.

A profit sharing deal is very developer friendly. Nice of them.
Patrick

Yes, UE3 is specifically designed for shooters. This doesn’t mean you can do drastically different things with it, but you will be working against the engine to do so, and rewriting systems that were put in place to make the job of creating shooters easier.

That said, this is incredibly awesome! What a great week for indie developers.
Ninomojo

If I may, I’m betatesting the thing Astrofra used for his cockpit compo entry, and it kicks MAJOR butt in terms of ease of use and power. It should be released to the public before the end of this year. Although it’s coming from someone mich smaller than Epic, it’s been in gestation for a long time and I think it’s a very serious threat to Unity at least. Don’t know how much it’s gonna cost though…

Well all in all it’s a good time to be indie :)
Dominic White

@Patrick – UE3 has been used for pretty much every genre, including Driving/MMO games (APB, currently in deveopment), strategy games (Endwar), turn-based RPGs (The Last Remnant) and tons of others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

It’s about as flexible an engine as you can get.

And as for the 25% thing? It’s not that bad, when you consider that it’s a very powerful, very well supported engine (so would probably save you at least a year of development time), and word is that a full royalty-free license for it comes to around $750,000.

No, I did not add any extra 0’s to that. Three quarters of a million dollars.

So, yeah. You’d have to turn 3 mil profit before you’d be paying the going rate for the engine.
hardoncollider

my penis just got a little hard
xxxxxx)

OH MY FUUUUUUUUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOD
X3N

Holy freaking crap. Indie games 2.0.
rumrusher

Wait doesn’t the engine can’t process hair well and leave every thing lube down.
or was that just Cliffy’s style of making games. so could some one exploit that deal due to ‘personal reasons’ by making there game free up to the $5,000 mark and then make a sequel that is exactly like the first one and repeat the cycle?
scottyG73

25% is huge! Like someone mention before if a portal takes another 35% then you’re not left with a whole lot of money. Though you are getting their engine I suppose.
Dominic White

For some reason, my earlier comment got eaten. That 25% may seem pretty huge, but here’s a number to chew on:

$750,000. Three quarters of a million dollars.

That’s the estimated price-tag for a royalty-free Unreal 3 license. You’d have to turn 3 million in raw profit before you’d be paying full price for the engine via this deal, and if you DO manage to make over 3 mil, then you’ve got enough money now to buy a full engine license anyway for your next game.

It’s a very powerful, widely supported and exceptionally flexible (it’s been used for driving/MMOs like APB, turn-based RPGs like The Last Remnant, strategy games like Endwar and countless others), and is also something of an industry standard, allowing you to easily recruit new talent, or transfer to industry work quickly and easily.

There’s a whole lot of advantages here. It’s not cheap, but it’s also one of the best, most flexible and most powerful game engines on the block.
PHeMoX

@Paul Eres:

“i wonder if thatâ€™s 25% from what the developer gets or 25% of the gameâ€™s profits (which could be different, if you use portals and such). since some portals take around 70%, leaving the developer 30%, that could potentially only mean 5% for the developer when used in combination”

I think this is about what the developer gets. The first 5000$ costs nothing, anything over that means 25%. They do not count the first 5000$, so if you’ve made 5001$, you only have to pay 25% of that 1$ you made.

Taking that into account, I think the whole licensing costs will come down on what the developer makes.

Besides, not every portal will take 70%.
DYH

@Paul Eres
I see, thanks for the info! It does seem like a bit crazy percentage, though I guess those portals achieve a more reasonable amount of requests/submissions to review that way. And many new developers will still make their first attempt at any income.
magallanes

1. If you use the kit internally at your own company, it costs $2,500 per developer seat per year.

It is absurd, since you can sell internally every application for a cent.

Anyways, the only drawback is that, this VERSION is only for windows, that’s it, no xbox360, ps3 or even osx.

@Thew :Mass effect IS-A-SHOOTER. Or more specifically, a conversational shooter (if not a adventure game) with a small touch of rpg (in comparison with a real rpg)
pandafresh

shit, i wish i knew how to use this. because i’d totally make a sweet game were you play as a skateboarding cat with an uzi.
Um wow?!!?

25% undercuts the going rate of 30 or so doesn’t it?
Brad Newsom

First of all people, indies pay a lot more than 25% usually for either steam or a cheaper engine. This isn’t that much.

Second, you can look at all the mods for Unreal Tournament 3 to see what the engine is capable of. From Drivers, to Top Down Shooters, to Sidescrollers, and then to Graphical Puzzles. This engine is capable of anything.

@Magallanes: Of course it isn’t compatible for the 360/ps3/osx. The biggest market for indie games are on the PC though. Not to mention, its not like you have a better choice over UDK. Unity is limited to the PC platform, and doesn’t even include a lot of the features of the engine unless you buy pro.

Next, Mass Effect isn’t a shooter. On a ratio of shooting over the RPG elements, it would be 35% whereas Dialog/Character Customization/Item Manipulation is 65%. Oh, I also notice how you totally ignored the fact that an RPG consists of Dialog, Basic Fighting, Exploration, and Character Customization.
Anon.

@Brad N.

Unity is NOT limited to the PC… the indie version can build for PC, OSX and web browsers and the IDE runs on PC & Mac.

The pro versions are available for WiiWare, iPhone and, soon, Xbox360;
cowgarden

@jph_wacheski:
whizlle is “top-down” and you can not “jump”, but it is still 3d :)
that way it should not differ very much from a shooter engine wise.
Anonymous

The real irony of releasing this development kit is the high barrier of learning that it would take for someone to actually utilize the kit to it’s fullest potential.

It’s sort of like giving a nation of people with extremely poor eyesight a boatload of Ferraris & then encouraging those people to drive the cars as fast as they can on the nearest race track.
magallanes

@brad :”If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.. then it is a duck”. The same as Mass Effect, and conversation (proof:Monkey island is not a rpg) is not the key of a rpg but the leveling.

Fallout 3 is a good example of a rpg, Bioshock is another example of a non-rpg game with some rpg features.