How long do we have to pay 19$ (20.71$)? A year? Two? I’ve pondered this, but I only have a summer job so long term payments aren’t possible.
- You only have to pay once to get access. They have on their FAQ that you may keep that build of the engine/source and release upon it.
- $20.71 a month is a steal. You should be kissing Tim’s feet.
- Long term typically means longer than a summer. You will find other jobs. Maybe even a career.
You can pay for it in the first and the last months of your summer job(if you want the updates, otherwise you can stick with the first one), and then buy again whenever you are able to/want to.
I didn’t intend to sound complainy I know how much of a beautifully good fricken deal this is. So as I understand it I pay once for access but pay more for updates?
You pay once for access, and if you continue the sub you get any updates that come out that month. If you skip a month, you get the current updates, not the ones you missed.
Are you referring to updates to the engine, or to the marketplace? If it works like UDK you should get the updates you missed, why would you not?
As soon as you resubscribe, you will get the latest version and it will contain all the updates you have missed.
If you are on a budget what you can do is subscribe for the first month then keep an eye out for the upcoming release notes… if it interests you then you can re-subscribe and update… if not then you can wait until the next update so you don’t have to pay for the months in between.
Of course that assumes you don’t care about having constant access to the marketplace.
I just wish to clarify that updates are cumulative. So if you choose to cancel your subscription (and receive no engine updates during that time), when you do renew your subscription later you will receive the latest update which also includes all previous updates.
How can you guys survive on this model? I do not really understand this.
They make something call “video games” 
that’s their primary income stream the engine subscription stuff is probably secondary.
Most of their profit comes from the bigger studios that license the engine. They will also get some money from the smaller developers who complete a game and the people who are on subscription. Having the engine available like this means that many people get experience using the engine, and if there’s a lot of people experienced with the engine then bigger studios are more likely to license the engine because it will be easier to hire people who know how to use it.
They don’t release that many games though, look at the list. I think this somehow must be their primary income, probably through royalty at a later point. Still, seems like too good of a deal to be true.
Good point, kind of how other software devs do with their softwares, making sure it is well established. I’m not so clever today.
Sorry,
but i´ve noticed, that my windows firwall complains if i bake lightmaps in my scene and i get some text messages, that “swarm” computing is going on. Is there any “cloud” in the background- so i can not even bake my scene if my subsciption has expired?
thx rob
That is just because you can use Swarm to set up your own computing network for Lightmass baking. No cloud. You can still bake after subscription ends.
Bigger companies like that will just license the engine straight up and not pay royalty fee