Time is your most precious commodity not money. Think about the amount of time and man-hours you’ll spend googling and researching how to do the most basic things that you could do in an existing engine in seconds. By the time you’ve trained your team to use a new engine and be efficient with it, you’ve always wasted months of man hours and wages on adopting it. When you do the math, it’s a hella-lot more expensive than $30 a month.
Unless Autodesk are putting a small team of people into a studio who are always on-hand and can teach you how to use the Engine, you’ll be wasting a lot of time and bleeding money in the process. I imagine they will be doing that for at least a short while for early adopters but even then, most of the largest companies that could even afford that make their own tools. Ubisoft, EA / DICE, Naughty Dog etc. all have their own engines.
Fair enough if you’re a very small team or you just feel like taking on something new, but I highly doubt it’s going to make any real headway for several years yet. Judging by how they’re marketing it, they’re biggest iron in the fire is that it has seamless integration with Max, Maya and Mudbox etc. That’s pretty much a null factor IMO. In my experience you’re better off learning one great tool and sticking with it, rather than trying to spread yourself too thin. All this aside, I’m interested in seeing how it does anyway, it’s pretty rare we see a new tool like this come out so would be interesting to see the effect of that.
I think you’re overestimating the amount of people working on most indie games. Most teams are perhaps 1-3 people. A salary for a developer is around $3000-$6000 per month. So let’s say $5000 * 3 per month would be a “success” for a small team of three (so there’s some margin for taxes and fees in the marketplace). $5000 * 3 people * 3 months = 45000
This is per game too. Time and expense for reporting this to Epic not included.
With stingray, it would be 30 * 3 * 12 = $1080 per year, regardless of how many games you make, and no hassle with royalty. Plus you get Maya LT in there for “free”.
With Unity, they’d not be close to the $1.000.000 mark, so they could use it for free = $0 per year.
So whether or not Unreal is cheap entirely depends.
Am I missing something, or why would UE4 be free for the first $1.000.000? The license clearly says 5% after the first $3000 per game per calendar quarter.
yeah, i know, and UE4 licenses clearly says 5% for first $3000
no, you not missing anything, $1.000.000 is only gross profit for example, (yeah, for example purpose only )
in my case, first case you make $3K, the second you make $1.000.000…
i will edit my post, so nobody misunderstanding it. Im sorry
in my post I not says which game engine is cheaper or not, i just wanna says if someone talking about price or royalty they must looking at their internal situations, i mean like how long the game will be finished, how much people in team, how much $ you team looking…
That’s one Fugly piece of software. 5 minutes, 1st impressions… sheesh!!
What exactly does that 3rd person demo project show? This looks like an Alpha, to think I was excited to see it
Edit: impressions continue.
Installation: 1st soft reboot, hangs at 30%. This continues 3 times until I hard reboot. Finally installs.
Open a project: I’m running a mid-level laptop, 8 months old, dedicated 4Gb graphics card, 5 minutes to load 3rd person demo.
Demo missing all of the objects. I only see sky. Controller seems to respond by visual arrows, but can’t detect 3rd person movement.
Loaded some of the .lua scripts to see just how “easy” lua scripts are going to be. “Player” controller = 500 lines of confusion.
I can’t be bothered with this. No threat to Unreal or Unity. Next…
Mmhh…its a bit nonsense that they will develop the Mac version later on, considering that lots of Maya users are using it on Mac.
Anyway the engine looks promising and having AD behind the scene pumping money on developing could help this engine a lot…but I think they just wanted to push Maya LT as the standard DCC for game development…and considering that they tried to lower the price more then once means that Maya LT is not selling very well…I think that is a very good software for game development, but they cut lots of usefull animation tools in it, and it basically crippled…
I’m curious to see what will be the situation in the coming months, because it could also be that AD pull the plug on the entire project…won’t be a news considering how they pull the plug on Softimage after a couple of years and they still don’t have a fully functional replacement for that software ( Maya byfrost is years behind and the node based editor has been copied by 3ds but still far away ).
Let see if this will be another royal grandiose F-up from AD
Until they actually have games shipped using it, it’s not going to go anywhere. Most developers aren’t going to jump ship from established engines like UE4 or Unity in order to beta-test a new engine without some major incentives. It doesn’t seem to have any features that stand out - and the engine being well-integrated with MayaLT just means you are either forced into MayaLT or your workflow is no different than any other engine.
And, frankly, with their ever-skyrocketing software prices and inability to create a stable, bug-free, user experience… they’re the last company I’d want to depend on for my core game engine.
Been playing around with it a bit. It seems like an OK engine, but nothing exceptional. There’s no reason to make a switch from established software and communities like Unreal or Unity.
I thought it was pretty good, nothing to pull me away from UE. But it seemed pretty straightforward / simple to use, had plenty of tools and options Unity doesn’t have without 3rd party plugins. Yeah not bad, sure it was a bit buggy also I’m not sure why every window is tied into a remote server that’s just odd…
It’s like an engine from early 2000’s; but may become a good platform if they keep investing on it.
They need a dedicated marketplace too, that one they have won’t help that much.
It seems you can’t write plugins to extend the engine runtime without engine source access, and I did not expect this: “The Stingray Editor does not currently have a plug-in or scripting API.” (Help)
I have messed with it and it seems that it could be good but I really cannot evaluate what it can do in one day. They one thing that I like about it is that they updated Maya Lt. They have one game that was made with it:
It’s early days yet, they’ll have to continuously keep iterating on it if they want to be able to compete; both Unity and Unreal have been around for over a decade, and as a result are much more polished.
Personally, I don’t see any reason to do anything other than take a quick look at Stingray right now, especially with their corporate lockdown so that nobody can extend it, and nobody knows where they’re going with it development wise.
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