Oh no, I understand that 5% isn’t going to break things for many small developers. I never once said it was an absolute deal breaker in a general sense. But there are many who would look at a 5% royalty on their gross revenue, look at how much they have in the bank, and consider buying Unity licenses instead. For those of us who have Unity licenses, and in my case have been using Unity since 2009 amongst other engines depending on a project’s needs, it’s a pretty straightforward case of “what’s another $750 every two years to upgrade?” Granted, not everyone’s in a similar situation to mine where my position as a contractor enables me to have the money to put out for that every couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, Epic’s done a great thing with its licensing, and I think you’re right - Epic is doing something revolutionary here. But just as Unity’s licensing isn’t right for everyone, Epic’s isn’t right for everyone either.
Honestly, I don’t think UE4 needs anything further for scripting. You’ve completely missed the point of the exercise I outlined above. It’s not to find a comparable scripting language or setup. It’s to find a library that’s comparable to the .NET Base Class Library that provides a similarly diverse set of functionality to Unreal as .NET’s BCL does to Unity. For my purposes, this is quickly turning into compiling a small piecemeal library of other libraries that fills the gap. It’s not a bad way to do it, but it’s not the right approach for everyone.
And one other thing here: I do identify that UE4 hasn’t even been out for a month yet. This is also Epic’s first time making Unreal Engine available to the masses in a way that only the big could really afford in the past, so hiccups and functionality gaps are to be expected for a first release like this. One of the biggest rules in software development, whether it’s games, the technology that drives games, or non-game applications, is development is iterative. I’m reasonably sure that everyone here understands that, and I’m sorry if I didn’t make it clear with my first post denoting what UE4 does not yet support that UE4 will eventually. I’d be very surprised if Epic didn’t fill the more common runtime gaps by the end of the year that holds UE4 back from being as general purpose as Unity.
My point previously was more to provide an example to outline the differences between two engines relative to each other at this time, which is honestly the more productive thing to do if you want to make a decision sooner rather than several months down the road. Of course we can talk about how things may be two years down the road, but that doesn’t really help anyone anytime soon in their decision making process.