I believe the 50 $ per month subscription is a way too steep for the average indie developer, maybe Unreal could make an agreement with Autodesk for a bundle including UE4 + Maya LT at a special price ?
I tried Blender many times and recently went though all the tutorials for Unity and Dota 2 tutorials on Maya LT and I think this product is really interesting for the indie / hobby developer.
A combination of UE4 and MayaLT would definitely be a hit IMHO…
There’s actually nothing that Epic really has to do with that stuff, Autodesk is perfectly capable of changing their pricing themselves, I think it’s doubtful that they would because they don’t want to devalue their software.
Well from the commercial point of view having a discounted procing for UE4 users would allow them to keep their regular price while getting some additional users from UE community even though at lower profit.
Bundling products is a common commercial practice and having UE4+ MayaLT at less than a Unity subscription license is definitely an interesting deal for both parties and for users…
MayaLT is already a discounted version of Maya, and if you buy a license of MayaLT along with a $20 for a single month of UE4 then you’re already paying less than either a full Unity Pro license or even a Unity monthly subscription
MayaLT is $795 by itself, plus UE4 would be $815
Vs.
Unity Pro license is $1,500 by itself. Subscription is $75 a month and you have to sign up for a year, which means it costs $900 to subscribe and you don’t even get to keep the actual license.
This is not entirely correct… in you are an European citizen, for some unspecified reason Europeans pay about 40% more than US dollars customers for UE4 and MayaLT licenses as both company count 1 Euro = 1 Dollar while the current exchange rate is 1 Euro = 1,39 dollars
So UE4 is 19 euros + Maya LT 50 Euros = 69 Euros, 96 dollars, vs Unity 75 dollars (or 57 euros).
I never complained about this as I think UE is still an exceptional deal at 19 euros, but well I believe it is a little unfair to Europeans in general…
I don’t want to be rude, but imho “Acceptable price” and “Autodesk” = incompatible concepts. If you’re not buying for studio, of course.
Why you exlude Maya LT price from Unity deal? You don’t get Maya sub if you buy Unity sub.
It’s (**19$ **vs 75$) + 50$
What about conversion - well, that’s the way how market works!
No they wont, its AD and they clearly shown that they rather kill a marvelous software ( who said Softimage? ) to push Maya…
Anyway the price of Maya LT is not that bad, 50$ a month is not soooo expensive, but the 65k FBX limit, considering that nowdays engines are capable to “crunch” way more polygons, is not acceptable…
AD want to push Maya for gaming and they limit the export of the meshes…c’mon…seriously?
The only way to make Autodesk decrese price for their products is to stop using them all togather.
Frankly at this point I would push Blender agenda. And not FBX format for blender, but Collada.
I know Collada is not standarized across any software (frankly FBX is also not standardized, the only “standardization” come from the fact that FBX is owned by Autodesk, which is not any standardization).
Best option would be to create external Collada import/export library on some liberal license like BSD, integrate it with Unreal and allow any DCC app producer to also implement this Collada library to their software.
I’m sure Blender and The Foundry with modo would be quick to jump ship on it. They already have nicely working Collada export, and struggle with FBX export.
FBX isn’t a problem format, if they wanted to support the format better in Blender then they could do it. It offers more features than Collada so maybe they should fix it rather than have everyone else change to a new standard. The only real standard format is OBJ and FBX is definitely right behind that.
