So I just had my first Sub renewal for the Engine and I was wanting to know if people thought there was a huge benefit to constantly keeping their Sub up? When not selling Marketplace content of course.
I’m not sure if I recall any additional Learning resources released in the last month, but they do they the upcoming Engine release soon and that new learning resource I really want. But does everyone feel as if there is value in keeping it long term or just turning it off until it becomes more relevant?
I would say there are benefits if you keep it up or not depending what you want from UE4 for example,
if you cancel your sub first its cheaper and you don’t have to worry about upgrading your project to the newer version which could brake something in your game.
if you keep your sub bugs in your current version may be fixed, new features added, there could also be general editor improvements.
so I think if there isn’t any features in the newer version that you would use there is no real need to keep your sub but if there is a feature that would make your game better then keeping your sub active is a good thing.
you could also just renew your sub every 3 months or so and get the best of both.
Out of the past 6 updates I have only had 1 thing that I really needed and a handful of things that just made the editor/blueprint experience better.
I like to keep updated to the current version even if I don’t need anything from the version though. A couple reasons:
I can catch problems incrementally. If I wait 3 updates and get 3 problems, then it is going to be much harder to work out than getting 1 problem per update. Plus, if you do see problems you can work with the devs to get them resolved sooner rather than later. (I have yet to have any problems from an update).
The new version learning curve is also incremental. A new context menu, new nodes, etc are much easier to take in when you get them bit by bit. I had experience when modding where I took 6-12 months off only to come back and find that not only did I not remember a lot of what I used to know, but that they changed so much that I couldn’t make sense of what had changed.
That and $20 a month is peanuts to support such a great engine.
Personally if you can afford to do it … then I would keep your subscription going. As stated above by fellow posters, there are various reasons for keeping your subscription going … so ultimately the choice is yours.
Ultimately I continue my subscription going because the engine is, without sounding like a fan-boy, awesome and well worth the subscription of $20. 8-}