I was puzzled by the pricing, considering Epic gives us UE4 for $20 a month. weather plugin costs £15 per month which is roughly $25. Seems weird considering we get a whole engine for less.
Pricing for software is all about numbers: how many we can sell at a given price, versus what it costs to maintain. Of course you’re also promising 5% of your gross revenue to Epic - is where they make their money perhaps, but the numbers for UE4 are obviously larger than for any given plugin.
I appreciate the reasoning behind it, but it’s ultimately out of a lot of people’s price ranges I would imagine. You’re providing some very cool functionality, but you are valuing it at a price greater than that of the toolset on which it depends.
I would suggest releasing a stripped down version with a license instead of a subscription. $100, gives you basic access but less customization or something. If people want to upgrade to the full version they can. I dunno, but all in all it’s just hard for me to justify the price for something that would only be a minor portion of my work. No offense meant, but you’ll probably get many more sales if it were half the price.
I don’t think is overpriced at all really, if anything I think UE4 is under priced, but there is the royalty. Comparing with other similar plugins such as the UE4 SpeedTree subscription, it is pretty much identical in cost and increased productivity, and they both have a very similar licence (sub runs out, you keep your work but can’t modify the parameters anymore). I do understand the point you are trying to make but I personally have no issues with the subscription price as it stands. I have not tried it yet, but it does look really cool and plan on giving it a try soon! 
I would actually argue that kind of business model hurts them. For example, it’s not like I really need a monthly subscription for sky generation. That’s definitely a polish pass kind of thing. In that case, I’m going to probably sub for one month near the end of my project, set it up, and then unsub. Which, if that is the intention, then that is great. That’s a really great value. $25 for a month to set up a dynamic cloud system is immensely valuable, but I also feel unfair to the dev. I’d rather pay more upfront for one time to just have perpetual access with maybe one or two free updates.
I guess all in all you are right though.
@Moose has a great point - maybe be more interesting offer a yearly price instead subscription, because as Moose said, if I buy , I’ll use only to improve my project quality and done.
Maybe the unsub scheme hurt the plugin earnings.
is also a very specialized piece of software. UE4 can run $20 because they want volume and need to support a large staff. TruSky is a very specific plugin, not everyone is going to be need a 3D sky.
I’m only guessing , but I wouldn’t be surprised if they added updated features in the future and all those people who subbed once, setup their sky and unsubbed, will be tempted to come back for another update.
The update thing is a great move, but I don’t see users updating a working sky system. For example:
- I create a game and add the plugin, it works and I release the project.
- New plugin version is released
- I probably won’t update my game and redistribute copies just to add a few sky features
No, but you would update your game over the time anyways and why not provide new additional features at the same time? You don’t have to update your game only to provide new sky features, but maybe you can incorporate the sky updates with bug fixes or other added features.
Doesn’t ArmA 3 also use ? ArmA’s implementation has some really nasty view space related bugs, the clouds change shape on the edges of the periphery when the view rotates. Does happen with plugin too?
So if I made a moddable game with plugin, I couldn’t expose the sky properties for modders to tweak or completely alter?
Since you have to use the their editor to change those settings, I think you are not able to expose anything beyond the already given things that you can change within Blueprint, but since I can’t purchase and test the plugin I can’t say that for sure 
If it is exposed in Blueprint, you can make a UI to access those properties and let a user change the sky properties in real time. It does raise a good question though, can the sky be updated if the subscription has run out? For example, if I make a Blueprint that let’s the users affect a Vector variable via a UI slider that to create a color value, could they change the sky color even though they aren’t the subscriber?
I don’t even mean in real time, though that would be important for some gameplay situations. Well, now that I think about it my modding support will probably include an in-game way to make mods in order to learn the system, so yeah, at launch or during runtime I want users to be able to configure any sky properties they want.
Say it’s a standard millitary FPS taking place on Earth. A user might want to make a mission that takes place in another climate. Or on another world. Look at the Star Wars mod that came out for Call of Duty 4 a few years ago, that looks to be emulating Battlefront’s gameplay in the CoD4 engine.
Or say it’s a Myst-like puzzle game where players can make new levels, (See Uru) and in one such level some lever turns on a laser pointed into the sky. Suddenly around that beam clouds start to gather and the sky turns purple, while lightning arcs across the sky.
With the license for plugin as it stands, could I allow these things? (I don’t even know if the latter is possible yet with plugin, but assume it is.)
We never got to the bottom of mystery I guess! Can you mail me on and we’ll figure it out?
I guess the question is at what point does it become a completely different game? Your modders presumably need to have a UE4 licence - if they want to release a modified product they’ll need to have a licence for the other middleware they’re using, like . Without a licence key they could still change everything using Blueprint, but distributing or selling their new game executable would be dicey. If they’re distributing data for your game, that would presumably be fine (IANAL).
The mail should be in your inbox.
Has anyone integrated into their project yet? I’d love to see how it looks in game from a non-static perspective.
I’d love to, but I haven’t had time to compile the engine just to try it out. I’m also confused about the trial/evaluation as I don’t have a paying project to pay for it 
I cannot get to work, and it’s not for a lack of trying. Compiled it with 4.3/4.4/4.5 and 3 different versions and windows 7/8 and two different machines.
Getting a crash on double clicking Sequence Asset. is the window I get.
Any help would be appreciated.