Oversimplifying
[=;140586]
You can only pay once and if you don’t have $19 I wonder how you pay your power+internet bills to open thread.
[/]
oversimplifies the situation unfairly. I don’t think anyone on the board doubts that Epic’s current licensing model for UE4 is an amazing value. Compared to, for example, the Unity Pro license, UE4 is downright cheap. Compared to what a full Unreal license used to cost back in the day, they’re practically giving licenses away.
The isn’t value or even perceived value. The isn’t even whether that fee is an obstacle to entry for new people - it certainly is. The real debate is about whether having an obstacle to entry is a good thing or a bad thing.
The reason that Epic created the Academic program (I’m assuming - I don’t work for them) is to encourage the next generation of game programmers to learn Unreal rather than another engine. Many programmers don’t learn to program using formal education. Ours is a field with a long tradition of people teaching themselves or learning from books, videos, and online tutorials.
To give an example, my company has around 40 programmers. Considerably less than half of those have formal CS or engineering degrees and I see absolutely no correlation between those degrees and quality of work.
Right now, people looking to teach themselves game development are very likely to choose Unity over Unreal simply because Unity has a free option and UE4 doesn’t. It’s not about appreciating value for these people, it’s that they are taking their first tentative steps into something new and may not be ready to plunk down money yet. When they are ready, they’re likely going to stick with the platform they started on because that will be their comfort zone.
But, as someone already pointed out in thread, there is a downside to opening the floodgates. The Unity community has bright spots and some truly wonderful people, but much of the community is a fetid swamp of negativity and incompetence populated by people who are in love with the idea of making a game, but who are not all that interested in putting in the work involved in actually making a good game. That situation can’t be blamed entirely on the free license (poor moderation of the forums is at least a contributing factor, for example), but it’s certainly one of the main reasons.
There’s not a simple right or wrong answer to whether Unreal should have a free option. It’s not simply a matter of UE4 being a great value and people should pony up money. It’s more nuanced than that.
Personally, as someone who has been seriously contemplating writing a UE4 book for beginners, I’d really like to see some kind of option to let people try UE4 for free. My most rewarding book to date was a beginner book on iPhone programming. Six years later, I still have people thanking me for getting them started on a career they love. I’d like to be able to do something similar for future game programmers because I know there is a lot of interest in it and it can be intimidating as heck, but am hesitant to write that kind of beginner book as long as there’s no free option at all.
But, as someone who has incurred the wrath of the dregs of the Unity community, I also understand the desire to have the fee to keep out the riff raff (and also to keep support costs down). I enjoy the Unreal forums SO much more than the Unity forums because people are almost universally civil, pleasant, helpful, and earnest. I also love the fact that Unreal developers often chime in to help. If we open the floodgates, that would all very possibly change.
That $19.95 will keep out many of the non-serious game developers, but it will also keep out some people with the potential to become great game creators.