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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.
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Doesn’t iOS development to day require a $99/year subscription? And if you’re not working in something like UE4’s blueprints, a machine running OS X as well? That’s a much higher barrier to entry for most people.
[=;140651]
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.
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That’s my biggest concern, as someone who came from Unity I don’t want to see community turn into that. Seeing so many Epic staff posting regularly on the forums, and the reasonably high quality of forum posts was the reason I came over to Unreal. I was on the fence, leaning toward not trying it yet, but a day on the forums changed my mind. (And the channel so I could see the workflow.)
Here there’s some assumed level of technical competence when someone posts in the C++ forum or even the Blueprints forum. That’s not a snobbery thing, it’s valuable because in the Unity community, a lot of the people who COULD answer the intermediate and above questions were driven out because they got sick of explaining how if statements and for loops work. Here I can ask questions about the domain and actually get answers, sometimes from Epic employees themselves.