I am in the planning phase of an educational game. Once it is release, the majority of the income are from selling contents delivered by the game online. Based on the EULA, all the income generated are subject to 5% royalties. The is the “game” is only a way to delivery contents, the development cost of the contents are few times more than the game. What’s your thought?
Also, what people feel about the royalty when it comes to the MMO game? MMOs usually have a high maintenance are operational cost. Since the royalty is based on gross income, the 5% may end up becomes 20% or 30% of gross profit.
If you are predicting that 5% of royalty from gross revenue might way to much, you can always ask for custom licensing.
Unless you’r prediction assume on making millions (literally), I wouldn’t really bother with 5% royalty.
The only other engine on the market that has a better licensing deal is the one you write yourself. Good luck.
Yes stay away from UE, carrots are fruits here, snails are fishes, they tell you what kind of electric bulb you can use, all that nonsense in life. But its quite good if you have Monty Python sense of humor.
As to unreal engine, I would say you cannot afford anything else, most game devs cannot. Or you will not get anything better for that price. For starter forget about anything bigger than tiny RPG, shooter or good platformer. Take look at steam greenlight most popular games, you just cannot do better than that until you have some real budget. So your worries about MMO are like me worrying now that i get too much tan in Australia, all while i am in Iceland.
And gross income (in case of UE4) would be higher than buying license (writing engine) only if your game sold few millions copies. If you that lucky to sell your first game in such quantinty, i bet investors would be kissing your *** and begging to have their baby.
No, it is not. If you are just building a single player game, the UE licensing is more than generous in my mind, no matter how many millions copies you can sales, since it is always cheaper then you write your own engine. But It does not mean it is a good choice for every situation. In my situation, the “game” is functioning as a way to deliver trainings. Or you can think it as a fancy multimedia player. Once it is done, only some small user interaction need to be added to the “game” for each course, the cost related to implement those user interactions is only a small fraction (less than 10%) of the total cost to develop a course, the rest has nothing to do with the game, not even have anything to do with a computer. but you still need to pay as the whole course is developed using the engine. If my only choice is using UE or write my own, it is a no brainer to use UE, but there are other other engines on the market with different licensing and fee structure. I am not here to complain about the fees, instead I think UE licensing is the best one currently available for most game developers, especially small developers. I am posting here just to see if anyone have a different view about the situation I am facing.
You can contact Epic to negotiate a custom licence if that is required for your project, for more info on that please see the following page:
All advice already posted is valid. The only thing I’d like to add is that other Engines require third party software that they do not neccessarily disclose that you will have to pay additional royalties for. (Bink Video for example.) UE4 has been designed as an all in one solution that avoids hidden costs. So the quick response is “No” -you shouldn’t stay away from UE, but do your homework as has suggested above to make sure it is the right solution for your particular needs.
If time equals money, as they say, even the one you write yourself has a worse license. Unless you earn AAA money…
I agree with the invitation to do your homeworks, especially maths one which are really usefull to create games, because if you think that 5 % of a part of your revenues and 5 % of another part of your revenues makes 10 % or 20 - 30 % as you said, you’ll have some issues to complete your goal. And other fees are not related to %. All business have fees like servers.
Fortunately , ue 4 community is like its beloved engine, really kind and helpfull (but sometimes a bit ironic…) and lots of people will be happy to help you if they can.
Personally, i have a total opposite point of view than you. If one day i have the incredible luck to have to pay epic a huge amount of $, i think i’ll dance all the night and shout it on fcebook and and say thank you, because each time i’ll give 1 $, i’ll have 19 ! (In anyway i earned them) And i’ll never forget that i could never have a single one of those 19 without epic staff permanent work.
And if i’ve earn so much that it could make people like you thinks it is unfair, i think that i’ll do something crazy like a ninja flash mob at the epic entrance with free muffin for everybody and with a big panel “thanks” ^^
anyway : Good luck with your project !
His math in it self is sound. It is just very unlikely that the numbers used are going to be representative for a real scenario.
If you have a gross income of 100 000 USD, 5% of is 5000 USD. If you have to pay 90 000 USD in expenses for every 100 000 USD you earn (not likely, I know), the 5% would in reality represent 50% of net income.
Yeah totally agree on the idea but a subjective way to calculate because as i wrote in first post, is exactly the same for every business, you have fixed charges and variable ones (not sure of the english words) and calculating to have an idea to what you need to reduce to pay less is one thing, but considering is unfair because - due to other fees only ! - the subjective percentage of one variable fee (and not the others) is higher is not good math even if the result is right.
I would say, don’t pay your mortgages. Don’t pay your employees. Don’t pay nothing, even food in market. It will be back to 5 % only. 