I guess I’ll throw my two cents in here. I’m a father of five and always wanted to get into game development as a kid. Now that my young ones are getting older, some of them have the same aspirations. The difference here is that the option of a free, AAA game engine was never available to me. Could I afford $20 a month so my kids can play around and learn the engine? Sure, but for some of us $20 is still a lot of money when you have bills to pay.
news is probably the best thing Epic could’ve done when it comes to training the next generation of game developers. Will we see **** games? Definitely, that’s true of every engine that was ever created. But will they REALLY give Unreal Engine a bad name? Mostly likely not. The reason being that the average consumer doesn’t look at a bad game and think about what engine it was made with. They just don’t buy games from that developer anymore. The only people (for the most part) that would look at the engine are developers, and I have a really hard time picturing those developers looking down on the engine itself when they are all aware (or at least should be aware) that the guy making **** games is the one at fault.
On top of all that, wasn’t the subscription only good for one seat at a time? So if two or three of my kids wanted to learn the engine and actually release their product, that price of admission just went up. I say kudos, Epic. If I ever had a tough time deciding between Unreal or Unity, move just laid it all to rest!