I’ve got a question for the updated pricing for Unreal Engine; In the blogpost from yesterday, the following is written: “This new pricing of $1,850 per seat will apply to companies generating over $1 million USD in annual gross revenue who are not creating games.”
Now I wonder what this means for our company. We produce games, but also produce linear content (animations). What does this now mean for us = what does it mean for when a company uses Unreal Engine for both games and linear content?
To make it more confusing, there’s multiple ways this could be happening:
A) a company has 8 devs, 6 working on games, 2 working on linear content
B) there’s multiple projects in the pipeline, so a dev works on linear content for 2 sprints, then 2 sprints on games (edit: I just realised that I even switch between both working on games and linear content creation within the same day)
C) mixed Engine company (yay!): Unity is used for creating games that produce revenue, but Unreal Engine is used for linear content creation mainly and then also for prototyping games
The reality is just - with the convergence of linear media and games, you cannot cleanly differentiate those two. We want to use what we build for linear media directly for creating games for the same IP, with the same engine, with the same people, the same machines, the same seats.
And maybe in addition for other companies that will evolve in a similar way: first we produced only games, but because UE made this possible, in the last years we first started testing the linear content production = we prototyped animation for movies and TV. Does such a company already have to pay for seats even if there is no revenue from linear content, only from games?