Because it’s incredibly expensive, way out of bounds for a start-up studio and would easily cost us more than 5% of our gross. Initially, we weren’t expecting to pay anything other than our monthly sub fee, simply because of the kind of project we we’re working on.
Honestly, when people are coughing up anything from 150K to up to 500K, they are very very careful and particular about where that money goes. The kind of holes you have to jump through to get this investment as a start-up game studio are endless. We’ve had very good incubation on the subject and a lot of both mock and real pitches to potential investors and publishers, it’s quite literally dragons den, only much more extreme because games are (as everybody knows) a very risky business.
Doesn’t really work like that, you can’t just magically add 5% to what you’re asking from investors or publishers.
Investment in somebodies business doesn’t belong to Epic as far as I’m concerned, that’s not what I’m worried about. Our running costs are not in anyway related to whether we use UE or not. The bit I’m worried about is when a client comes to us, we start making the product and get milestone payments to keep the studio running (the remainder of that counts as our profit), but 5% of all that money that is supposed to run the studio instead goes to Epic. That’s a LOT more than $19 a month, and turns the whole ‘free’ thing completely on it’s head. We’re actually paying considerably more.
In terms of what we’d have to pay, it’s almost as much as a full-time salary for an additional team member. I just want some clarification on what we pay, originally it was 5% of profit on what you actually sell, and only on games. This changes the game quite a bit.