Hi, I’m trying to decide between learning Unreal Engine and… competing platforms and came across a weird topic. My plan was to try to use JetBrains’ Rider IDE for development. I’d be okay with paying the licensing fees associated with that (around 170€ here).
However, when looking into different tutorials regarding Rider, I noticed all of those I found download Visual Studio for its “Build Tools” and then Rider. I later found out you only need the Build Tools published by Microsoft, which are also part of Visual Studio, i.e. you can just download them and then use Rider.
But on the “Before you start” page on the Rider docs (see link above), I saw:
Note that using MS Build Tools for commercial products requires a valid Visual Studio license.
Now, according to a Microsoft blog post from 2022, compiling open source software (even when the product is then sold) doesn’t need a paid license. But that only applies when compiling open source code, which Unreal Engine’s runtime probably isn’t. Paying the cheapest license of Visual Studio would mean $45/month already.
And I also read on multiple occasions: the community edition of Visual Studio is (apparently) free for up to $1kk in revenue (and <250 employees, or 5 people on a team using Visual Studio).
So:
What is the actual cost of developing commercial games with Unreal Engine?
(Especially with Rider, but also if without. It seems like development with VS Code also needs the Build Tools.)
The question is kinda weird, because “developing Fortnite” is measured in nine or ten digits of dollars…
Visual Studio (O G version, not vscode) has a Community Edition which is free to use, and gives you a valid license.
You don’t need Rider – you can use Visual Studio just fine.
You can download Unreal Engine and use it for free until your game makes enough money to need a license.
You can use Blender for animations and art assets, and Krita or Gimp for textures, if you don’t want to pay for Maya and Photoshop.
But none of this is the real cost of developing a game – developing all the art, and spending all the engineering time to make gameplay fun and then tune it to run well on your target hardware, is where the cost is at.
Idk how you got “developing Fortnite” from my post, but: I’m talking about the licenses of different IDEs in this context. Idk if the Community Edition is really free to use for commercial games, specifically. The core of my question is basically that.
You are just getting started make it easy on yourself and just use all the free stuff given to you. You don’t need to pay for rider or anything to learn the engine.
The cost of developing a game including marketing is anywhere from 0 to 400,000,000 dollars comparing a simple game solo to Call of Duty including marketing spend with a 1000 developers spread over years.
My advice is do something very simple to teach yourself game development, I would start by just making a race track using the template project and see if you like moving things around the editor, learn to build that into a project you can give someone to play, watch them play your track. Tune the car they give you make it more fun, change the camera.
Spend 2 days doing that, and redoing it until you feel you have a fun track that other people would like driving on.
This is the basic test to see if you have talent as a game designer and if you like working on games. It will not cost you any money.