Great interview with David Helgason - UE4 has had no impact on Unity

…or so he claims.

I read that. It is very interesting, especially when they get to the following part:

GamesBeat: With their base price, they’re trying to undercut you.

Helgason: They actually went up in price, in a way. Now Unreal has a five percent backend, which arguably makes it the most expensive engine on the market. It doesn’t really matter. I won’t go into the math.


I admit that there are specific price points where one can make the case that Unity is cheaper, such as a single developer selling more than $100,000 worth of games per year. However, for nearly everybody else, UE4 is cheaper than Unity. For hobbyists, UE4 is massively cheaper. The 5% royalty is basically a non-issue for hobbyists. For large teams, UE4 can be cheaper, since Unity charges per seat for licensing. I really wish the interviewer had taken a moment to dig a little deeper on that issue. If Helgason really thinks Epic’s prices went up, then he does not understand the situation.

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No impact means no intersection:

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… which would be hard to believe.

This guy has great fashion sense though :slight_smile:

Fixed that for you.

You missed his awesome scarf in the article. So he is an expert in both scarves and collars. :slight_smile:

Most interesting part of the interview for me

Question: What are your plans for supporting HTML 5 as a run-time?
Helgason: We started working on that quite a while ago. We announced it and showed it at GDC a couple of months ago, a Unity exporter for HTML 5 and WebGL. It’s running really well. It’s not perfect, but it’s going to be out in what we call a preview with our Unity 5, which is the next big release. It doesn’t have a date yet, but it’s getting really close. It definitely exists and it’s surprisingly awesome.

For some strange reason I am unable to edit my earlier post or else I would have edited the earlier one to add this as well.

The 2nd most interesting part

Question: The rumor a while back was that AutoDesk was trying to acquire you guys. Thanks for not selling, if that was at all possible.
Helgason: If I had a dollar for every rumor about acquisition, I wouldn’t be rich, but I could buy myself a really nice meal.

Funny thing is he says if he had a dollar for every rumor about acquisition…
Well, rumors can be true or false, he doesn’t say it was a false rumor.

So we may never know. :wink:

You can have a really nice meal cheaply too, just an egg and some bread can taste really great.

I keep doing the maths for this and have no idea how you reached this conclusion. Take a studio of 100 employees (large studio) and some of them are artists, some are ‘technical’ and not everyone needs a seat, but assuming all 100 people in that team needed a seat then that’s about 100 thousand pounds in brit money in unity seats for pc games. If you make two million pounds from your game (You really have to pray you make more than 2 million pounds with a studio of that size, imagine one year at a horribly low pay of 20,000 per employee, that’s 100*20,000 = 2 million, so thats employment at degrading rates for one year covered by game sales), 5% of that is 100,000 pounds.

And Helgasson talked of enterprise deals for large companies.

Even in a worst case scenario i can’t see a ‘big game’ being cheaper to a developer with U4 than Unity, unless you have an odd idea about how much money is involved in ‘big games’.

I think the mistake most people are making in running these numbers is that Unity is $1500 for the base license only. Most Unity projects are going to be mobile so the licenses are $4500 each ($6000 when OpenGL comes out) so a studio needing 100 licenses would have to pay out $450,000 not $150,000. Now on top of that on a large project you are likely to go over at least one Unity upgrade cycle so you will wind up paying another $225,000 to upgrade your licenses. So the total would be $675,000. So if your game made $2,000,000 you would pay Unity 33% of that. Now on top of all that, if your game fails to generate any significant revenue (or the project is cancelled) you still paid out all that money to Unity, but Epic only makes money when you succeed.

Most people need all those licences (A 100 person mobile development studio)? The entire studio need a Unity seat? You missed the bit about enterprise arrangements?

This is different as with Unity you OWN your licenses and upgrades you paid forever. If you failed making selling your game, you could make 10 other games using your licenses , and sell these games as long as you want and make new games, all money will come to your pocket with no Royalties.
With UE4, you pay less, but Royalties are forever, if you are not success no deal, once you have success you will pay forever something.

Do it and i switch to EU4.

Only so long as your game earns over $3000 a quarter. And even then, if your game earns (say) $4,300 you only have to pay the royalties on the $1,300 - which is $65.

+1 That would honestly be the last straw for me…

If you are working on a project in Unity and have committed time and money to it then you are most likely in the short term stay with Unity. But once you have released your latest project then things might change, at least you will probably try out UE4 and compare it to Unity. I would expect that it’s early days yet but the big crossover could happen when Unity 5 is released and developers have to compare the available engines and their costs.

Apparently people aren’t fans of autodesk around here :stuck_out_tongue:

Perhaps a good deal. For some people that could be success and win over 3000$ a quarter , no Royalties means Epic have no insight on your business ,and you don’t have to worry if you have to pay or not each quarter of each year. But indeed a game can sell a lot at beginning , and reach a maximum months, then this is decrease as a year passes and new games arrives, so indeed perhaps you have to worry about the sells only the first year, and UE4 would make sense even with Royalties.

A plus with Unity , is if you target lower hardware Unity keeps compatibility with 3D cards old from 2004, what is a strong point, specially for simple 3D indie games or using standard shaders. For UE4 i don’t know if you can produce a simple PC game with simple lightening and shaders compatible with older PC and not only last two years ones ?

They baught Maya their main old concurrent to remove a serious concurrent, but they are more concentrated on 3DSMAX, Maya staying in the background in terms of bigger features. Buying Unity could lead to bad situation like some new AAA engine targetting bigger companies with Unity binded with 3DSMAX features, so you would need 3DSMAX to use Unity so overall pricing would jump a lot indeed.
As indie i don’t know if there is small companies using 3DSMAX or alternative software but it is too much expensive for lonewolves.