…
Cool!
The only good things (among other features) that i can see in UDK is their real-time Unified editor (no need to re-import assets), which is pretty awesome. And the fact that you can switch between PC mode and mobile (emulation) is also a plus!
Unity 3.5 where are you? ^^
Wow i didnt know that all those Dx11 features will be implemented so soon.
If I wasnt so intent on android stuff i’d be all over it but I am so hey!
Alright guys, lets discuss!
How many of these new UDK features can be done in Unity pro?
Damn… I have to admit that little terrain copying-pasting clip was neat.
The main problem is, you have to buy Unity Pro, to use Unity Pro, and therein lies the rub
I can think of a million and one things I could do with GL, render-to-texture and occlusion culling alone, not even starting on the rest so…
FXAA actually is already done (see showcase - FXAA3 thread)
And yeah you have to get Pro, but question is to what degree thats a drawback, cause its one time $1500 for all eternity. UDK sounds great but $50k free? come on with that you don’t even get a stunning iOS game payed that would even require the use of UDK, even less one that justifies UDK on the desktop. You need to take much more into your hands to fund that and at that point it becomes more a matter of “what you are more used to” than its price as UDK will be the more expensive solution and if you can’t make full use of it, it will just remain that, more expensive.
Also UDK lacks and potentially always (as long as you can build on windows) will lack plugin support on mobile, a major thing out of my view as being up to date and unique is a must have on mobile, not an option.
I think from my perspective is that I know how to use the fancy stuff on Unity Pro like I know how to use the fancy stuff in UDK but i literally cannot afford, may never be able to afford (Before actually selling enough games, could be months/years down the line), Unity Pro, and people in my circumstances would naturally be drawn to UDK
You work on paid ‘real’ projects, i’ve gathered, so its a bit easier to talk of Pro as a sound investment, which it IS, its a great investment, if you have the money to choose your tools, and having been very interested in photography for a few years of my life I know how this can be…
I think with the upcoming 3.5 UT is equal to UDK.
me like the new decimation tool from this vid.
Lets be honest there are some really cool workflows. In particular you can clone chunks of your terrain. That is genius. Also robust terrain painting tools are a lot better than unity.
There’s no two ways about it: their desktop engine is better than unity’s now - if you are targetting DX11. But I am sure the guys at unity will be all over that. They are competitive creatures and won’t take a challenge lying down.
As you can see they have upped the ante with their mobile platform and unity has to keep on its toes with the mobile end too. So thats a lot of work for unity, but its doable.
with version 5.x they might be equal (however UDK is growing in features meanwhile too, so UT needs to speed up development if they want to be able to close the gap)
I know you love Unity, but credit is where credit is due, even if it’s the competition. (fair player)
Again, Unity is good for what it does, don’t get me wrong… but… it’s nowhere near UDK quality yet.
(overall)
I love 3D art. it’s my business, we just want to be on the save side to use the right technology at the right time.
But sure, we all love Unity for its fast intuitive and fun workflow 
I would like you to count me 10 or 20 Unity IOS games that actually made over 50k in revenue and that justifiys your statment.
That should be studios, not games… because the royalties kick in after you make 50k in revenue, regardless if it’s $5000 from 10 games or $50,000 from 1.
You pretty much can’t comfortably support a family on less than $50k in the US, so if you’re making this a career and can’t hit that number, you need to do something else.
Thats exactly part of the problem. Its not $50k per title but the first $50k for your legal entities lifetime income made from UDK.
The other part is that its $50k gross revenue, not $50k after you payed back all the investments and salary required to produce the game with your team, so you basically even pay a UDK tax for the salary of the team on top of your sales.
So simply put you are going to pay UDK 25% on the whole revenue required to pay back the multi month salary of your 5+ head team (if you have less I fail to see a game to succeed with UDK as its like Max nothing 1-2 persons can master and utilize to its real extends) to create the title, so you basically need to make 25% more to even “get even” financially in the end.
On Unity its $0 - $1500 for each dev, fixed and flat. You know upfront how much you pay for it, can budget it for the rest of your existance (or till you upgrade) and are done. You don’t have to consider it for future project forcasts.
UDK or full revenue shares like this out of my view only work for modding teams that at the end decide to go commercial and if you ask me thats exactly what Epic was hunting for, getting their modding teams to spread the word about the power in a real way, cause mods with their binding to some Unreal Tournament version didn’t really drag enough attention especially when compared to the blockbuster mods that went into standalone on the HalfLife engine.
All that being said I like UDK and the power it theoretically offers, even though I’m aware it will never master it as its just too large.
If they somewhen realize that scripting is nothing for monkeys on a typewriter and get a real IDE in place officially bundled, we can talk about it being targeted at the users it tries to sell itself to expensively.
So you will drop app store sales aswell? since they take a royalty aswel. (30% on revenue, which is even higher than 25% for UDK and has no threshold of 50K usd)
With UDK, It’s not so much money you are paying on royalties:
If you have e.g. 60000 USD revenue you keep 57500 for yourself and 2500 to Epic Games.
The initial price is just 99 USD, instead of 1500 USD… You need to get to the 50K first, which is quite hard for a small indie (team), especially for the first year. And this 50K is fully yours to keep btw. no royalties due. Just after that, it’s paying 25% on what gone OVER the 50K, calculated quaterly.
The chances you are paying this 2500 USD soon is smaller than the initial money you have to pay for Unity license. 
Many won’t even get to 50K USD revenue at all.
Let’s be realistic here, most indies don’t.
Sure we can dream, hope and whatnot. but most just simply don’t
The only thing I am really jealous of, is the motion blur. The one provided with unity is not really usable and the technique it uses is outdated.
Thats not related out of my view. On the asset store or any platform you pay the ongoing costs for ongoing services, namely maintenance, payment processing, refund handling, technical and sales support costs oh and free advertisement within the related ecosystem which saves you lot of advertisement and free passerbuy sales in case of something as focused as the Unity Asset store
To my knowledge on UDK you pay some 5 figure fee for any form of “beyond board” support and have none of the others so you pay an ongoing fee for no ongoing services.
The engine updates are nice but projects normally don’t switch engines midway through a projects development for reasons of regression (you don’t even do it on unity unless it added a feature that crucial to make your app happen at all but in that case your project shouldn’t have been started yet as unity roadmaps are “an idea of what happens”, there is no guarantee it happens or happens anytime soon)
but to tell the truth: I stopped doing middleware years ago, its a business that so far for me only cost money and has generated more lose than anything else as the support efforts were beyond any reasonable amount for the fees that could be asked to still sell the products. Thats why I have no library etc on sales on the asset store or even my page. Not even with the much higher exposure of the AS I see it as reasoanbly working, given that the top seller in Q1 made only $15k with income curves normally being of exponential nature, not yielding much hope that even “rank 5” was able to pay his life even halfway if he did it fulltime.
The only thing nowadays still available (the other things all were ceased years ago) is a technology I developed / co-developed half a decade ago back then focused at RC Standard.