What do people think of this? Do you see it as competition for Unity?
edit : I called it Unreal ED in the title. Changed it to UDK.
edit: This news was already news by n0mad here :
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=35356&highlight=udk
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Thanks.
this is huge…
and it’s not unrealED - which came free with many UE Engine based games for modding…
It’s the complete Unreal Dev Kit now for free ( noncommercial use…)
You can also get it for commercial use with a 99$ upfront fees and 25% royalty shares… Or 2500$ per seat per year…
For more info, check the license page:
http://www.udk.com/licensing
This is pretty pretty huge!
I’m sorry, Unity, but… i have been cheating on you!
does it have a watermark? 
Wow, free UDK, that is awesome,
I just cant imagine how the guys who paid 30k to license the engine feel now, since is free to used now.
So, unity guys, if you feel bad because you paid $199 for Unity indie license and now is free, compared to UDK, you are in relief now, so dont feel bad about yourself, feel bad for who paid 30k for Unreal license.
other than that, is so great the world is turning around and giving all this nice early christmas gifts to all of us undie devs out there.
lets just wait what will be brought up on 2010 , ill bet you even more goodies will come up.
perhaps Simutronics (heroengine) will gives us a surprise next year??? ahhhh that will be a truely big surprise, lets just hope for the best., I mean, not for free but an indie license will do, lol
UDK is not a competitor of Unity, UDK is by far one of the most advanced studio professianls engine creaton tool ever created, so I heard, so far there is nothing compared to it, is is totally different beast, there were times where indie devs will never dreamed to even use the engine since 30k license minimum is not something a single indie dev can pull out of his pocket an given time.
I mean, dont get me wrong, Unity is a great tool and even a professianl one for any game dev purposes, but here we are talking of 2 different things.
LOOL no wonder unity is free,remember crawling the web and gamedev for an engine to realize a dream and the only decent engines coveted their precious toys with a $1000 + license fee but you can still use the crappy version?
well thank god we now have something that actually does the job without all the BS.
buh bye T3D and unity
Am not sure how Unity will respond to this, all i know its gonna hurt pretty bad.
The fact that you could have the engine and tools fully free(for non commercial use) or for 99$ and 25% royalty… or 2500$ per seat (per year no royalty). Is an open door for indies and hobbyist.
UDK no longer need any game to work, you create the game and package it when finished, it creates an auto-installer for you… I just installed UDK, it comes with a demo version (fully sourced) of Unreal Tournament.
Keep in mind that UDK comes with a binary of the lasted version of Unreal Engine 3. You don’t have access to any engine or tool sources, pretty the same as Unity.
You’re off by quite a huge amount considering UE2 still licenses for 350k. Mind you that UDK is not the same as a regular Unreal Engine license. With the UE3 license you have full source to the engine and gears of war and can do what you want with it… whereas the UDK is compiled binary and allowed UnrealScript only. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, but there is a massive difference compared to what you get for paying 7 figures.
Also tatoforever you are wrong with the licensing… please note the following from their license agreement:
“if you are providing services in connection with a game or application, the per-seat option does not apply.”
The $2500 per seat is only for inhouse applications and not distributed works.
The UDK is no holy grail.
The Unreal Technology was designed with Source usage in mind and that requires a full license. You can not even invoke native functions without a full license.
Unity on the other hand was designed primarily with the idea of not working with sources at all. Additionally Pro comes with the possibility to invoke native functions from DLL, .NET assemblies are available in all Unity editions to expand the tech.
Also, as others mentioned above, the UDK is really in no way comparable.
Its not like you install UDK and will be able to just prototype something small and fun.
Thats something you will be able to do after a few days.
Scale that up to a real project and you will either understand that you need to have a team to work with UDK or a lot (more) time than you would need with Unity, because what makes Unity as strong as it is, is its high accessability.
UDK is not FPSC or anything similar trivial, even Unity is a cakewalk compared to the weeks to months you will spend learning the UDK.
The real question is what it means to other technology. With that I especially mean technologies that primarily made a name due to eye candy and less due to user friendlyness. I think Leadwerks and Torque 3D will not like this news.
Also, actually Epic made the UDK free AFTER UT made Unity (Indie) free, so it wasn’t the other way round.
I see this far more as a great learning possibility than anything else. People usually struggle already to take full advantage of unity (and the like) engines, when it comes to gameart, gameconcepts and originality.
To think UDK enables one to create the next hot next-gen thing on earth is a “little bit” shortsighted…
just look what the great dev/art-team of Runic Games did with a nearly “plain vanilla” version of the opensource Ogre Engine - it’s simply unbelievable
It’s a game of the quality i expect from Blizzard, even if i don’t like the missing depth/tactics etc. , but that’s my personal “Don’t like Diablo” attitute 
Take a look at this game, created in two months by a two guys team using the UDK:
http://www.udk.com/showcase-whizzle.html
Dreamora, you are wrong about native functions.
You can call native functions through the TPClink inside UnrealScript. Of course you don’t have the same low level control as in Unity Pro but you can pretty do what ever you want. Keep in mind that UDK is not a mod tool, it don’t even work with other existing game mods (GoW, UT).
Of course, the learning step is pretty heavy compared to Unity because of the amount of tools and features that the editor have.
On the other hand, Unity still an easy way to create and prototype games.
My spider sense tells me there’s a touch of confusion in this thread. The UDK is not the same as the Unreal Engine - far from it, so no-one out there have been “cheated” out of $300k + or whatever amounts of cash. You do not get the engine source with the UDK which is the primary you pay for when you buy the whole engine.
As I understand it, UDK is a serious upgrade of those kits people received with their Unreal Tournament games. It comes with a bunch of editors (some of which are really cool) and grant you access to UnrealScript.
@jojimbo:
Discontinuing Unity Indie and introducing Unity with the free license wasn’t really done over night - we’ve been crunching the numbers for a while and the decision to make it final came from us wanting to and the numbers matching - not pressure from competitors. The free UDK was as much a surprise for most people here as everybody else.
As I see it, we’re not in direct competition with Unreal at the moment, but I expect that we will be at some point and I am looking forward to it. Nothing like a strong competitor to push products further 
Probably not as it stands now, but come the next major release of Unity, I think it will be (especially for Pro users).
The feature set of UDK is very luring, and while yes it will take longer to get something up and running, and have a higher learning curve, it will not be a hindrance to those willing and determined.
Students and those looking to get their foot in the door of major studios will also flock to UDK for experience with Unreal Technology.
I think the indie engines will have to match feature sets with UDK to stay competitive.
So now now the question is when is AI, a facial animation system, and other goodies going to come to Unity? 
UDK isn’t going to be big for most indie developers that are looking to earn money. You don’t really use Unreal with the intent to make casual games. You use it to make something big. And with that, comes the need of a big team and a lot of time. I see established mod teams excited about this. They’ll be able to work 3 years on a level for their project that they could try to shop around to publishers, hoping for financing.
I could also see some 3rd world studios trying to use UDK to break into the console market. They may have teams of 40 people working on a project for years, and in those countries, the cost of employees isn’t that huge compared to the cost of hardware and software. If they eliminate a huge up front investment, they’d gladly pay 25% off the top of profits just for the chance to make it big.
Unity is a great environment for small teams. It’s fast and easy to get everyone up to speed. While the focus tends to be casual games, it is very capable of making something big. Sure, at this point it won’t look like something from UE3. But with the speed that Unity has been upgrading their engine, I have no doubt that in another year or two it will be up there. Especially when DX11 is supported.
And to make a big game like Gears of War, it will take significantly more than a year or two.
Unity is the premier choice if you’re targeting multiple platforms. Looking to make something for the PC and Mac? No problem? For iPhone? You can use the same engine. XBOX 360? By the time you’re done making your game, it will be supported too.
If you’re looking to make some money without a lot of overhead, it’s also great. Heck, if you don’t use Pro features and choose to deploy to PC, Mac, or the web, you have zero software overhead from Unity. That means more profit from your games. Looking to make a million unit selling game? The Pro license will end up costing less than having to pay a 25% royalty.
As for hobbyists? I think they fit into two main categories.
People who just want to create.
People who want to break in to the industry.
Hobbyists that just want to create a game and have no intention of profiting from it will have an easier time with Unity. When things are clear and intuitive, it’s easier to get a team of other hobbyists to contribute to it because they get to see the fruits of their labor faster.
People who just want to break in to the industry may end up using Unreal because it is one of the big industry standards right now. It looks good on a resume. Unity looks like they’re making an effort to also become an industry standard.
The UDK does not offer you anything else than non-source driven development on Windows only.
You can’t break into console development with it nor anything similar.
Whoops.
I guess that means shopping for a publisher. Which takes even more off the top.
If I can (finally) get my animated models into it using Cinema 4D (Windows) that may be reason enough for me to take a serious gander / lateral move to UDK…
-Will
UDK has a lot of really cool utilities (IA, destruc enviroiments, powerful particle editor, cinematic editor…), but in the end, with a low budget team, unity is by far much much better.
In general, if you don’t need any really special feature of unreal, or you don’t have a big group with you, unity is, by far, the best option.
And who knows, maybe some day unity will have some of this cool features (ia, crowds, destruct environment editor, cinematic editor, etc etc)