more options for developer.
Interesting, but consider that Apple takes 30% of your sales I think… if that is 25% of the selling price that means that between Apple and Epic you do give away 55%. Then again, without UDK maybe the game you had in mind would have been different/sold less… I guess it all depends on what your game/goal is
The UDK license requires that you pay 25% of your TOTAL GROSS INCOME related to the game. Then in addition to Apple’s cut you also have to consider taxes. Chances are you’d make more money flipping burgers at McDonalds. 
Either way, this is pretty exciting news. Given that the kit is free to try out, there’s definitely no reason NOT to check it out.
Rather likely unhappily I would say unless you are a professional studio with a team large enough to unleash UDK and produce epic level visuals, cause thats the only chance to even hope to make the money required to let the ~25% share or so remaining for you (depending on which country you life in ie taxes) being large enough to walk in the “greens”
Already without handing over 25% to a middleware nearly all projects fail to make back their investments.
And yeah no reason not to check it out, on the other side we could have done so for over a year 
Also keep in mind that UDK does only support 3GS+, first two generations are totally cut
I started the thread first, cough
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/70748-Has-anyone-heard-of-this
This leaves you with 52.5% of the earnings before taxes (I have a calculator, and I’m not afraid to use it!), so typically about a third of the total earnings are left after all taxes and fees in my country. Or as is the case with low earnings, 52.5% while below $10000
So it’s not that bad, since most indies don’t sell a hell of a lot. Your sales will typically be low, but at least you keep more of the money!
UDK is only Free for educational or non-commercial use. It’s been like that a while.
cool I m waiting for next gen AAA puzzle game now ^^ made with UDK 
@orb - I think there’s a difference between an “indy” developer (single or small team) and a “hobbyist” developer (not relying on this as an income). They are by no means synonymous. For the hobbyist to give away nearly 50% of a game’s proceeds to royalties may not be a big deal, but for an indy it could very well be the difference between remaining in business or not.
But it doesn’t hurt to look at UDK. I’ve got it on my hard drive, looks pretty cool. If they relaxed their licensing I could even see trying it some time. But with the current royalty scheme its a “no go” as far as I’m concerned.
For those of us who already spent years in the Unreal Engine, it’s good news. I love the UDK art pipeline, I love how animations are handled and I like how Kismet works, creating shaders is awesome. The art pipeline is solid start to finish. You will see a ton of FPS clones saturate the AppStore, but UDK can do any kind of game. I hope the profiling that’s already with the app will work.
Just with Kismet alone you can make many kinds of games. No scripting needed. But scripting in UDK can be a nightmare, but possible for the beginner. And that’s where the good games will get separated from the bad.
I’m still using Unity for many of my projects, but some things will get made in UDK, royalties or not.
Yeah. Their offering is basically a good choice for people already invested in unreal and regarding those who aren´t, well, then its really just a good choice either if you expect your game not to sell at all or to sell such big numbers that it doesn´t hurt you to pay a big chunk to others, which kinda pretty much excludes the large majority of games which fall in between those two extremes.
I like to give each promising technology a try when i have a chance for it, but yeah, i find it kinda risky to expect every iOS game to sell gangbusters so that paying a large chunk to the middleware creator wouldn´t hurt me financially anymore.
UDK becomes an option if you have a concept you don’t know if it works out and don’t want to pay 5 figure for the team wide licensing as Unity on iOS does already with 4 members.
Anyone know how this thing is going to work in terms of development platform? UDK only runs on Windows doesn’t it? Most people are talking about this like it’s an “additional feature” that’s being added to the existing UDK, but that would put it on Windows right, where they won’t be able to produce an iOS app? Or are we expecting this to be a brand new package that only runs on Mac - kinda like the old Unity iPhone product?
Given the HW requirements the UDK editor has on windows, I have doubts its going to see any OSX light as such monsters aren’t sold that commonly (the “recommended” hw setup for UDK was not available till 2010 at all and costs in the range of $3000 at least)
As such I expect that it will likely generate an xcode project you copy over for compilation or generate a package thats processed on osx by a tool to generate such a project, like Shiva does it for example
@dreamora: Hm, couldn´t someone if he hasn´t bought any license at all in case of unity get the free desktop version and then the iOS base license and roll with that? Then if they see it fitting they could get more of these licenses or the pro versions, no?
All that said, i think there could be quite some license and pricing models changing going on there next year regarding various engines.
They could, but not if they don’t want to be sued to hell, cause teams of that size will definitely have a turnaround of more than $100k per year in which case you MUST upgrade to pro
Also you aren’t going to pull such a project with remote devs around the globe, so the licenses will commonly fall under a single legal entity
Also working on a team without VCS? That was a good joke. And that requires Pro + iOS Pro
@gepetto: yeah, the side whether UDK comes out on mac or they do some things to allow app creation without needing a mac at all is quite interesting.
A lot of middleware solutions like Unity went the “suggested” Apple way of creating an xcode project that requires a mac to built/deploy, whereas some others like Adobe with their flash exporter went the way of completely bypassing xcode and deploying an ipa directly.
First Apple blocked flash out of the game but then made the rules less strict again so yeah, now all bets are open =)
Definately interesting which option Epic goes for there regarding deploy of the game/app.
Flash though is still as illegal as it always was.
Apple can void your dev contract at any time if you use Flash cause you broke it (OSX and XCode usage are already a requirement by this, the ToS only messed with “what can you use to get to the point where you can compile it in xcode” and only the ToS were lifted again)
Apple just didn’t use this for their benefit so far.
@dreamora regarding licensing models: Hm, have you done the math on what turns out to be cheaper, udk and paying the share to epic when you make 100k or unity when you make 100k and pay for pro licenses?
Also that kinda comparison is moot anyway because with unity you´d pay for the licenses once and then only again once the next major version upgrade hits, whereas with udk it could be such a cut with every game you release (which is successful)