Why Unreal engine is expensive?

#1

Hi my friends,

I want to know what the differences are between" Unreal 2 engine" and other 3D engines like “Torque”,
? ( For professional game development ).
As they said Unreal engine will cost $7000-9000 for only engine without source code, and with source code is more than $ 350,000 ! While other 3D engine like Torque with its extra packages, plus source code will cost around $2000
at least 200 times less.

Is Unreal that much better, why?
Which features does make it that much powerful?

By the way, anyone know how much is " half life 2 " engine?

Best regards
Nima NF

#2

The price for the HL2 engine is not announced yet as far as I know, but as far as far as Unreal VS Torque, LOL, UNREAL kicks Torques ass from here to the north pole!
Unreal has better tools for everything you could think of, from shading, to
well whatever! If you are going to do this professionally like you said
( I guess your going to sell whatever it is that your making) save the extra money, and get Unreal! :cool:

#3

I have not seen the Unreal engine but in Torque’s defence it is a very capable package which can be seen from the software that is produced with it, its technology is not the most up to date but it does have very capable graphics output, excellent network code, a lot of supporting sub-systems, practical games application modules and a wide range of freedom to create a wide variety of applications.

If you are thinking of developing independant games with a tiny budget, Torque is certainly worth considering.

#4

The idea behind the Torque engine is like those IBM commercials on TV: “low margins, but we’ll make it up in volume!” For $100 sure the Torque engine would sell well and the developers would profit from it.

How many games have you heard announced that uses the Unreal engine? Not too many. How many eager amatuer game dev’ers have you come across? Too many. Well there you go.

And in spite of all this talk about games being pirated, the developers still make money from the game. The video games industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. There’s money out there, so these game houses can definitely afford the license cost. Console game developers have to pay a royalty to the console maker, PC game developers do not. There’s more to it than meets the eye. Torque and Unreal are both game engines, but are birds of a different feather.

#5

The Unreal Engine is more expensive than Torque because it’s much more robust and full featured.

If you’re serious about developing games, the features and toolsets that both support should make it very obvious as to why one is $100 and one is $350,000.

#6

two different engines for different type of projects
you dont buy one of those monster trucks either if you just intend to use the car to go to work 5 miles further every day
unreal is meant for the high end mass market and big publishers and companies and torque is for garage game like companies
unreal does has far better tools and support, official tutorialwebsites and other networks and regular updates + you even get extra things like ‘free’ private on site classes teaching you the engine + when you make a game it must still look good and way above average in 2 years when you release it so your engine must have a good base and potential to allow this
no serious game company buys torque and no normal hobbist or semi hobbyist buys unreal, not very comparable, its the same for quake/doom engine and hl2 engine (who are also in same price range btw, dont expect them to be sold for 10 000 or so)

“How many games have you heard announced that uses the Unreal engine? Not too many. How many eager amatuer game dev’ers have you come across? Too many. Well there you go.”
+70 covering a public of tens of millions where as the only torque game i know is tribes let alone that it would cover the same size of public
point is its just not comparable, it depends on your situation as developer or publisher rather than “Which one is better”

#7

So, a new company with a team of professional programmers and artists but new in game industry ( and of course really Serious not for hobby ), for revenue (I can say for all of sells) between $400,000 and $800,000, to raise funds for the next project that is very bigger and better, what will they do, or what should they do?

For that purpose, at first they should make a new engine themselves?!

Any comments

#8

They do what any new startup would do: take out a loan.

#9

If the unreal engine is too expensive for you, and you want the power of the latest technology for your game without costing several furtunes, check this out:

www.artificialstudios.com

#10

if i were them i would pick an in between engine then, something in between the 2 discussed here…
i dont know how expensive far cry engine is, might be more affordable

or ofcourse as said get a loan or try to use your first succes to get publishers and investors to pay for you cause you wont be able to do it on your own, in such case more expensive stuff as unreal is a possible option
800k seems alot but not if you start to pay everything of it yourself…engine alone would already take half the ammount, now substract whatever taxes, rent * 18, pc, other software, x number of salaries * 18 months = …

i dont really believe in this “lets make engine ourself” stuff anymore, those selfmade engines usualy not only take more time and investment and you are also less sure of what youll get at the end, but they are also less userfriendly for the artists most of the times
if we take unreal for example, everything is previewed realtime in editor, all light, particles, etc.
that greatly speeds up workspeed
engines also get more and more complex, its also just not that easy to make anymore…

#11

If 3 programmers and 7 artists ( professional but new in game industry) tell you they will work for 2 years with only $7000 per year plus only 1 or 2 % of all revenue each one (all together less than 20% of revenue), then what will you do ? , is it a top chance?
(As they are professional but are new in game industry, and some of them may have some personal / in-house experiences in game development)…

You should know for some reasons it is not a ‘dream’ for us here?
What do you think about that?

thanks in advance

#12

depends. i’ve worked both on projects were in one case we licensed unreal engine 2, in the others in house technology was/is being used. i can only say that the latter feels far better. if problems arise, programmers fix them and that’s about it.

with a licensed technology, fixing is not so easy, especially when the engine thing is as huge, old and grown over the years as unreal is. understanding other peoples source code can be a difficult task even for experienced programmers.
sometimes you cannot even fix yourself but have to wait for a new release or even longer. determining the quality of builds is another story if you don’t fully understand the engine.

yes, with inhouse tools you don’t have the most fancy editor interface in the world. however, our tools do not take ages to load and are small, to the point and reliable.
something i cannot say for some popular engine toolset’s i’ve had to use in the past.

biggest pro for developing your own tools is probably that you can fit the technology exactly to YOUR needs. as said, even if you have the source code to your licensed engine, it might become very difficult if not impossible to implement drastic changes. and not for every project something like unreal would fit like a glove.

#13

Is that American currancy? (I’m not making a wise crack, other countries use the $ sign to, they also suffix it with the currancy abbreviation)

I don’t know about you but $7000 per year is what I spend on groceries alone, and you plan on having just $7000 a year budget for 2 years to work on a game? Let me guess, the game development is a part time gig, the 10 of you still keep your day jobs?

Look I’m sorry. There’s no way I can say this without sounding like a condescending jerk, just please understand that I’m not out to be a condescending jerk and go poo-poo on your plans. But let me just illustrate something for you.

So with $7000 a year budget, 10 people are working on a game. By the sound of it, it really seems like you guys are doing the game development part time while still doing your day jobs. Where is this $7k figure coming from? Is it money out of your pockets? Is this a mutual investment? Are you now or planning to create a formal “company” as in an entity the government recognizes and one that pays taxes to the government? Once you do that then you have to setup a bussiness account. That means money you put in there is for business purposes only, and if you go and put personal funds into the pool, things will get hairy for your book keeper.

My g/f took out a loan to open her own bagel shop. When she buys supplies, anything from dish washer soap to toilet paper, that has to come out of the business account, the receipt is filed away etc. What I’m saying is: she could not use her company checkbook to buy her own personal groceries. She should not use money out of her pocket to pay for supplies used at her store - even if she’s already at the supermarket picking up stuff for herself.

Now even if you just wanted to get some people together, find money to fund your project, then sell the game as shareware over the Internet, if you make a certain amount of money off of those sales you’re going to have to claim it in your income taxes. If you setup a business and conduct the sales formally, the business pays some taxes. When you collect your salary from this business you have to pay income taxes. If you just pocket the money from sales you still have to pay income taxes, but it get tricky here because you have to specify where that income came from. So where did it come from? I don’t know all the answers to these things because I’ve never done it before. But a game dev “company” is still just the same as any other company and I’ve seen the inner workings pretty up close and personal.

#14

if its your personal money youre putting in please reconsider…really
if you “just have” that much money, and you want to work for 7k then go for it your decision you know but i wouldnt join such company or team for sure, i wouldnt really call it a golden opportunity, if you really want to work in the game industry you are likely better off if you practice more on your own and then join an excisting and proven company…i may sound negative and you may really believe in your project but i saw a lot of these things, i almost was in one of those type of projects myself and it never really worked out…
looking at your 7k i certainly wouldnt go for unreal engine or something equivalent, you better keep the money for other things…
i would just buy torque then or something along those lines, far cry is maybe more payable, serious sam engine maybe, or that other engine that someone mentioned here, enough possible you know
you could even try to find a freeware engine and update it a lot tho that may turn out bad :slight_smile:

GIJoe, i also worked with both in house engines as unreal engine and i also say the latter is best, so means unreal engine :slight_smile:
I just have very bad experiences with lesser engines and in house engines myself, really bad to work with. Your text makes me assume you are a coder or scripter or something along those lines and not a graphics artist ? Maybe its different for a coder but for an artist these in house engines are hell most of the times
On my last project we had several problems, one of the most frustrating things for me was that I couldnt place a light in my room without spending 2 days + 3 people on it…i couldnt even preview my light in my room without letting maya render the area which also didnt gave a comparable result, getting the light actualy in the game was even worse and was absolutely untweakable. It was a “do once then never touch the level again” type of working and that is so extremely utterly horrible when you make a level and you want cool, bugless and balanced lighting…its also horrible demotivating and also horrible for letting people experiment with things and see if they can come up with something cool. It takes so utterly long that no one tries…
Everything also loaded very slowly, crashed a lot and to do a simple testplay you had to wait 15 to 30 min+ sometimes just to convert your stuff to the engine and do a simple testplay…
At the end we were 4 days over our deadline, not too bad, but some people did work trough the weekends and you know why ? To do the last thing in the game, and that last thing was…lighting…
if the game was made with the unreal engine I could have done the lighting about 4000 percent faster (the 4000 was -not- an overstatement) and also fixed all the horrible black faces from corrupted lightmaps we have now…
just a small example of an artist pov, same goes for particles and shaders and the like, they must all be realtime previewable or it is not workable and i havent saw a lot of lesser/in house engines that have significant preview support…
stone age methods…game graphics are art, and art you dont guess about, you dont go guessing “maybe if i place a light here it might look ok when we render this in 2 weeks”

you do have a point about in house engines being simpler to fix when something goes wrong and that you can better adapt it to your game but on the other hand its only easier for the engine coders themself and not for the other people in the team
say you license some big engine like unreal/quake/half life, you could then hire specialised unreal/quake/hl people instead of learning everyone an engine under construction
you could hire people who know exactly where to find things and know exactly how to get a good workflow and that is a big plus
another thing i dont really like is that with an in house engine you dont have a base to work with. everything must be created from scratch and certainly in the beginning you miss a lot of tools and you have to adapt to new tools and workmethods all the time…

#15

i’m not a technical artist at the moment, in fact pretty much specialized on doing characters, but atleast i do not fear the command line, programming, scripting or unix-like environments :wink:

i did sign an unreal-related nda so i cannot give details specific to that engine but my overall experience with licensed technology is pretty bad. so often i had circumstances where simple problems could not be addressed in time because the coders were unable to navigate in the code. trying to analyse someone elses code can be a real pain and takes a lot of time.
maybe there are specialized coders for popular technology like unreal, quake and the like nowadays to help ease the pain. otherwise you can only rely on the developer of that technology and the level of support divers greatly in my experience.

of course inhouse tools are not a godsend by default, you’ll need a bunch of talented lad’s to create them - and invest a lot of time into making them usable but in the end i feel it’s worth it. maybe that impression is also based on the differrent company structures i’ve worked it. with licensed technology we usually had many artists, rather few coders and lots of problems that could not be adressed properly; in the current studio there are comparably lots of very capable (engine) coders and rather few artists and problems simply get solved. :wink:

#16

First of all, forget the money. The money is not the issue. The issue is what do you need to do? What are the requirements of your project? Then take a look at all the engines you can that will fulfill the need of your project. Once you have narrowed it down to only those engines that will fulfill your project’s needs, then you start to look seriously at those engines (requesting demos, asking questions of the developers, etc). Then, once you have it down to a few you look at the prices and go from there.

Unreal2 may be an overkill for what you need to do. Torque could also be an overkill, once again, depending on what you need to do. As an example (and only for an example) if you needed to do something similar to a 2D side scroller, then neither engine is exactly what you want. So, you need to ask yourself key questions. Do I need to the source code? Do I need the latest and greatest graphical effects (normal maps, etc)? Do I need multi-player? If so, how many players do I expect to have online at a time (i.e. how much does the multi-player engine have to handle and what does it have to handle)? What is the target platform for my project (PC only, MAC and PC, XBOX, all of the above)? Etc.

Answering these and other questions will rule out an entire set of engines and help you narrow it down to something that should work well for you.

#17

You plan on having just $7000 a year budget for 2 years to work on a game?
Let me guess, the game development is a part time gig, the 10 of you still keep your day jobs?
Are you planning to create a formal “company” as in an entity the government recognizes and one that pays taxes to the government?

We are not American so I converted prices to American dollar to understand, and it means 10 x 2 x 7000 = $140,000 (+ %20 of revenue), and it is Not part time job they will work full-time. (As I said it is very hard to believe for you and most of people), and plus $100,000 for computers and other needs to make a formal company.
By the way, the real salary is much less than your salary (about 6 times less), and instead we could Not hire specialized Unreal / quake / HL people like you, just some professional artists and programmers.
So if you wouldn’t really call it golden opportunities, many professionals in my country because of their little salary call it.

Another thing is about ‘taxes’ that here is an opportunity for us, our government gives us a great opportunity to make computer softwares (include games) with a bit taxes (I can say No income taxes, yeah its True), just please don’t ask me "where or why “.

Now with all above conditions I think you can understand why I’m really interested as No one can forget this opportunity with our little salary of people and chances that government gives us while you are lover of computer graphics and technology.

Thank you guys for your information about in house and licensed engines, they all open our eyes, and I appreciate it.
Best regards

#18

Oh well that changes a lot, we’re not in the same country. Heh I never thought of that. Most of the stuff I said won’t apply to you as I don’t know what country you’re in (and you seem unwilling to tell which is fine).

Look I wasn’t trying to put you down are anything. Apparently we just live by different rules. Best wishes to you and your team any ways.

#19

you might wanna check out devmaster.net/engines for a nice list of 3d engines :slight_smile:

#20

if you have a few dedicated programmers you should be able to write your own engine,

taking someones elses engine and making it do something else is difficult and usually causes many unforseen problems.

Yes it takes a much long dev time for your own engine but you are way better off with your own. In my experience every time I ve worked on a project or my friends have told me about past projects where they ve worked with an existing engine is hell and insanely painfull.

If you re confident an existing engine can do everything you need it too then it might be the right option for you. But I ll say this, nothing is ever as easy as it looks like it will be, specailly with someone elses code

I would never recommend taking out a loan for a startup, not all start ups do, infact many that do either fail and have a huge debt or barely make it by with a huge debt.

This is one of the biggest killers of start ups

quote “And in spite of all this talk about games being pirated, the developers still make money from the game. The video games industry is a multi-billion dollar industry.”

heh, I beg to differ, yeah alot of money is being made, and alot of money is out there up for grabs, but the amount of games made that make absolutely no money at all is insane

quote “i dont really believe in this “lets make engine ourself” stuff anymore, those selfmade engines usualy not only take more time and investment and you are also less sure of what youll get at the end, but they are also less userfriendly for the artists most of the times”

when your own programmers make it then its made to exactly what you need and should be taylored to your artists specific needs and prefernces, if not, your programmers arent doing their job very well

Existing engines are great if you never step outside what they are made to do, as soon as you step out of that, even a tiny bit, it can be painful. And keep in mind things will pop up further along in dev that you never could have anticipated