Forum Discussion
UE4 or UDK?
Question in brief: Should I switch to UE4 now, or should I wait until I have a working prototype in UDK and then switch? I definitely plan to switch at some point, but it's unlikely I'll have anything...
"falco" wrote:
I am seriously thinking on using UE4. Unity´s license is just too expensive.
If you're planning a commercial release and think you're likely to make (gross sales) more than about $30,000 (US) then Unity may work out cheaper in the long run, because they don't charge royalties. You assume all the risk by paying up-front though. It therefore only makes sense if you have a good expectation that you can generate sales significantly higher than that amount. Of course, that's for a single developer on desktop only: the break even point goes up significantly for teams and multi-platform projects. Of course it could be less if you go with the subscription model and can turn around a finished product insanely fast.
For me a 5% royalty isn't that much (to put it in perspective, Apple take 30% from the App Store) and it avoids having to pay a large up-front cost, apart from the monthly fee which is quite low anyway. If i had investors, a marketing budget and things like that then the up-front cost might not be significant in the overall production budget and well worth the potential increase in net revenue.
However, Unity is also a bit of a toy engine compared to UE4. The real killer feature of UE4 is full access to the source, so you can really do whatever you want, if it's within the bounds of possibility and you have the programming skill. As a programmer, this appeals to me; others may be scared of the complexity. No matter how good UDK, Unity or similar may be, there is always going to be a barrier that you can never escape, because you don't have the source code. Whether or not you actually hit that barrier, and how big of a problem it will be, depends on the game.