Seems like a fair move to me. If Hollywood studios like Disney are able to use it for free right now to save time and money producing shows and movies why shouldn’t Epic get a fair fee for the product that enables those savings?
I suspect that Unreal 5 is going to make Epic so much money in the coming years. Taking 5% after the first million dollars doesn’t seem like a lot until you remember that the next Witcher and Cyberpunk are both Unreal 5 developments.
The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn’t bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I’d be thrilled if that happened).
Unity gave them a fantastic opportunity here, they now have an excuse to raise their prices as well and still look like the good guy by doing it somewhat reasonably
I’m pretty sure Unity showed, quite clearly, that a bait and switch is a bad idea. Plus, Unreal is going after big titles. You don’t fuck with companies that make big titles.
Unity was too greedy at once. It tried to make devs pay retroactively. Unreal just needs to not do that and can still be greedy. Who’s to say they won’t do incremental pay increases over a few years to make devs more accustomed to price increases?
Difference is that Unity was generally favorable, until the recent blunders, while Epic has generally been disliked for quite a long time now, because of Tim acting like a complete cunt to a lot of people on the industry, including the consumers for his own products
It’s not. It’s miserable to actually use. It’s miserable to manage in a production setting. It’s just not acceptable unless you’re working for yourself.
I’d recommend Photopea for casual use that’s not miserable to use. It’s in browser only and is basically a photoshop clone with slightly less features, but it’s amazingly close to Photoshop when I need it to be, even with things like using a pen or a really specific option menu.
It does generate it’s revenue via banner ads but I’ve never seen them with my adblock, if I’m needing to quickly whip something up and utilise my Photoshop familiarity, it’s my go to.
Yeah…no. It’s objectively worse in many ways. Student on a budget? Hobbyist? Gimp will get the job done…but then again so will Pixlr 99% of the time. It’s gotta get a whole lot better before production houses seriously consider switching.
Gimp was competition for Photoshop some 25 years ago. Photoshop has improved a lot since those days, Gimp hasn’t. Gimp isn’t even the best graphics app in the Free Software space anymore.
I have used gimp over the past about 15 years, photoshop & Corel suite past 10 & 4 years ago as well. Gimp is not photoshop anyone who has used it, understands that it’s a different product and frankly it does not matter. It’s very capable where it matters and the net result is it costs nothing. No rent charging for nice but not necessary features for myself.
Workflow just wasn’t as good, it didn’t have a lot of the little features (search was definitely not as nice to use), and as a Nikon shooter back then, it never nailed the Nikon colours the way I wanted without very heavy post-processing, which was time I didn’t want to spend.
Paying forever is not a better deal than paying the price of a few months of use and then having it for years. Maybe a business can justify that, but for a hobby? No way.
Maybe a business can justify that, but for a hobby? No way.
Hobbyists CAN and DO get the $10/mo plan. It’s cheaper than most streaming services and if it’s a part of your workflow (as a hobby photographer, for example) then $10/month for a constantly updated software is a good deal.
Like if you don’t value photoshop at $10/month that’s okay but A LOT of people do.
Paying forever is not a better deal
I just ran into the not forever issue when I had to re-buy Affinity photo to get the newest version.
No, it’s still US$10 for me for both. I wonder if it’s a regional thing, or Adobe are being sneaky bastards and hiding the cheaper version of the plan somewhere.
Because it’s aimed at photographers who raised a huge stink in the first place (I was one of them).
You don’t have to use it in the cloud too, all my camera photos are sitting in my drives, none of them have been uploaded to Adobe’s servers.
PS and LR at this price is cheaper than the perpetual licenses if I upgraded every other cycle, so it’s been cheaper for me. Of course there’s still cheaper alternatives for PS now (Affinity Photo is really good), but since I still use LR a lot and the cost is bearable, I stay on it.
Yeh, I use 4 applications from Adobe in very limited amounts. I wish they did a pay as you use subscription! If you use them all every day it’s cheap, but I maybe use them about 10-15 hours per month at the most.
Traditional I would be working on a freelance basis with companies and teams that would only use adobe, and wanted files in those formats. Though as I’m doing more and more of work just for myself the alternatives are getting more tempting.
No. Previously if you used unreal but didn’t ship any engine code to end users you didn’t have to pay anything (games obviously ship engine code, so they’re already paying once they pass a certain revenue threshold or upfront if they want a support contract, and the announced pricing changes explicitly don’t effect games)
Unreal has been pushing hard into film and virtual production workloads, but they weren’t getting paid anything due to the existing license terms.
Now if eg. you’re using a virtual set (like the Mandalorian) or doing in camera previs (basically previewing approximately what a scene will look like with CGI, either between takes or even viewing it live on a second monitor attached to the camera as you film) with unreal you’ll have to actually pay.
cool, then it’s 20% of your “games” revenue if you want to do that.
Epic generally let companies self report, when using the engine you have to agree to allowing them to audit if they think your self-reporting is incorrect but that’s not a very usual situation
Yeah a game engine saving a studio hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per episode on lighting, comp, rendering, and set building or travel costs to shoot on location is not representative of the license fee paid
This bit got me: Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
…Did you not see this coming?
Have you really not had a plan for when Fortnite started to lose momentum? I get that having a product blow up will leaf to a period of manic spending because your cash flow suddenly feels infinite, but come on.
You’re not a small player in this, Epic. You’ve been around since the 90s. You know better than to mindlessly ride the wave of a success.
Of course the Fortnite money was going to run out. That’s why you invested so heavily in UE5, right?.. Right?
Fucking idiots. I swear, i dont know why we place CEOs and richer folks, in general, on a pedestal so much. Minecraft has longevity because its basically digital legos. Fortnite is a FPS with buildable aspects.FPSes come and go with the winds.
People have this tendency to associate wealth with knowledge, or business savvy. For many companies, it’s just a matter of “creative accounting” coupled with a psychopath CEO and lucking out. Epic lucked out with Fortnite Battle Royale, don’t forget their original “save world” was a total flop as a paid product
Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!
Not to mention the amount of money they literally burn through EGS. If I remember correctly, the plan was that it wouldn’t be profitable for another 3/4 years (by 2027).
As recession looms, you have general inflation and increased interest rates. This affects overhead and loan repayments. That and probably other factors all contribute to the need to raise prices.
It’s not just the gaming sector. Almost all other sectors are raising their prices or adjusting their service plans. Eg. shrinkflation and/or lower quality on products and services.
Probably because most devs stopped making their own proprietary engines, so the supply for solid engines is at an all time low. With less options they can crank up the price, as there aren’t really any other options for most devs.
There are a lot of game engines out there. Godot is a good engine if you’re jumping from Unity because it’s a lot more similar to Unity than some other engines and they both can use C#.
Most devs never would have made their own proprietary engines. With ready availability of engines to use, the number of developers skyrocketed as it lowered the bar of who can make a game.
This is particularly for people using the engine to write film rending software which gets bought one for a lot of money but low volume, and gets used as a huge cost savings for mid-high end production that can save on lighting and comp passes or even render time.
High volume software(games) probably won’t change much at all.
Because China is increasingly looking broke, so daddy Tencent’s purse is tightening.
On top of that, the world’s banks now have interest rates to look after again, so their free money streams have ended too. Meaning that companies have to prove their profitability.
But the rich want to keep their free money train going, so we’re all paying now.
Tim Sweeney alone owns 50% of the company, he can pretty much make his own decisions independently from Tencent. Also China is slowly catching up to the US’s GDP with way less government debt, what are you talking about?
The most current projections is China will never catch up to US GDP. Just for posterity, China GDP per capita is under $14k, while US is above $80k. There is no conceivable path to closing this gap. Not with an authoritarian in charge who shuts down entire industries on a whim and murders political rivals who disagree with him.
Or taking advantage of that happenning with the competition, to enhance profitability.
Make money is the point of pretty much all companies, and financially there are only 2 thinks stopping them from upping their prices:
If there is competition it will lead to losing customers (though thinks like branding subvert this quite a bit) which means the money they make with higher prices might actually be less.
If prices get too high people will choose the “do without” option.
Anyways, the point being that if there is a broader shift in pricing in the market, even companies that are not under the same financial pressures to up prices will still do it as the 1st of those price limitation is relaxed so they can make more money.
Because like all the tech industry, they grew massively on the back of low interest rates since 2008 where investors saw better returns putting money into companies than sitting on it, now the interest rates have shot up again post Covid, they need to show their investors they can make better returns than the 5%+ they’d make just leaving the money in the bank. Hence the cost cutting by sacking staff and gouging of customers by price increases.
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Seems like a fair move to me. If Hollywood studios like Disney are able to use it for free right now to save time and money producing shows and movies why shouldn’t Epic get a fair fee for the product that enables those savings?
I suspect that Unreal 5 is going to make Epic so much money in the coming years. Taking 5% after the first million dollars doesn’t seem like a lot until you remember that the next Witcher and Cyberpunk are both Unreal 5 developments.
The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn’t bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I’d be thrilled if that happened).
Cyberpunk made a million dollars?
That’s sarcasm, right?
I love that you get me.
Many, many millions of dollars.
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/03/31/cd-projekt-2022-report-revenue-cyberpunk-2077-profit
$116,000,000
Altering the deal eh, at least they take smaller steps.
Unity gave them a fantastic opportunity here, they now have an excuse to raise their prices as well and still look like the good guy by doing it somewhat reasonably
The article states that Epic intends to keep the game dev pricing unchanged. Free up front, then 5% after the first million dollars in sales.
For now yeah, its a lot easier to pull this shit incrimentally
I’m pretty sure Unity showed, quite clearly, that a bait and switch is a bad idea. Plus, Unreal is going after big titles. You don’t fuck with companies that make big titles.
Unity was too greedy at once. It tried to make devs pay retroactively. Unreal just needs to not do that and can still be greedy. Who’s to say they won’t do incremental pay increases over a few years to make devs more accustomed to price increases?
Difference is that Unity was generally favorable, until the recent blunders, while Epic has generally been disliked for quite a long time now, because of Tim acting like a complete cunt to a lot of people on the industry, including the consumers for his own products
But… photoshop is very expensive
Gimp
This is the way
I would rather stab myself in the eyeballs than use GIMP. It’s never the way and never will be.
It’s not. It’s miserable to actually use. It’s miserable to manage in a production setting. It’s just not acceptable unless you’re working for yourself.
I’d recommend Photopea for casual use that’s not miserable to use. It’s in browser only and is basically a photoshop clone with slightly less features, but it’s amazingly close to Photoshop when I need it to be, even with things like using a pen or a really specific option menu.
It does generate it’s revenue via banner ads but I’ve never seen them with my adblock, if I’m needing to quickly whip something up and utilise my Photoshop familiarity, it’s my go to.
I use Photopea too for basic editing, but it certainly wouldn’t be good in a professional environment.
Do whatever you want on your own time 🙂
“oh no I have to learn something new 😭😭😭😭”
It’s easy, real easy in a production setting. Different is not hard.
Publishing to other formats and opening more formats are an absolute strength!
Yeah…no. It’s objectively worse in many ways. Student on a budget? Hobbyist? Gimp will get the job done…but then again so will Pixlr 99% of the time. It’s gotta get a whole lot better before production houses seriously consider switching.
I’d also like to add Photopea to the list. Gimp has plenty of competition that have pulled themselves up in a shorter amount of time.
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Bud you’re flat out wrong here.
Gimp was competition for Photoshop some 25 years ago. Photoshop has improved a lot since those days, Gimp hasn’t. Gimp isn’t even the best graphics app in the Free Software space anymore.
I have used gimp over the past about 15 years, photoshop & Corel suite past 10 & 4 years ago as well. Gimp is not photoshop anyone who has used it, understands that it’s a different product and frankly it does not matter. It’s very capable where it matters and the net result is it costs nothing. No rent charging for nice but not necessary features for myself.
It could be worse. They could have looked towards Autodesk for inspiration.
They did, tim epic just said in the article they looked to service like Photoshop and Maya
I mean I hate Adobe as much as the next guy but photoshop is like $10/month
Affinity Photo is $60 once and you own it forever, with free updates. It’s pretty much the only actually good Photoshop replacement.
Photopea is free and in browser as well
Being a browser app is not a plus imo. I’ll take a snappy native app over easy portability every day.
Yep I use and love affinity photo. It works well for my needs.
They need to do a LR replacement, then I’ll just switch to Affinity.
Darktable is an excellent replacement
I’ll try it again, but several years ago when I tried it I didn’t find it as good.
There have been a few changes, but it is mostly the same I think.
Out of interest, what wasn’t as good?
Workflow just wasn’t as good, it didn’t have a lot of the little features (search was definitely not as nice to use), and as a Nikon shooter back then, it never nailed the Nikon colours the way I wanted without very heavy post-processing, which was time I didn’t want to spend.
GIMP is free and also doubles as a way to express just how much I hate myself!
Free minor updates. And if you buy it a month before a major version update, you get nothing. Ask me how I know :/.
🏴☠️
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Americans will talk of $10 a month like it’s chump change. It’s more expensive than my water bill.
Now add every other tool that decides to take the same approach.
$10 is also more expensive than my water bill in the US*. I purposely have as few subscriptions as possible.
*other utility bills are higher though, like sewer capacity, which is $17/mo.
If you’re using photoshop in a business or hobby capacity, $10/month is a fairly good deal.
I personally use Affinity Photo but I’m not going to pretend that it has feature parity with photoshop.
Paying forever is not a better deal than paying the price of a few months of use and then having it for years. Maybe a business can justify that, but for a hobby? No way.
Hobbyists CAN and DO get the $10/mo plan. It’s cheaper than most streaming services and if it’s a part of your workflow (as a hobby photographer, for example) then $10/month for a constantly updated software is a good deal.
Like if you don’t value photoshop at $10/month that’s okay but A LOT of people do.
I just ran into the not forever issue when I had to re-buy Affinity photo to get the newest version.
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Photography plan should still be US$10 for both PS and LR.
That’s not what I see.
Look harder
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Ah, I see, you’re on “All”, on the left tab. Hit the “Photo” and you should see it. They’re really hiding the cheaper option now!
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No, it’s still US$10 for me for both. I wonder if it’s a regional thing, or Adobe are being sneaky bastards and hiding the cheaper version of the plan somewhere.
It’s 100% regional. After you mentioned it, I dug this up:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18526985/adobe-creative-cloud-lightroom-photoshop-plan-price-hike
It will eventually come to everyone.
I think they were saying $10 per software.
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Eh, would you prefer that to be US$20 each instead? Why are you ideologically opposed to something when there are benefits?
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Because it’s aimed at photographers who raised a huge stink in the first place (I was one of them).
You don’t have to use it in the cloud too, all my camera photos are sitting in my drives, none of them have been uploaded to Adobe’s servers.
PS and LR at this price is cheaper than the perpetual licenses if I upgraded every other cycle, so it’s been cheaper for me. Of course there’s still cheaper alternatives for PS now (Affinity Photo is really good), but since I still use LR a lot and the cost is bearable, I stay on it.
I have the $10 plan.
Yeh, I use 4 applications from Adobe in very limited amounts. I wish they did a pay as you use subscription! If you use them all every day it’s cheap, but I maybe use them about 10-15 hours per month at the most.
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Traditional I would be working on a freelance basis with companies and teams that would only use adobe, and wanted files in those formats. Though as I’m doing more and more of work just for myself the alternatives are getting more tempting.
… Are they trying to pull a Unity?
Doesn’t appear so, it seems pretty minor and doesn’t retroactively fuck people over.
No. Previously if you used unreal but didn’t ship any engine code to end users you didn’t have to pay anything (games obviously ship engine code, so they’re already paying once they pass a certain revenue threshold or upfront if they want a support contract, and the announced pricing changes explicitly don’t effect games)
Unreal has been pushing hard into film and virtual production workloads, but they weren’t getting paid anything due to the existing license terms.
Now if eg. you’re using a virtual set (like the Mandalorian) or doing in camera previs (basically previewing approximately what a scene will look like with CGI, either between takes or even viewing it live on a second monitor attached to the camera as you film) with unreal you’ll have to actually pay.
I wish Lemmy didn’t downvote people asking genuine questions. Not everyone is in the loop of what’s going on at all times, folks.
how do they even figure out what the developers are building tho?
like i can make “interactive movie” with unreal and still call it a game right
cool, then it’s 20% of your “games” revenue if you want to do that.
Epic generally let companies self report, when using the engine you have to agree to allowing them to audit if they think your self-reporting is incorrect but that’s not a very usual situation
Unreal is being used extensively by special effects teams in Hollywood at the moment so it sounds like Epic are trying to get a piece of that action
Non games meaning movies and TV shows that use Unreal Engine. IIRC, The Mandalorian uses UE for a bunch of stuff.
Yeah a game engine saving a studio hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per episode on lighting, comp, rendering, and set building or travel costs to shoot on location is not representative of the license fee paid
Deadmau5 uses it for his visual effects for concerts. Guy streams his work in it all the time
Not at all surprised.
This bit got me: Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
…Did you not see this coming? Have you really not had a plan for when Fortnite started to lose momentum? I get that having a product blow up will leaf to a period of manic spending because your cash flow suddenly feels infinite, but come on. You’re not a small player in this, Epic. You’ve been around since the 90s. You know better than to mindlessly ride the wave of a success.
Of course the Fortnite money was going to run out. That’s why you invested so heavily in UE5, right?.. Right?
Unironically, no. They really thought Fortnite was going to be the new Minecraft and compete with Netflix/Disney for time and attention.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/fortnite-ceo-isnt-worried-competing-netflix-touts-game-store-plans-1196050/
Fucking idiots. I swear, i dont know why we place CEOs and richer folks, in general, on a pedestal so much. Minecraft has longevity because its basically digital legos. Fortnite is a FPS with buildable aspects.FPSes come and go with the winds.
People have this tendency to associate wealth with knowledge, or business savvy. For many companies, it’s just a matter of “creative accounting” coupled with a psychopath CEO and lucking out. Epic lucked out with Fortnite Battle Royale, don’t forget their original “save world” was a total flop as a paid product
Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
They started shilling for Shell to extend that income a little bit more as well.
But wootz! Don’t you see! Fortnite was making inroads into the metaverse, and we all know that whoever cracks the metaverse concept is going to reap infinite profits right? Because that’s certainly not a weird dystopian sci-fi pipe dream or anything! It was going to be all smooth sailing straight into forever profits!
At least they got a touch closer than most, hosting virtual concerts etc. Just… No-one I know went to one.
Surelly there are infinite virtual profits to be had in virtual universes!
Few understand.
Not to mention the amount of money they literally burn through EGS. If I remember correctly, the plan was that it wouldn’t be profitable for another 3/4 years (by 2027).
Why do game engine producers feel the need to increase prices so much currently?
As recession looms, you have general inflation and increased interest rates. This affects overhead and loan repayments. That and probably other factors all contribute to the need to raise prices.
It’s not just the gaming sector. Almost all other sectors are raising their prices or adjusting their service plans. Eg. shrinkflation and/or lower quality on products and services.
capitalism
Capitalism is becoming unbearable. People are getting squeezed from every side.
Probably because most devs stopped making their own proprietary engines, so the supply for solid engines is at an all time low. With less options they can crank up the price, as there aren’t really any other options for most devs.
Haha Godot go brrrrrrr
It’s great that Godot is growing
But if it would have been pretty funny if it was vaporware
Hopefully Godot is the first of many
There are a lot of game engines out there. Godot is a good engine if you’re jumping from Unity because it’s a lot more similar to Unity than some other engines and they both can use C#.
Most devs never would have made their own proprietary engines. With ready availability of engines to use, the number of developers skyrocketed as it lowered the bar of who can make a game.
If anything, in this case it seems like a loophole they’re closing more than a price increase.
Why should Hollywood studios making billions get to use Unreal Engine for free, being subsidized by gamers?
This is particularly for people using the engine to write film rending software which gets bought one for a lot of money but low volume, and gets used as a huge cost savings for mid-high end production that can save on lighting and comp passes or even render time.
High volume software(games) probably won’t change much at all.
Or at least that’s what SHOULD be happening.
Because China is increasingly looking broke, so daddy Tencent’s purse is tightening.
On top of that, the world’s banks now have interest rates to look after again, so their free money streams have ended too. Meaning that companies have to prove their profitability.
But the rich want to keep their free money train going, so we’re all paying now.
Tim Sweeney alone owns 50% of the company, he can pretty much make his own decisions independently from Tencent. Also China is slowly catching up to the US’s GDP with way less government debt, what are you talking about?
The most current projections is China will never catch up to US GDP. Just for posterity, China GDP per capita is under $14k, while US is above $80k. There is no conceivable path to closing this gap. Not with an authoritarian in charge who shuts down entire industries on a whim and murders political rivals who disagree with him.
US’s debt to GDP ratio has decreased by 13% since 2019. To 77%.
China’s real debt to GDP ratio is estimated to be 335%. (Via the IIF via the SCMP)
Two different things the 335 includes non-government debt like personal mortgages and corporate debt, 77 is federal treasury bonds only.
Same reason everyone else is pivoting to profitability. Interest rates and loan servicing.
Or taking advantage of that happenning with the competition, to enhance profitability.
Make money is the point of pretty much all companies, and financially there are only 2 thinks stopping them from upping their prices:
Anyways, the point being that if there is a broader shift in pricing in the market, even companies that are not under the same financial pressures to up prices will still do it as the 1st of those price limitation is relaxed so they can make more money.
Everyone wants to be part of the " big squeeze " that’s going on.
Because like all the tech industry, they grew massively on the back of low interest rates since 2008 where investors saw better returns putting money into companies than sitting on it, now the interest rates have shot up again post Covid, they need to show their investors they can make better returns than the 5%+ they’d make just leaving the money in the bank. Hence the cost cutting by sacking staff and gouging of customers by price increases.
I misinterpreted the headline and expected a joke article about Epic charging developers who don’t use Unreal.
So they’re gonna start sending me bills until I make a game? They can’t do that! I’m too young to be a developer! Nooooooooo!
Are you a Hollywood film studio?
Did you read the article?
Are you incapable of understanding humor?
Did your funny bone break?