What's up with Unreal Engine licensing?

by Vladimir Cole { Oct 18th 2005 at 9:30AM }

Unreal Engine 3 With their new licensing arrangement of FaceFX technology from OC3 Entertainment, Epic Games (the developers behind upcoming Xbox 360 title Gears of War and the Unreal Tournament series of games) are one step closer to cobbling together the ultimate middleware engine for game developers who want to spend more of their time creating games and less time reinventing the wheel.

Licensing fees for Unreal Engine 2 range from $350,000 plus royalties to a flat $750,000 (royalty-free). The company has inked more than a dozen licensing agreements in 2005 alone. This explains why Epic never wastes an opportunity to pimp the Unreal Engine, even when they were in the midst of demoing Gears of War for us last month at the Tokyo Game Show. To an extent, Gears of War is just a tech demo to prove the viability of Unreal Engine 3 for next-gen development. It'll be an impressive game, no doubt, but perhaps mostly because it needs to be impressive to drive licensing revenues.

Why does this matter to you and me? Well, for one, good middleware can keep development costs of next-gen titles in check. It can also shorten project durations because companies who use solid middleware theoretically have to spend less time and money to create games. That means more fun. That's the theory anyways. In practice, a development team still needs to execute. Duke Nukem ~~Never~~ Forever has licensed the Unreal Engine, but still appears to be nowhere near launch.

[Thanks, JamesO]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jason E. Rist @ Dec 18th 2005 9:05PM

How easy is it to build a game with the engine and the tools that are provided with a license agreement? Is it easy enough to justify spending $750k?

P.S. That is seriously a scary picture.

Art Guy @ Dec 18th 2005 9:05PM

Making games that look as good as GOW is very expensive, the artwork alone is leagues more complicated than the ps1-ps2 shift. Until the user base is built up you wont see many games that look this good, it just costs way too much to risk the expense.

Jago @ Dec 18th 2005 9:05PM

Well duh...its called "next gen" for a reason. The Xbox can't even do stuff like this...the first couple launch titles are always gonna be just tech demos to show off what the system can do.

Senbei @ Dec 18th 2005 9:05PM

Jason: It's still quite hard to build a game once you have an engine. The engine gives you a selection of technical solutions that can be used to build the game, but the building itself, adding custom AI, etc, is still a long process. That being said, if you say that a good engineer makes an average of $75K a year, then the $750K corresponds to 10 engineer working on an engine for a year. And it's highly doubtful that you would get anything close to the suite of tools that Unreal gives you with only 1 year and 10 people. So yes, it's quite easy to justify the $750K! Of course that's not true if you already have an engine that can handle next-gen stuff.

Jeff @ Dec 18th 2005 9:05PM

Well if you know a game is going to sell at the very least 750,000 copies, than only 1 dollar out of the first 750k copies sold goes to paying for the engine. And since most console games generally can hit 1 million sales fairly easy, its pretty easy to justify spending 750k on the engine.

Jeff @ Dec 18th 2005 9:05PM

D @ Dec 18th 2005 9:05PM

No............... its easy to justify 750k because once you have payed that you can use it for an unlimited amount of games. So the time developers would have to spend on creating a game engine and all the R & D would cost more than the proposed 750k.