Just what's happening with these game-related engines?

[Vynavill]

I thought I'd drop the question, as I'm curious in hearing some different opinions. I apologize beforehand if I mess up the chronological order or certain details of these occurrences, but I have been busy with my job lately and only managed to partly follow up with all of this.

• 
  ■First comes Epic games, announcing Unreal Engine 4 is going to be open-source, albeit not completely free, as they get a 5% royalty on what you sell if the product succeeds.
  ■Next up is Unity, with it's rev. 5 engine going free for personal use, at least as long as you only gain under $100k, with source code also available if you pay their subscription.
  ■Then, Valve hops onto the "free2play" train too, announcing at this year's GDC that the Source Engine 2 will be free for developers; while, from what I know, they said nothing about the source code, it's another engine going into the "free cookies" jar.
  ■If it wasn't enough, a company I've personally never heard of before, Quixel, comes out of nowhere, announcing Megascans, which seems to be an online and completely free library of almost triple-A grade graphical assets, going up to 8k resolutions (that's still to be confirmed, from what I know, but that's the rumor going around for now).
  ■Last, but not least, Nvidia follows up, putting up the rest of the PhysX SDK for free and open-source on Github (the basic SDK was available for free on Windows already, they supposedly made Cloth and Destruction free as well).

Why now? Just what is happening that's making these people share their intellectual properties so easily? Works of a lifetime which once grossed money from contracts all over the place in the game development world magically going semi or fully free almost overnight.
I can understand Epic wanting to get a bigger segment of the current market, but what about the others? I'm not into marketing, but logically, the first thing that comes into mind would be avoiding to be cut out of the market, as Epic's offer for their engine...well, pretty much lives up to the name of the company.
There must be more than that tho...

Anybody willing to drop in his thoughts?

 

[Pinhedd]

[quotemsg=15437120,0,1497628]I thought I'd drop the question, as I'm curious in hearing some different opinions. I apologize beforehand if I mess up the chronological order or certain details of these occurrences, but I have been busy with my job lately and only managed to partly follow up with all of this.

• 
  ■First comes Epic games, announcing Unreal Engine 4 is going to be open-source, albeit not completely free, as they get a 5% royalty on what you sell if the product succeeds.
  ■Next up is Unity, with it's rev. 5 engine going free for personal use, at least as long as you only gain under $100k, with source code also available if you pay their subscription.
  ■Then, Valve hops onto the "free2play" train too, announcing at this year's GDC that the Source Engine 2 will be free for developers; while, from what I know, they said nothing about the source code, it's another engine going into the "free cookies" jar.
  ■If it wasn't enough, a company I've personally never heard of before, Quixel, comes out of nowhere, announcing Megascans, which seems to be an online and completely free library of almost triple-A grade graphical assets, going up to 8k resolutions (that's still to be confirmed, from what I know, but that's the rumor going around for now).
  ■Last, but not least, Nvidia follows up, putting up the rest of the PhysX SDK for free and open-source on Github (the basic SDK was available for free on Windows already, they supposedly made Cloth and Destruction free as well).

Why now? Just what is happening that's making these people share their intellectual properties so easily? Works of a lifetime which once grossed money from contracts all over the place in the game development world magically going semi or fully free almost overnight.
I can understand Epic wanting to get a bigger segment of the current market, but what about the others? I'm not into marketing, but logically, the first thing that comes into mind would be avoiding to be cut out of the market, as Epic's offer for their engine...well, pretty much lives up to the name of the company.
There must be more than that tho...

Anybody willing to drop in his thoughts? [/quotemsg]

There has been an enormous increase in small, independent game studios in the past 5 years. The wild success of titles like Minecraft, DayZ, Torchlight, Divinity, etc... that just come out of nowhere and gobble up rewards and millions of dollars in sales has put a lot of major publishers on edge and has created business opportunities for anyone who is willing to make their tools accessible for little to no upfront cost.

Unity kinda got the drop on Epic/Valve/Crytek by creating an easy to use (but terribly performing) engine that was positioned as being very affordable. Epic has historically closed themselves off to smaller studios, preferring to work closely with large publishers that have deep pockets; UE4 is absolutely incredible though, and can easily be picked up by anyone with some decent C++ knowledge.

 

[Vynavill]

[quotemsg=15437186,0,144299]There has been an enormous increase in small, independent game studios in the past 5 years. The wild success of titles like Minecraft, DayZ, Torchlight, Divinity, etc... that just come out of nowhere and gobble up rewards and millions of dollars in sales has put a lot of major publishers on edge and has created business opportunities for anyone who is willing to make their tools accessible for little to no upfront cost.

Unity kinda got the drop on Epic/Valve/Crytek by creating an easy to use (but terribly performing) engine that was positioned as being very affordable. Epic has historically closed themselves off to smaller studios, preferring to work closely with large publishers that have deep pockets; UE4 is absolutely incredible though, and can easily be picked up by anyone with some decent C++ knowledge.[/quotemsg]

But isn't that going to be counter-productive, on the long run? I'm happy of the fact they're opening up these possibilities, especially because I'm thinking about a game developer career rather than my current software developer one, but I just can't avoid thinking it'll make things worse.
There's already an excess of games on the market between triple-A and indie titles, which nowadays translates to a "quantity over quality" issue; I just can't help but to feel afraid that making such tools essentially free might worsen the issue.

Minecraft is a fine example, where an high amount of re-adaptations and/or clones were done, but just a few actually marked a significant difference (Such as Terraria and Starbound, or Cubeworld and Trove); most of the others are basically Minecrafts with cool-looking shaders...
More products mean more diversity, which is usually always nice, but too many risk being harmful, and might make original ideas feel like washed out copies of already available contents.

 

[bystander]

Well, there are driving forces behind a few of those, such as Valve trying to push people to develop for their SteamOS. The more people who develop for SteamOS, the greater chance it will succeed. They also make money on any sales over Steam. And Nvidia wants people to use PhysX in order to promote their GPU's. Epic and Unity are making money on theirs, but it is a percentage, which helps small studios jump in the mix, and allows them to possibly make more money on big successes.

 

[Pinhedd]

[quotemsg=15437981,0,1497628][quotemsg=15437186,0,144299]There has been an enormous increase in small, independent game studios in the past 5 years. The wild success of titles like Minecraft, DayZ, Torchlight, Divinity, etc... that just come out of nowhere and gobble up rewards and millions of dollars in sales has put a lot of major publishers on edge and has created business opportunities for anyone who is willing to make their tools accessible for little to no upfront cost.

Unity kinda got the drop on Epic/Valve/Crytek by creating an easy to use (but terribly performing) engine that was positioned as being very affordable. Epic has historically closed themselves off to smaller studios, preferring to work closely with large publishers that have deep pockets; UE4 is absolutely incredible though, and can easily be picked up by anyone with some decent C++ knowledge.[/quotemsg]

But isn't that going to be counter-productive, on the long run? I'm happy of the fact they're opening up these possibilities, especially because I'm thinking about a game developer career rather than my current software developer one, but I just can't avoid thinking it'll make things worse.
There's already an excess of games on the market between triple-A and indie titles, which nowadays translates to a "quantity over quality" issue; I just can't help but to feel afraid that making such tools essentially free might worsen the issue.

Minecraft is a fine example, where an high amount of re-adaptations and/or clones were done, but just a few actually marked a significant difference (Such as Terraria and Starbound, or Cubeworld and Trove); most of the others are basically Minecrafts with cool-looking shaders...
More products mean more diversity, which is usually always nice, but too many risk being harmful, and might make original ideas feel like washed out copies of already available contents.[/quotemsg]

I don't see how it could be considered counter-productive.

Epic's previous business model was a high per-seat annual licencing fee and royalties negotiated with major publishers on a per-title basis. Now, it's a fixed 5% royalty due on all sales >$3,000 per quarter. Their goal is to get as many developers and publishers on board as possible, on as many platforms as possible.

They've shifted their business strategy from exclusivity to exposure, and given the relative maturity of the Unreal Engine I'd say that it's working out pretty well for them. If you were to have gone on any game dev forum in 2012 and asked for a comparison of major game engines you'd see something like this:

- Unity: Cheap to start with, no up-front cost, easy to use, awkward and restricting tools, mediocre performance
- Unreal: Exclusive and expensive (licence discussed under NDA only), very well established, extremely verbose set of very clean tools, amazing performance
- CryEngine: Complex codebase, hard to get started with, powerful tools, can make some seriously awesome environments, probably less expensive than UE (licence discussed under NDA only)
- Source: Ancient codebase, not very flexible or extensible, probably less expensive than CryEngine (licence discussed under NDA only), performs well

Now you'd see something like this:

- Unity: Cheap to start with, no up-front cost, easy to use, slightly less awkward tools, slightly less mediocre performance
- Unreal: Fully open source, well documented, incredible tools, extremely fair and simple licencing terms with no up-front cost
- CryEngine: Closed source engine (full source available only to professional studios under a separate licence agreement), decent documentation, powerful tools, monthly per-seat licence
-Source 2: TBD, no royalties?

 

[Vynavill]

That makes sense.
On the other hand, I'm sorry...

[quotemsg=15438181,0,144299]I don't see how it could be considered counter-productive.[/quotemsg]
I should have explained that better. What I meant is that it's likely going to be counter-productive for consumers. With such an availability in terms of tools, the electronic entertainment scene (which already is on an exponential increase in importance and size), will just grow bigger.

Independent developers/studios will have an easier time delivering good quality products without having to develop an in-house engine from scratch, and can directly contribute to improving the engine alongside other studios, independent or not, for those that are open-source.
The engine owners will get an huge increase in the userbase, getting their small but extended profits, not to mention free testing and (eventually) improvements.
The consumers, however, may have to face a tidal wave of products flooding the digital (and retail, eventually) market. It has already happened and is still happening, yes, but this time there are higher chances of delivering a good-quality product; isn't that going to decrease how much a developer work's worth?

 

[Pinhedd]

[quotemsg=15440974,0,1497628]That makes sense.
On the other hand, I'm sorry...

[quotemsg=15438181,0,144299]I don't see how it could be considered counter-productive.[/quotemsg]
I should have explained that better. What I meant is that it's likely going to be counter-productive for consumers. With such an availability in terms of tools, the electronic entertainment scene (which already is on an exponential increase in importance and size), will just grow bigger.

Independent developers/studios will have an easier time delivering good quality products without having to develop an in-house engine from scratch, and can directly contribute to improving the engine alongside other studios, independent or not, for those that are open-source.
The engine owners will get an huge increase in the userbase, getting their small but extended profits, not to mention free testing and (eventually) improvements.
The consumers, however, may have to face a tidal wave of products flooding the digital (and retail, eventually) market. It has already happened and is still happening, yes, but this time there are higher chances of delivering a good-quality product; isn't that going to decrease how much a developer work's worth?[/quotemsg]

Oh I see; no I do not think that it will.

More accessible tools certainly allows smaller, independent developers to get started easier, but there's always going to be a huge demand for the John Carmacks of the world. Software Engineering is only one aspect of game development, there's plenty of opportunities to go around.

 

[bystander]

I assume you are worried from a developers point of view? The news is great for everyone else for certain. It is even great for independent developers trying to get started. It's great for consumers. The only concern is there might be more competition for jobs and sales from someone already established.

 

[Vynavill]

@bystander
I'm worried both from a developer and a consumer's point of view. I'm an avid videogame player, and while all these announcements are amazing from a developer's point of view, as they literally open Pandora's box in terms of possibilities, they also mean not too happy stuff in my horribly wrong head.

From a developer's point of view, my work may not be evaluated as good anymore. The use of a developer could be reduced, considering the engine lets you do most of the work about designing and rendering.
From a consumer's point of view, there may be such an injection of new products in the market that I'll end up not buying anything, because I would go broke if I had to buy all the ones I may like.

That's probably just me, trying to "cross a bridge before I actually come to it", or at least that's what some people I've talked this stuff to in real life tell me (curiously, also getting close to Pinhedd's line of thought with their answers), but I can't help it