Hacker News Reader

Comment by CamouflagedKiwi | Hacker News Reader

Surely better than this engineer having to pay $100k upfront which would likely mean he never made the game at all. 5% over a million seems pretty reasonable to me. I guess it'd be an issue if profit margins were thin, but that wouldn't be the case here.

View on HN

Sure as long as we acknowledge that this isn't really free it's just deferred payment

Not deferred payment for most devs as they do not reach the 1 million revenue

For "the best train sim ever made" they probably reach it.

Sure, and then he can afford it, because he's making over $1M/year revenue on this sim, and taking a very reasonable 5% off the top of that. So it blunts the profits a bit at that point, but it hardly seems like such a terrible thing at that point.

By that logic we should be OK with Adobe's subscription model. It makes it affordable to people who can't otherwise use it. Ultimately it means we can't own it (and just like we can't own UE, we owe Epic income reports for life).

I'm not saying it's a terrible model and it's great that games are made with it but let's be honest it's not all rainbows.

I don't know anything about Adobe's model - I have (pretty happily) never bought anything from that company. But the two are not very similar, and I don't buy the argument that you're trying to make - I think you're trying to bring in dislike of Adobe's model as an argument against Epic's, despite the two being pretty fundamentally different.

"it's not all rainbows" - I would also not let perfect be the enemy of the good here.

> I don't know anything about Adobe's model

You do, becaude I explained... It's subscription based. It's fundamentally the same because in both cases you don't own it. Epic's is just with the added element of freebie at first

weird how HN is up with pitchforks against that but OK with Epic's.

But it is free up to $1mm in revenue. Anyone can go and download the engine and use it as much as they want free. It is really smart and honestly $1mm is a generous entry point to capture a royalty for everyone involved.

They could have just sold the engine, even a subscription is better than royalties. If my game sells more it doesn't cost Epic any more money.

I know you’re trolling but come on. The entry price for what you are suggesting would never be obtainable for folks like this kid. You can absolutely negotiate pricing if you are a big enough studio but for hobbyist they let you use it for a royalty. It’s great because it opens it up for everyone. If they charged a fixed fee it would have to be at a very high price.

You misunderstand the business model.

Unreal is like venture capital or a book advance (or the equivalent in music record deal)

Can you self publish? Sure, of course, have fun. But if you want the support and infrastructure of a company that understands the business of books, you take a deal and it is just like this: if a bunch of authors get book advances, that is generous to the ones who are unsuccessful, and they can only do that _because they capture the upside of those that are successful_.

Without that, you don't get advances for anyone.

So the point I'm making here: unreal provides variance reduction for all game publishers and yes that disproportionately benefits the ones who make under a million. But they're the ones who need the help!

And in exchange, if you're one of the lucky few, you pay a shockingly reasonable 5% in perpetuity.

I don't think it's a good analogy. You don't have to "self publish" (go without a game engine). You can choose a game engine, just a different one that doesn't require you to report your income etc.

Ok, then do that? The game you make will be limited by that choice. If those limitations are acceptable, then great!

My contention is that people can build more ambitious games that are more likely to make their creators rich if they use Unreal, and if the creators also think that they should use Unreal and if they don't they shouldn't.

I was replying to someone who said how fantastic it is that the guy was able to make it for free. I'm not saying it's all completely bad, again Adobe subscription model and past piracy tolerance allowed many people who couldn't afford their stuff to use it while paying less or nothing, just adding nuance about "free"

Of course! And I think it's fair to require people to be honest.

I just fundamentally disagree with this line of thinking:

> even a subscription is better than royalties

Royalties are a great business model that allows more creators to create. You can dislike it, but I genuinely don't know that this game would exist with a different business model, and I want it to be easy to make art (or other things!)

And while there were a bunch of interesting side effects of piracy (people who pirate more music were bigger fans of music and spent more later - correlation/causation questions obvs), I would strongly prefer that the easy thing to do (ie cheapest/lowest friction to get started) be legal

> I genuinely don't know that this game would exist with a different business model, and I want it to be easy to make art

I think the guy did it on enthusiasm and if he used say Godot he could probably have a pretty good result too, if less impressive visually. But you have good points, sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com