Unreal Engine: A Developer's Haven After the Unity Fiasco?

The past year has been a rollercoaster for game developers. While Unity, a long-standing favorite game engine, faced criticism for its monetization practices and licensing changes, Epic Games' Unreal Engine has seemingly taken the opposite approach. This article explores the recent developments in Unreal Engine, analyzing how they might position it as a more developer-friendly platform compared to Unity.

Epic Games keeps its promise regarding its “Unreal Engine” 3D engine. No bad surprises are on the horizon, therefore, for video game developers, who will not be affected by the change in pricing policy announced last year.

During its Unreal Fest 2023 event, Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, announced that the company would start charging for the use of its Unreal Engine 3D engine outside of video game development. The person concerned, however, assured that this new approach would not change anything for video game developers... and this promise now seems to be kept.

The publisher has in fact detailed the terms of this new pricing policy, confirming that the situation of game developers would remain the same as that known until now. In other words, they will continue to be able to use the Unreal Engine, a true benchmark within the industry, for free until their game reaches the million-dollar mark in gross revenue. After this milestone, Epic takes a 5% commission from these profits.

When Epic Games reassures game developers…

The announcement made by Tim Sweeney last year, however, will concern other areas of application of the Unreal Engine. Companies that use the 3D engine in the industry or audiovisual creation, for example, will now have to pay for Epic's software. Until now, the latter often benefited from the status reserved for game developers, and therefore from the free use of the tool... without necessarily royalties being paid to Epic Games at the end of the day. This is mainly what will change.

The new pricing policy provides that these companies now pay for a license if they generate more than one million dollars in annual gross revenue. The annual cost of this license will be, as a base, set at $1,850 per unit. The companies concerned will have to pay this amount each year, especially for each employee using the Unreal Engine.

These details are synonymous with relief and stability for many video game studios, who will therefore be able to stick to the usual methods with Epic's 3D engine. For context, this (reassuring) evolution of the Unreal Engine's pricing policy comes a few months after Unity announced that it would charge developers each time a game using its engine is installed... before apologizing to the developers.