Now even Rockstar has licensed Unreal Engine 3.

[Richard]

London-boy, Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. (in stereo), Oh okay. I see what you mean. Yes, personally I think EPIC made the right decision but that also meant suffering a bit on UT2003/4's outdated engine.

I think the primary reason why UE3 is so successful with licensees is due to the editing tools and of course, a bit of aggressive pricing; especially those studio licenses Midway and Microsoft got -- Epic can afford to sell licenses for less money if this means they'll get more licensees. The licensee market is obviously finite and even if they don't get as much money as if they had sold each license for their full price that still means every other engine won't have as many licenses in the first place.

As I mentioned in my question to Tim, the large portion of the licensee market will give Epic a great leverage in the future and this was likely one of their goals when they started their licensing blitz.

 

[London Geezer]

JVD missed my point. It was that Epic's timing is what is impeccable. They had a lot of foresight, spent the money and started the work long before they had any kind of viable development platform.

Most definately. Where the hell are Renderware?! Where is their new middleware?

I'm actually quite amazed that Epic seem to be the only ones to have seen the door and went through it. I mean it's not rocket science to predict how many developers would jump on a prefabricated next gen engine to use as they please, relatively cheap and powerful.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I think the primary reason why UE3 is so successful with licensees is due to the editing tools and of course, a bit of aggressive pricing; especially those studio licenses Midway and Microsoft got -- Epic can afford to sell licenses for less money if this means they'll get more licensees. The licensee market is obviously finite and even if they don't get as much money as if they had sold each license for their full price that still means every other engine won't have as many licenses in the first place.

As I mentioned in my question to Tim, the large portion of the licensee market will give Epic a great leverage in the future and this was likely one of their goals when they started their licensing blitz.

Is the licensing really cheap? Or does it only get that way if you volunteer to give Epic a royalty on your sales? Usually you pay a lot of cash and keep the sales, or pay less cash up front, and give Epic a royalty for every game you sell, usually on a sliding scale.

Given that Epic so ahead of the curve, has such good development tools, has cross platform products and apparently offers a great support service, I'd be surprised if they have to compete by lowering prices too much.

 

[Farid]

The company also said that within the next year they will be releasing a special physics graphics card which will take over the physics calculations load from standard graphics cards. Both Unreal 07 and Gears of War will likely support this feature.

Wait, they announced that Gear of War is also coming to the PC? That's news to me.

 

[Richard]

Is the licensing really cheap? Or does it only get that way if you volunteer to give Epic a royalty on your sales? Usually you pay a lot of cash and keep the sales, or pay less cash up front, and give Epic a royalty for every game you sell, usually on a sliding scale. Given that Epic so ahead of the curve, has such good development tools, has cross platform products and apparently offers a great support service, I'd be surprised if they have to compete by lowering prices too much.

I'm not privy to the details of course, and I'd never qualify their licensing as "really cheap" but regardless of how much advanced UE3 everyone and their mother has been licensing UE3, not just the heavy hitters with money to burn. Also, CryEngine, Source and DOOM 3, though old when compared to UE3 still do the job and will continue that way for some time yet. Epic might be doing some buy 1 get 2 licenses, especially with those studio licenses for Midway for example. That Bioware license looked to me like payment to Atari for going to another publisher with UT2007. Which is a very intelligent way to go about it. Even if you're throwing a bit a money out the window there will be press releases with your company and engine's name on it, to steal a cliche, you just can't buy this kind of publicity. The same thing with PS3 and xbox 360 coming with UE3 on the dev kits.

I think licenses are now a much more important currency than money. PR sells more than licenses and if you can reach critical mass (like Epic has) soon enough you'll find yourself with 99% of the licensee market, denying your competitors the money, prestige and future leverage.

So I think that many licenses are a direct result of the snowball PR effect. The same effect the Quake 1/2 engine used to have even when there were better engines (e.g. Unreal 1) out there.

 

[PG2G]

Gears of War is property of Microsoft, as far as I know. I remember reading from one source that it was coming to PC (MSFT, I think) and from another that it was X360 exclusive (Epic, I think). I could have that backwards, itd make more sense if it were

 

[Richard]

Wait, they announced that Gear of War is also coming to the PC? That's news to me.

I think I read somewhre that GoW is coming to the PC you'll just have to wait awhile. Don't quote me though.

 

[scooby_dooby]

There's been comflicting reports, I beleieve the Epic guys said it was 360 exclusive, then allard went as said something to the effect of it being a timed exclusive.

We'll probably see something along the lines of Halo.

As for licensing costs, I had read that it was $1million a pop to license the UE3 engine.

 

[Farid]

Gears of War is property of Microsoft, as far as I know.

I did a few researchs and it seems that the game is produced by Epic and only published by MGS, since Epic holds the trademark for the game.

Well, I guess, it's going to be a timed exclusive like Fable.

 

[pegisys]

I think it was Mark Rein in an interview who said if you licence the engine you get it for all platforms, so if you make a game for one system you might as well put it out on all of them because it won't cost any more to do it, I think thats one of the big reasons everyone is jumping on the engine, it might have been the same interview where he said he was trying to get rockstar to licence the engine because they had the only nextgen engine that could handle the massive worlds like gta and still look great.

EA has renderware now and thats what they had running on the PS3 I think all there games use it now and they are licensing it but I don't thik it can compare to UE3

 

[scooby_dooby]

I did a few researchs and it seems that the game is produced by Epic and only published by MGS, since Epic holds the trademark for the game.

Well, I guess, it's going to be a timed exclusive like Fable.

There's more to it than that though, as Epic is actually a part of MGS, According to my OXM from a couple months ago.

So they surely have agreements that reach beyond this one game. But I agree that most likely this will be a timed exclusive for PC, but it will never end up on PS3.

 

[mckmas8808]

What was that announcement that Sony made about the UE3 engine? Is it included in the SDK?

 

[AlNom]

At this time, it is only there for a trial run. I don't think they've made a decision on whether or not to include it. (I wonder what the dollar figures would be )

 

[Bobbler]

There's more to it than that though, as Epic is actually a part of MGS, According to my OXM from a couple months ago.

So they surely have agreements that reach beyond this one game. But I agree that most likely this will be a timed exclusive for PC, but it will never end up on PS3.

That is some heavy crack OXM seems to be smoking -- the OXM and PSM (not sure on the official PS magazine -- never read it) both seem to like to make stuff up whenever they please.

What was that announcement that Sony made about the UE3 engine? Is it included in the SDK?

The PS3 SDK comes with havok/novodex and UE3 engines (the UE3 engine is a 1 month trial I believe). At least that is what the press releases said.

 

[Farid]

There's more to it than that though, as Epic is actually a part of MGS, According to my OXM from a couple months ago.

I know that Epic has a publishing and a licensing deal with MGS, but I never heard anything about MGS investing into Epic's capital. Are you sure that they said Epic was a subsidiary branch of MGS?

mckmas8808, an evaluation version of the UE3.0 will be shipped with every PS3 Devkits.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

There's more to it than that though, as Epic is actually a part of MGS, According to my OXM from a couple months ago.

No, MGS is just Epic's publisher. However, Epic have hinted that it's not exclusive. They must have deals for specific markets or number of titles, etc. After the move from Atari/Infogrames, it sounds like Epic pretty much wrote their own ticket.

 

[scooby_dooby]

They had a list of all game developers supporting x360, then they said "In addition, MGS is comprised of several developers:"

Epic was included in that list, along with Bungie, Mistwalker, Vivendi and others...

 

[DigitalSoul]

Haha.....now why would Vivendi be on the list? They are a big publishing house. MGS owning Epic would make no sense since they are developing UT2007 for multiple platforms [including PS3 ] and excet for GoW, Midway is publishing their games.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Sorry, I just got home so i can look at it now, vivendi was not on the list.

here it is verbatim:

"In addition, Microsoft Game Studios represents a large group of developers:

- bioware
- bizarre creations
- bungie studios
- epic games
- FASA Studios
- Game Republic
- Lionhead Studios
- Mistwalker
- Rare
-Q Entertainment"

btw: UT2007 has not been confirmed for PS3, despite them demoing "something" at E3, it still has not been confirmed as a PS3 title to my knowledge.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Sorry, I just got home so i can look at it now, vivendi was not on the list.

here it is verbatim:

"In addition, Microsoft Game Studios represents a large group of developers:

As publishers. AFAICR, Lionhead, Epic Bioware and Rare are not MS owned are they?