subject: Epic increase UDK royalty cap tenfold [print this page] Epic increase UDK royalty cap tenfold Epic increase UDK royalty cap tenfold
Epic have announced a ten-times increase on the royalty cap for games created with the Unreal Development Kit. The free software kit is powerful enough to let anyone create a game using tera goldUnreal Engine 3. Before now, games earning profits of more than $5,000 would have to make royalty payments to Epic. The royalty cap now stands at $50,000, making it easier for new developers to get started.
Vice President of Epic Games, Mark Rein, made the announcement was made on the Epic forums. He says "we're really excited about folks making some amazing things with UDK and we realize that a lot of you are just started in the business so not having to pay royalties on your first $50,000 should help you get a financial footing toward building a quality game development business."
The release of the UDK, in combination with the Make Something Unreal contest, has given a headstart to a number of small developers. The most recent success story was The Ball, which was the runner up in last year's Make Something Unreal contest, and recently released a full retail release on Steam. If you're interested in creating something using the UDK, it's available to download for free from the Unreal Development Kit site.
Yeah, it was incredibly easy to produce loads of content for CryEngine 2, mostly because it was polished to a shine and heightmap-based, instead of geometric BSP. Changing up core mechanics, from there, was only as hard as one made it out to be.
Seeing as CryEngine 3 may present the same package, with even more assets and polish, I can't see the UDK being at the forefront of indie development much longer, SO LONG AS Crytek pushes out with a freemium dev kit and a high royalty cap.
Indie games using UE3, or indeed any game using UE3, should be destroyed. The texture pop in the engine is just so damn annoying, really breaks any kind of immersion.
Then theres the fact that Epic are just such douches to the PC, they don't deserve any royalties at all from the platforms indie developers.
First, blame consoles for the whole texture popping thing. Second,In UDK there is an option to turn off texture popping, dumbass. Third, I think it was nice to give beginning game developers the most popular game engine, which normally costs about 700,000 dollars. Im just sayin.
