cryengine and UDK have far lower monthly subscription plan, and superior graphics and performance. I love unity but it just seems very expensive just to be able to port to iOS and Android on top of the unity pro plan. Maybe if they included iOS and Android in the $75/month (which is still much higher than UDK and Cryengine have announced) and lowered it further, it could stay competitive.
UDK is $19/month plus a royalty equal to 5% of gross sales (as in, before Apple or Google's 30% or other expenses). This means the UDK becomes more expensive if your game has more than a few hundred $$$ in sales.
Cryengine will be $10/month with no royalties, but does not currently support mobile platforms.
If you are looking at Unity Pro ($1500), and want to publish on iOS ($1500), and Android ($1500) it will cost $4500. You'd need to gross more than $90,000 on your app for the 5% royalty to be more than $4500, and I'd bet a vast majority Unity make much less than that.
Majority of games never break even, and that's ok: it's a high-risk, high-reward business. $90k isn't even close to an adequate 3d mobile game budget of average+ quality, so if you gross so little , you're fucked anyway, or you never had a serious product at your hands to begin with.
I am sorry, but anyone serious about building games would not balk at their monthly prices.
I dont mean to offend but this kind of reaction to pricing almost always comes from people with little to no money, traction, revenue etc.
The reality is, when you have a game in the market, costs like $75/mo or even 225/mo for iOS/Android targets - that cost does not even cross your mind. It is less than the cost of a single developer for a single day.
For big dev shops, sure, $225/month is just the cost of doing business, no big deal.
It's way too much for the Indie crowd, though, and that's Unity's big problem these days; it's being attacked from below by UDK, where the far lower upfront cost appeals to indie devs and tinkers, AND from above by UDK, which is a much better pro-level AAA framework than Unity, and for which the $$$$$ no cut of gross revenue licensing cost isn't an obstacle.
One of the ways that Unity appeals to indies though is the free tier. You can get started with Unity without paying anything at all. And if your project gets serious, then paying the monthly fee isn't such a large barrier. That's how it worked with my project anyway.
you make a really good point. UDK and Cryengine's low monthly pricing makes it an innovative disruptor because for indie folks it's a blessing to have such a powerful engine at the fraction of what it costs with something less powerful like Unity. I'd imagine, if you were a studio, you'd opt for UDK because you'd be able to do more. UDK also includes Android and iOS compilation.
I have used Unity free version, it was great but always felt nervous about dropping $4500. UDK addresses my pain point and likewise for other indie developers by giving access to a triple A framework without having to worry about return on investment. I definitely don't mind sharing the risk with UDK for a meager 5%.
which is funny, because cryengine and udk were not even in reach for indies just a few years ago. Those have now reacted with dramatic pricing and philosophy changes while unity basically cost the same as they always have. I expect unity to make a move soon, especially the extra costs for multiple platforms does not seem to be competitive anymore.
Since I haven't written much "UnityScript" code myself, I'd appreciate your comments about whether you think it's possible (or worth the effort) for a tool like Browserify/Unityify to translate JavaScript code so it runs in Unity3D, or for programmers to write portable modules in a dialect of JavaScript that will run in both.
Maybe Unity3D themselves could help, by fixing problems with UnityScript that make it hard to run standard JavaScript, and providing hooks in their compiler pipeline that enable passing JavaScript libraries through with minimal modification when you're targeting the web browser and WebGL.
I would argue that Lua is way easier/smaller/neater than C#, but both CryEngine and Unreal have visual flow-based scripting systems, which are significantly easier for a novice than scripting.
In CryEngine their FlowGraph is basically a way of connecting predefined C++ and Lua code boxes. Blueprint in Unreal takes things to extremes and basically exposes almost the entire C++ API to the scripter.
Unreal4 seems way more flexible in this regard than previous versions of the engine, but I haven't played about with it enough to be sure.
In any case, the limitation was never down to the scripting method, more the way that the engine was designed and what it specialises in. Remember that full licence holders had the C++ source.
A full license for UDK is quite pricey, so isn't really germane to this discussion.
If you need to develop in C++ then your cost structure (in cash or opportunity cost) means that worrying about paying $1500 for a development tool won't even move the needle.
Maya / Max seat $5000+ (and devs tend to need them too)
Unity's biggest payoff is in workflow. If what you care about is the most polygons on the screen then UDK or Cryengine will win. If you care about the price of getting something out the door and it isn't an FPS then Unity clearly wins.
I meant that even if you can afford the full licence and get the C++ source, that doesn't mean that the engine can make any kind of game you want. It's not really a question of constraint by language so much as the way the engine's built.
I'm not sure based on the screenshots and demos but it seems very intuitive, and it's actually one of the main reason I want to get started with UDK. I know C++ is gonna be a challenge but Lua pretty much looks like python, which is a huge win over UnityScript which is like Javascript.
It's funny because I was looking to see if I could use Unity with a python like language and Lua seems bang on the spot.
More reason to learn Lua as an excuse to use some thing like Lapis, a Lua framework for Nginx OpenResty which lets you write apps directly on Nginx.
Under the syntactical surface, Lua is really more like Javascript than Python.
Unity has support for Boo, which is just a Python-like front end for the CLR. I'm pretty fond of it, myself. I prefer to use it whenever I can, inside Unity and elsewhere. The docs could use a lot of love, but it's still very easy to learn and extremely productive and a joy to write. I rarely touch MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio; I write Boo in Sublime Text, and find it very satisfying.
Another path I've been tempted to explore is to use Moonscript with Gameplay3D, but Unity is hard to leave.
I could be wrong, but I have the impression that Unreal is too unwieldy for a solo developer, which is how I plan to stay for the foreseeable future.
