I’m putting this here because it has wider reach and it’s simply a factual answer (not a question on games, unless mods really feel I’ll get a better answer in GR).
This is actually for an extra credit school assignment, the teacher said if we can’t find the cost and addition royalty fees we could just bring in the Unreal 2 ones (which I’m prepared to do, took 3 secodns to find). Since I’ve found that the license cost hasn’t been publicly released yet,I know we have one or two game developers here that may have some industry inside hearsay (or experience) on cost and royalty percentage that could give me an answer.
This is just an off-chance thing, and I’m only asking for help on this assignment since it’s pretty much impossible for me to find the cost myself. I’m guessing it’s around 900k (from what I’ve heard it’s usually double the reduced cost of the old engine, Unreal 2 is 350k) with a 5-6% royalty cost on all revenue from the game (unless that’s fixed, in which case it’d be 3%), but I want it confirmed.
I found this but like it says in the quote price can vary. A poster comment suggested it was 750k + 100k per platform. Dunno where he got that from. I’d stick with the guy who actually wrote a check for it.
The problem with this quesiton is that’s it’s not, AFAIK, an off-the shelf purchase. That is, right now it’s a product which is negotiated over and no set cost exists.
Yeah its generally a complicated negioation on the part of the games company, and is often a “per title” cost rather than an up front cost. I’ve heard of situation where a studio was using a trial license, still haggling over terms, right up to the point where the game was about to ship. Unreal were happy to do this, of course, as they knew there was zero chance of them turning round and using something else two weeks before shipping, so they had the studio over a barrel.
May not be relevant, but of course there are plenty of mature, stable, and a fully featured open source games engines out there such as Ogre and Irrlicht.
And plenty of that are very cheap or free for non comerrical use. Such as C4 or Torque.
The assignment was really to compare the cost of licensing TGE (torque) and Unreal 3. I was wondering if there was an “average” cost. I realized it wasn’t set yet.
I’ll use 500k and fall back on Unreal 2 (which is what the instructor said to do if we couldn’t find it). Thanks.