Unreal Engine 4 is now free

[charlie]

Free to use unless you sell, with any games made using UE4 having a 5% levy on any sales.

https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4

Not sure what this means for FOSS. It's probably a bad thing, if anything, for the FOSS engines such as OGRE but on the flip side it probably opens up the way for FOSS games based on UE4? Although if your FOSS game uses a proprietary engine, is it truly FOSS? (Well, no its not, but how many aspiring game devs will care about that?)

[andrewj]

UE3 was released with similar terms (if I remember correctly), so I don't think this will have any additional impact on FOSS gaming.

[NaN]

It is certainly great news for indie devs, not so great for Unity and co.

I am not sure about the impact on FOSS. How many commercial games have been using open source game engines? I know of a few using OGRE, but that's pretty much it.

[Vandar]

If it has some impact at all, it will move developers from working on engines to working on games. There is a "vendor lock in" antipattern, though, but all the engines suffer from that, it's hard to switcha project from one engine to another.

I see no problem in FOSS games using closed libraries, but there have been plenty of debates if the result of such a combination is actually free - for me, it's good enough, not worth spending much thought about it.

[rogerdv]

Unreal cant be used for FOSS games. I quickly read the terms and it states that you cant use it for products under GPL or such licenses. So, I guess we will still need old Ogre and others.

[charlie]

Unreal cant be used for FOSS games. I quickly read the terms and it states that you cant use it for products under GPL or such licenses. So, I guess we will still need old Ogre and others.

Good catch, roger.

[farcodev]

I don't think they will grab many people from the FOSS, especially since a project takes already enough of our valuable free time and doing the switch would require even more work. Unity have more indy devs than real FOSS ones.
Don't forget that one thing with the FOSS is the freedom to share the sources.

[c_xong]

Unreal cant be used for FOSS games. I quickly read the terms and it states that you cant use it for products under GPL or such licenses. So, I guess we will still need old Ogre and others.

No, permissive licenses ( ) will still work. I know around these parts people like to equate "free" with "copyleft" but that's not accurate.

[c_xong]

In a very short term and narrow, FOSS-centric view, you could say this is bad, but I can't help but feel this is good all around. Just as Firefox made the web more open and competitive despite being overshadowed by Chrome recently, this development couldn't have happened without the release of huge numbers of quality FOSS engines in recent years. If anything, this is a concession that FOSS is a serious option for game dev, and proprietary products becoming "more free" (cost, and in UE4's case, it is source available) is a great thing.

[andrewj]

Unity 5 has also just been released:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/03/03/unity-5-launch/