Game Engine Licensing Breakdown - Unity, Unreal, GameMaker Studio

greetings and welcome my name is Aaron Craig with beyond us games and what I want to do in this video is break down what are the licenses for the big three when it comes to game development engines so I'm gonna be showing game maker studio two unity and Unreal Engine now I use game maker studio and that's what I love and that's what I teach on but I do want to give it a as fair as possible breakdown for each one so that you can make a decision on which one you should use based purely on a budget if you already have a preference or coding language that you know then this probably won't matter as much but if you're looking to get started or you're just curious which one has the best pricing then I think this will be really informative we're gonna start off with game maker studio so here they have four different options and if you don't know how that works then it can be a little confusing well I guess they have five technically you have a trial version which is completely free I has a lot of limitations so you can only have a few resources in there and you can't actually build your game to share it with people so it's a great one to get started with but if you actually want to make a game you have to buy something and that's where creator comes in so it starts at $39 and you buy it for Windows or Mac because that's where you're allowed to then build a game for you can use game maker studio on any OS it doesn't matter but if you have a Windows one you can only build a Windows game and if you have a Mac you can only build a Mac compatible game that's how that works it's 39 dollars and it is a 12 month license it's not a permanent purchase so if you want to try it out this is a really great way to do it to have access to everything and be able to build your game you cannot change your splash screen and that's something that's really important to a lot of people so just keep that in mind if you're going with this option now there is also a developer which has several different options inside of here the desktop license gives you access to publishing to the desktop and that allows you to make games for Windows and Mac and that is a $99 permanent license all of these ones inside of here they developer licenses are all permanent so you will own them forever you'll get the upgrades and that's really really nice if you want to purchase to the Amazon app marketplace you can do that you have web mobile and uwp which is for Xbox or for Xbox and Windows 10 the Xbox goes specifically through the creators program but you can do that and that costs up to 399 but all of these are permanent so once again you will own them forever which is really nice now if you want to purchase console licenses then you can come down here and the first one they show is the uwp which we already talked about and that one is kind of the outlier because it has a permanent license and it is significantly cheaper now if you want to purchase a license to be able to publish to the switch ps4 or Xbox those are gonna run you $800 for a year in a 12-month license so you have to renew it and it is not subscription-based so they're not gonna charge you $800 at the end of your one year usage like a lot of companies will get you to sign up for and then auto charge you and that's how they make their money this isn't like that you pay for 12 months and then you have to go in and buy it again now the last one here is $1500 but ultimate is for everything so it includes every single place that you can possibly publish it so developer and console all for $1,500 and that's a 12-month license now I've heard a lot of people complain about this 12 month license thing they want to be able to own this forever but the thing is that this is actually a pretty good deal if you know that you want to publish to one location like Nintendo switch and that's what you want to do this is actually gonna be the best price that you can get depending on how well your game does so the license is so that they can continue to make money and they continue to put out new features because Nintendo switch was actually added well in the last year I think and that is partly because be we'll keep giving them money to be able to make games that's just how that works they're no different than unity which is what we're gonna look at next oh the last one here is education but that's not really for just individuals but if you have a school system you can get education pricing which is really cool now unity here seems like a really good deal now they have a personal plan which is completely free you get access to the software everything that it has you don't get like support but you still get access to their marketplace their software and you can go and learn on your own and you get that all for free now the caveat here is that you cannot make more than one hundred thousand dollars per year if you do then you must upgrade if you make more than a hundred thousand then you have to move to plus and that is gonna be $25 for a per month for a year or $35 if you're just paying monthly but the thing is that if you're making more than that you must have this plus if you're making more than two hundred thousand then you must move to the pro which is going to be fifteen hundred dollars a year and that is per developer so if you have a team of ten that's gonna be fifteen thousand dollars per year that you want to have access to your game once it starts making a good chunk of money so that's kind of unity it's a little confusing because their brackets are within tiers so less than a hundred thousand between 100 and 200 thousand and then greater than 200 thousand but the nice thing is that you can get in with personal and you can make a game it's really cool but again personal doesn't allow you to change the splash image kind of like I'm game maker studio so if that's important to you you will need to go and upgrade I believe to the pro but the plus might also have that so keep that in mind as well if that's something that's important to you then we move on to unreal which definitely has the best-looking page if you scroll down to the bottom you can find their pricing so unreal is completely free except for once you start making money after you make $3,000 gross revenue in a year you have to pay five percent from then on so gross revenue is the total amount of money that you make that means if you publish on steam steam is gonna take 30 percent of that $10 price or that $20 price or whatever you put but you have to pay off of that full $10 not the seven dollars that you actually get in revenue and that's important to keep in mind so you're actually losing 35 percent if you're publishing on steam if you use unreal and if you're not making a large game or you're not making more than $3,000 in a year then unreal is completely free and really powerful and a great option but I imagine if you're making a game you're hoping to actually make more than three thousand dollars in a year as that is extremely low but what I want to do next is actually do kind of a breakdown of average sales and kind of do a little bit of math here okay so I'm gonna do a little bit of drawing on here now this is really really low estimates the average indie sales that I've read are kind of hard to pin down because of games that do really well and the games that don't do really well they're all mixed in there as an average what I read was around twenty one thousand but that number was supposed to be inflated so I'm gonna go with a much much lower number but I think you can expect for your first game if you make a good quality game and you put it out there and do a little bit of advertising not even paid just word of mouth on Twitter social media stuff like that so I'm gonna go with 4,000 sales in your first year the average price for an indie game is like 872 or something so again I put that down to $8 so this is all lower on the estimate very conservative so the total that you'd get your gross revenue is here $32,000 doesn't seem like much and that's because it really isn't making your way as a game developer a full-time it's a really difficult thing to do so keep that in mind as well have a backup and have some money on the side that you can make after a revenue cut from like Steam right here so they take 30% what you're actually making is twenty two thousand four hundred now every place that you publish is gonna be different unreal just launched their new store and I believe they have a much less revenue revenue cut I don't know what it is I want to say it's like fifteen maybe twenty percent they're trying really hard to get into the game sales so they're undercutting steam which is you know the big one and so that might be a better place to publish if you're starting out you'll take home more but the thing to remember is that this right here is the gross revenue so what you're gonna pay on is that so let's look at unity with those numbers in mind if you're making under a hundred thousand that's totally fine you're not gonna have to pay for anything again you can't change the splash screen but that's okay if you're fine with that no problem if your game started doing a lot better then you'd have to pay for plus and that would be three hundred dollars a year per developer so that's really not that bad as far as licensing goes that's pretty cheap if you are a one-person studio now if you have a team of ten you know that's gonna add up but at that point I don't know how much of an indie developer you are maybe an independent team but you probably have more of a budget than a one-person team so keep that in mind after you make two hundred thousand so you have to go pro with that and that pro is gonna be 225 a month and fifteen hundred a year again per developer so if your game is pretty low then you're fine unity is a great option Unreal Engine seems really great at first but once you start making more they actually take a lot so I love unreal I've used it but their I think their model is kind of deceptive because you don't realize how much you're actually gonna pay them but it is a really great engine I'll just say that so if you make less than three thousand in a year you don't pay it all in our scheme you are making more so if you made 32,000 that year you have to pay those royalties okay five percent goes to unreal that's $1,600 because again that 5% is gonna come right out of your gross revenue so that 32,000 you made you're losing if you're publishing on Steam or as of right now you're losing about 35 percent overall which is kind of normal so after all that you take home $20,000 not enough to live off of in most places game maker studio it it's kind of hard to pin down but if you were just publishing to steam you can buy the license for 99 dollars and that's a permanent license that you get to keep and that would be all you have to pay if you're doing just on Steam if you're going for one console then it would be $800 for that year and if you're publishing on multiple consoles then it would be $1500 now these are all very conservative let's go and bump it up to say your game did really quite well let's say you make you sold 20,000 copies in your first year at $8 a copy so overall you just made 160 thousand dollars in gross revenue and gross profit that's pretty good so unity again here is going to be $300 a year per person that's not too bad unreal is gonna cost a lot more it's gonna be 8,000 for that year and every year afterwards that your game is making more than $3,000 that's how much it's gonna be changing obviously but as long as your game is making more than 3,000 you will be paying unreal unity and gaming studio which we'll get to next you don't have to keep paying them if your game was complete and done and there were no errors whatsoever and you never had to touch it again then you don't have to keep paying to do that you could just let your game live and you don't have to pay unity or GMS but unreal will continue costing GMs at the most is gonna cost you fifteen hundred dollars a year per person that's if you wanted to publish desktop web and ps4 Xbox switch all of them you could buy the ultimate and get $1,500 if you were just doing steam it would cost you 99 dollars if you were just doing one console it would be $800 per year per person now let's bump that up what if you did like stardew valley level of sales okay this game was an indie hit you've probably heard it if not played it I know are sunk a lot of hours into it myself and I've actually bought it more than once because it's on the switch now and it's a lot of fun so they sold over three million copies this is one of those games that as far as indie devs go is you know a super big outlier you can't expect this but I think as game developers we hope for that right we want to hope that our game does well like this now it's priced at $15 and overall I was actually really surprised at this 45 million dollars in gross revenue that's over the course of its life I heard that he spent about four years doing it by himself so I think that's a pretty good return on investment unity again is gonna be really good here $1,500 a year so that's not too bad unreal on the other hand and this is why I think it's kind of deceptive it's gonna end up costing over the course of its life 2.25 million dollars that 5% really starts adding up okay so keep that in mind if your game is gonna do really really well well you'll have the money to pay that cost and it comes in only as your game is doing well but that's still obviously is a lot more if you were doing just GMS it'd be $1,500 a year because he's got stardew valley on every single platform except I think web and mobile but I bet mobile will change in the future too because it could be really good on mobile if you got the right UI so unity and GMS I think come out on top here if you want to publish it every we're unreal is great but it's gonna cost you a lot once your game starts doing well so keep that in mind so that's what I have for you I hope that helps I hope that it kind of gives you an idea of what the licenses are how they work and which one might be right for you because depending on where you're going and what you want to do where you want to publish your game there are a lot of different options so that's what I've got for you thanks very much for joining me if you have any questions please leave them down in the comments below if I made any mistakes or things have been changed since I last put this out definitely put some comments out there and I will pin those to the top to make sure we've got the most relevant information possible thank you very much for joining me and as I always say have fun making great games and I will talk to you later hey there it's Erin I hope you enjoyed that video and if you did I encourage you to check out my patreon you can join for as little as $1 a month and get access to our discord channel and be able to vote on the next series that I tackle you'll also be able to do one on one training sessions for $10 a month or more if you want more time with me we can work on whatever it is you're struggling with and I can help you make that awesome game or project you'll also get access to my courses every time I publish a new course on udemy or Skillshare every one of my patrons gets that course for free so even if you support me for just one dollar a month that's a great steal because I'm gonna be putting out a lot more courses this year I want to do YouTube udemy teaching game development full-time and you can help make that happen so thank you very much I hope you'll check out my patreon and consider supporting me on there and check out my courses on udemy and Skillshare if you're wanting more content from me have fun making great games and I'll talk to you later [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Let's Learn This Together

Views: 14,494

Keywords: Beyond Us Games, BUG, GameMaker Studio, GameMaker Studio 2, Unity, Unreal, Game Engines, Pricing Explained, Licensing, Unity Engine cost, unreal engine cost, game maker studio engine cost, Game Engine Costs, Game Engine Explained, Game Engine Pricing, Game Engine Licensing, Licensing & Pricing, Game Engine Complex, Game Engine Software, Real Costs, Game Engine Breakdown, the real costs, unreal engine, unity engine, game maker studio engine, game maker studio 2 engine, GMS2

Id: rBD2al41NrU

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019