Infinitap Games

AT GDC, Epic and Crytek announced that their AAA game engines would be available at a much lower cost. I discuss what this means to game developers.

Hooray capitalism!

I would tend to agree that most AAA developers use their own internal engines for usage. As you mentioned for example EA with Frostbite, Valve with Source and Bethesda with ID Tech. However I wouldn't say that this reduction is engine costs is aimed at the higher end of the market, more the mid-low end of it, at least in my opinion anyway

Whilst middle market games are less common nowadays, last generation the de facto standard for engine choice was arguably Unreal 3. I mean it was utilised in a lot of games so I suppose now that we're entering a new generation, there's that rush to become the new standard that U3 achieved last generation. It's why we see Crytek now discount the price for using their engine as they can see the benefits of having that edge in the market.

In terms of the lower end of the spectrum, I suppose that these companies want more Indie devs to utilise their engines as they are noticing the increasing prevalence of these types of games, as well as the amount of success that they are having I recent years. Although how well that'll succeed over the already established indie engines like Unity is another story really!

As a side note, it's rather exciting to see the rise of indie games relevancy within the past good number of years. I mean sure it didn't happen just overnight immediately but it's cool to see that these indie games have had a noticeable impact on the industry in recent years. I mean on PC it seems to come naturally as it's a rather open platform, but the fact that even console companies (especially Sony) are now putting a decent amount of investment on the indie scene shows an interesting development of the industry hahaha

With mobile, F2P, and all sorts of new business models, the console full priced market is decreasing in market share, so basing their tech licensing business model on what worked years ago would be a poor decision.

With the increasing cost of AAA budgets and the increasingly risk adverse publishers and the rise of digital distribution, I think the increase of indie market had to happen.

Unfortunately for indie developers (like myself), because of the perceived success of indie development (and the creative bankruptcy of AAA), everyone is doing it. I think the market is significantly smaller than the number of developers who are going indie, so just making a good game doesn't mean you can put bread on the table, which is kind of scary. You can be good at what you do and fail financially... I learned that lesson on Retro/Grade...

Yeah I can imagine that it's scary putting yourself into the indie market space, especially now that it's so saturated. I suppose that you'll just have to not only make a good game but have a strong positive word of mouth! Considering that I can't imagine you have much in terms of a marketing budget.

Still I'll do my part and recommend it to everyone I know when it comes out! So hopefully that'll help in a minor way hahaha

I think word of mouth helps a lot! To some extent though, there is always a component of luck or events outside your control, which can really hurt you. Had Activision not driven Guitar Hero into the ground with such aplomb, would Retro/Grade have sold better? While I denied it in interviews before we released, I think the answer to that is yes.

As a note, I don't think I was lying to interview reporters. I didn't think it would affect us the way it did. I was probably actually lying to myself...

So hopefully the day we choose to release will be a relatively slow day on Steam so we can keep our banner placements up for longer. Another item of bad luck for Retro/Grade was that we launched at the same time as Steam Early Access as well as the massive juggernaut Kerbal Space Program, which really came out of left field. We had similar issues on the PSN storefront as well, but those were more... complicated.

Hopefully we can continue to build buzz and remind people we exist up until release, and get PewDiePie to stream us as I mentioned on another forum post.

I guess keep your fingers crossed for the next 6 months and pray to the deity of your choosing! hahaha, that's my plan.

I'm curious as to why you had problems with Unity. I've been going through some of the tutorials lately, though I haven't done enough yet to have an opinion.

I had a LOT of them, but I am a hardcore programmer with over 10 years of experience. I think Unity is good for beginning game development. Personally, I can't stand it, but I have different requirements for tech than most. Others have asked why I don't like Unity, so maybe I'll make a video about it, but my experience was so terrible, that I would have to try really hard to be fair and not ranty. hahah