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No love lost: AppLovin helpfully releases tool to switch from Unity to Godot or Unreal
(www.pocketgamer.biz)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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One of the big reasons to have picked Unity over Unreal in the first place was because Unity was royalty free. Unreal Engine, despite being absolutely amazing, is not.
To preserve your existing business model, Godot just makes the most sense for many former Unity developers, and I say that as an unapologetic UE zealot.
However it's currently difficult for games made for Godot to port to consoles (XBox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch,... not those non-Switch "gaming handhelds" since they are all just Windows/Linux handheld PCs) while keeping Godot open source since the SDKs, APIs, porting kits of these consoles are proprietary and you have to sign in NDAs. If most of your games' revenues are from consoles, you don't have much choice currently.
Hopefully a new generation of consoles based on regular PC hardware takes the market so we don't have to deal with locked-down platforms, NDAs, exclusive titles, and overpriced games anymore. The Steam Deck is doing great so far.
Unreal Engine royalties only start after you make $1 million from a project. Even then, it's 5%, and waived for sales done on the Epic Store (whose 13% cut is almost a third of what Steam takes). If you are a small indie dev, you won't be paying Epic a dime unless you start rolling in some serious dough, and even when you do, 5% of your revenue for using one of the most powerful 3D game engines is pretty fair
Yes! This is why the hate I see for Epic (or non-Steam in general) bugs me so much. Epic has done nothing but right by developers. While they could definitely make their storefront/app better (and they claim they are working on it) for the customer experience, I have nothing but respect for them as a company.
I will still buy games on Steam first, given a choice, but that is only because I am now a staunch acolyte of the Steam Deck, and installing via Steam is much easier than trying to get EGS games running on the device.