How much would you pay for a game engine?

It should be obvious why 'game engines' like Torque, darkBASIC, Blitz3D and Gamestudio are popular among start-ups, hobbyists, and indie developers. The price.

I currently own licenses for Blitz3D and Torque, and I'm planning to buy 3D Gamestudio as well as a new one Visual3D.net.

However, I've looked at something called HeroEngine recently, and they want at least $300,000 to $950,000 for thier engine. Seriously. This reminds me of prices I've heard about Gamebryo, Unreal and others.

Who do these companies expect to pay for their systems. There are not too many peole in the world with that kind of money.

You could buy a cheap house, or car for that kind of money.

Obviously, siince I own Blitz3D and Torque, I'm willing to pay $100 to $150 for an gamiing engine. Since GarageGames prices their TGEA engine at $295. and I like what it does, I'll pay that, but that is my limit. $300.

How much are you willing to spend for an engine?

It really depends what comes with the engine, and how good the engine is.
If the engine comes with hundreds of universally usable assets worth $8000, then I would be willing to pay $8000 for the engine. Also the quality of the tools matter a lot, at least it should be possible to edit and create 3D models and place them around so that the engine can read it.

An engine of that price class should also support all highest-end technologies, including real-time raytracing or an alternative way to accomplish the same results. And it should run on all platforms, including consoles.

For an engine which runs on lower than GeForce 8800 cards, I wouldn't pay anything. I don't get any joy of making obsolete games, but I want to get the "wow" effect when I do some never before seen amazing stuff.

Only about $200

So the latest versions of the Crytek, Unreal and ID engines are all worth nothing to you then?

I meant more engines which are at best on high-end hardware, not at best on lower than 8800 and just adding some useless stuff in high-end mode. There's a big difference between those two, as high-end engines can be designed to work totally different and much faster and more powerful.

What do you mena by this?
From what I've seen in all the engines that I've mentioned, and what you mentioned, all the engines support 3D models, DX9 shaders, scripting, and particle effects.

Torque has versions of itself that will let you create games for the MAC, Linux, xbox, and Wii

I'm not sure about 3DGamestudio cross-platform capability.

HeroEngine is an MMO engine and looking at its website it's a pretty darn good one and MMOs are buggers to program. They have dozens of people working on them for months or years who all want paying $x0,000 a year each, and so on. What you're paying for is the already completed labour, a games company could buy the engine, skip the "reinvent the wheel" stage which takes so many months or even years, and get their new game out sooner, hopefully make millions of $ in sales and save on labour costs..

In otherwords, Blitz&co is aimed at hobbyist individual (or small group) programmers whereas HeroEngine is aimed at multi-$million companies, two rather different markets :)

@Flavius

Ok, I get your drift. have you seen Visual3D.net. While the toolset is not even close to HeroEngines, It does pretty much the same thiing as HeroEngine, yet it only priced at ~$200.00

For a hobbyist engine, I'm willing to dish out in the 100-200$ range.
For an indie developer engin, I'd got up to 1000-2000$, depending on the quality.
For a professional studio, I couldn't care less as I wouldn't be the one paying ;)

@gosse

What engines have you seen that are available for $1000 - $2000.

BTW everyone, would any of you consider using a free engine?

>>I don't get any joy of making obsolete games, but I want to get the "wow" effect when I do some never before seen amazing stuff.<<

I luv this guy..'obsolete' games are not about your 'wow' stuff, but about game, game game game=fun fun fun fun to play..by the way since you are not enjoying creating obsolete games, do you have something in your production line right now what is not obsolete...i would really like to see 'inventions' you talking about..

as for engine price..Im willing to pay up to 5K if engine is nice, multiplatform, with provided proven and stable exporters and let me use explosives and naked gurllz :)

I think up to 1k$ can be a nice sum for building the base of a quality product whilst still beeing affordable.

I'd consider using a free engine if it did what I wanted to do with it...

Hard to say. If the engine had specific features and simplified usage like most commercial products, great support, a guarunteed future, and popularity....sure.

Although realisticly, I haven't even remained comfortable with the engines I pay for, let alone the free engines.

Unfortunately it usually goes...Higher Cost = Higher Support, better future.

No idea what HeroEngine is tbh, but i'm sure if you paid for a license like that, you would have constant support from a team of people to impliment and fix features in the engine to fit your needs.

Depends on whether it makes coffee or not.

$100 tops. But then I'm only tinkering for fun. IF this were to become my line of work then I would splurge up to $125...

(OK - if it were for work it would all depend on cost/benefit and cost/expected profit analysis)

Unity Pro, which is 1500.

If I were to make a 3D game, it would probably be for fun and have more emphasis on gameplay, since I'm not going for a large audience... and for that I would probably use Python with a free engine like Panda3D.

The engine looks good enough and again, with an emphasis on gameplay, a free one would do just fine.

There's my two cents at least...

I would pay anything for an engine if it meant I could make a game and beat the competition to the crunch :D

Once I even considered licensing the Quake 3 engine when it was thier latest one I was told by Id I could use it for $5000 which seemed fair for an engine of that calibre at the time.

What?!?! A good engine can easily target this level of hardware AND any new cutting edge cards too... its gives your game the greatest market share.

To answer the thread question...

$100 to $200


BUT if it had some really juicy addition, lets say full client server support with a proven track record, Id double the above amount. Also the quality of the tools that come with the engine is a selling point.

To me the most important thing for an engines is speed, speed allows flexibility in game design... it can have the best documentation/samples/tools/fancy FX under the sun but if it can only render a few characters on the screen with uber powerful hardware... then that's a turn off for me personally.

That's a nice dream, but impossible to make. You could do it only by making two different engines, which however can use the same assets when possible. If you try to put both low end and high end stuff into one engine, then both parts suffer, and the engine would be bloated with useless stuff too, even the source code.

Oh my god, even the source code.

Once again i'm appeased that you're here and tell us how things really work.

I'm guessing he meant bloat on the lines of having to include additional media support (low poly model versions, craptasticly low resolution textures, etc), 'along' with bloated source code.



Has anyone here done anything successful with Unity? Is it a product worth investing into as an indie?

Blitz3D/DarkBasic are not engines. They are languages.

Aside from specific engines such as the Cry engne or Source for example, which I am sure licences would be quite high, there are a hge number of engines available for various purposes, and a lot of these have not been exploited for a particular game.

It would realy depend on what the engine offers and its suitability for what I have in mind.

tens of thousands is not unreasonable for some very good engines, considering the reeturn can be easily 30-40 times as much with a well marlketed product. Having an engine handle all the slow and painful aspects of game coding, freeing up the time for custmisation, media and of course, design and testing is a HUGE advantage considering the extremely tight deadlines imposed by so many producers now, which is reflected in the overwhelming number of very-delayed releases or buggy products.

@Retimer
I've used it for several client work and despite it's pros and cons it's the best overall solution i came across so far. If i remember correctly i once posted a link list here for some examples but you for sure also will find examples on their site or in the showcase forum.

there used to be a video application a while back called toaster - however I don't think it made coffee. $100,000's of dollars does seem like a ludicrous amount though.... the only game engine I've bought recently was Grey Aliens... the last one was about 24 years ago and technically speaking my mum and dad bought it - and it came on a C60 magnetic tape.

@Malice

Yes, I knew that Blitz3D and darkBASIC were languages, and not engines, and 3D Gamestudio considers itself an 'authoring environment' as opposed to an engine. I just used the term engine to make posting easier.

Taumel you do not put ' in its for possesive!!!

Not the Incentive "3D Construction Kit" was it?

" Who do these companies expect to pay for their systems "

I asked the same question , some time ago, on GameDev.net
I was replied by a guy who claimed to work for a well known software house

He said that someone in their team had the same idea
Why should we spend so much money ?
They purchased an Indie game engine

At the beginning everything was working fine but in the long run they came across a lot of unexpected bugs
The fps drammatically dropped
Their game refused to work on some platforms
The author was unable to provide any support

At the end they switched back to expensive engine and they paid the royalties

Dude, you need to pluck your head outa that LE hole you've got it permanently stuck in... have a look around you may be amazed what programmers can write with these newfangled computer languages there usin today...

I like also Max3D. But both LE and Max3D should be really divided into 2 engines each: low-end and high-end. At the moment neither is either, since at high-end both are still supporting SM3.0 and not SM4.0 only, and at low end they don't support SM1.0-3.0. Maybe there should be a seperate engine for each SM version?
Although you could consider MiniB3D as the low-end version already.

[edit] Should have read thread first, my post is rather redundant. Oops :P.

I've been sort of following the development of the HeroEngine along with the accompanying MMO, Hero's Journey. Almost got involved in the project a while back. Anyway, they've already sold at least 2 licenses to the engine that I know of.

From what I've seen of the HeroEngine, it would be worth that kind of money for what it would be used for - serious AAA MMO Development. It could and likely would shave off at least a years worth of development time, and that could easily save a large company $1M or more.

I'll be spending over $1000 for my Lisp Environment once my project gets further along. And that's far from a game engine. It does have a number of tools and packages though that set it far apart from a basic common lisp compiler - not to mention the code was 50-300% faster than when compiled on a competing compiler.

The Heroengine look interesting but how much does it cost?

If the engine had the simplicity of use like Blitz3D plus extra gubbings like shaders and shadows,and was a solid engine.I would probably chop off an arm or leg for it.

Blitz3D with Extra stuff would be nice.

Snap!