Game Engines | What has changed.......Commercially
OK so we all have played a lot of video games since our childhood but we have been always curious about whats under the hood.Well this curiosity lead very few of us to world of mods or some of us ends in game industry like me (Not really :)).But there are some problems in becoming a game developer and living a cool life, most common one is we don't want to learn 3-4 programming languages and then dump hours in learning game development and then making a game by putting more hours (or may be days or maybe months or years).
So whats the solution, as the game industry moved on the softwares called game editors . These are built upon game engines to make game development more easy for game designers.
Hmm sounds good well more good as the time passed more tools came making the process of game making easier and easier with less and less code and math involved. But then arrived the "Coding less game development tools".These tools changed everything they were so easy to use that now even a grandma(or may be a 7 year old ) was able to create flappy bird. These were so successful that giant players in game dev industry like Unreal also have some thing like visual programming.
The Only problem they all had was that they(almost all of them) were not free.But tools like construct 2 and stencil and clickteamfusion did very well and people made a lot of money with them.
Most of them costed less than $500 returning thousands if not millions some times.
But this success was though limited to only big and hardcore game developers or those who made something addicting.
So what about people like us who just want to make games and share them with their friends or might wanna earn something out of it but cannot devote their lot of time and don't wanna pay hundreds of dollars......................,
The solution is using a free one......so people did and the demand of free ones increased rapidly.....this was felt by many commercial engines and they adopted 'free engine policy'...for example the Unity 3d is free for use until your company or you don't earn more than $100,000.This was not the only example there are many others like, Unreal engine made there engine free completely just like unity. So is this the era of free game engines where we see thousands of free game engines .Well there was a time when i was newbie(making snake game in C++ ), unity used to cost $1500 straight and most of the big engines had a free trial for non commercial use.
But this is not only the only thing that has changed over time......many engines have now adopted subscription based service.Let me explain, remember those days when you used to check for sales on different engines and their addons and plugins and used to buy them forever for few or few hundred .
But now things have changed aren't they , lets talk about "construct -the coding less game creator"...for years it was available for just 130 dollars on official website and even less while on sale on steam.So what we got today is Construct 3......... the only problem is that it is not available for sale instead you can subscribe to use it for next one year just for a $100.
So a lot changed about game engines.Its not that only paid have changed.Many engines like Godot and Gdevelope are still free, open source and you can use them free forever. Gdevelop which offers some tools as Construct is a pay what you want software and was started as a hobby project in 2007.But these free ones have become more powerful and are capable of challenging paid ones.
Ultimately it depends on you that what business model do you like nut one thing for sure game industry is all time changing industry and we'll see more improvement and amazing business models
and games and developers in near future.
Hope you loved this post, if so share this with fellow Developers......If you want to say something comment box is always there...:).
See you soon
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