Hi,

With both engines there are costs, UE4 is not completely free, you end up paying royalties, while with Esenthel you don't pay any royalties, instead you pay a subscription fee.

UE4 is very powerful and popular, however it may also be very difficult to use.

Esenthel on the other hand is designed to be very easy to use.

So in the end it's about which engine makes you more comfortable to work with.

You can download and try Esenthel for free, to see if you like it.

Thanks

I've used Unreal for years, and i've gotten quite used to it. I'd rather pay royalties as the amount is very small, and that's only appicable to titles you gain profit from, whereas a subscription is much higher given development times and not good long term.

From reviews, apparently tutorials are available only for subscribers. That turns me away. I would like to know how to use and properly test a product before buying it. Putting everything behind a paywall is bad.

UE4's tutorials were free and online for everyone to use.

Hi,

The reviews are actually incorrect.
The engine includes more than 100 free tutorials with full code included.

Around 99% of them can be started, except only a few which require some extra functionality available only in licensed version.

Yes, however if your game is making big bucks, then 5% of the sales can be much much bigger than Esenthel's 11$ per month.

Thanks!

Neither UE4 nor Unity5 are truly free. They both have strings attached. There are not very many truly free engines that have an editor and IDE and everything built in. The only one I know of is Godot Engine - it's MIT licensed (very liberal open-source license) and it's very nice. But it's not available on Steam, you'd have to download it yourself.

Though I haven't used it, Blender has an integrated game engine and it is also free on Steam.

The problem with a subscription model is you have to pay for it through the entire development of the game before your product is earning you anything. And if you end up having to scrap the project, you paid for nothing.

The benifit of the royalty model is you don't have to pay anything until *after* your product is already making money for you. And if your product never makes any money you never have to pay anything.

I do agree with the dev on one thing - $11/mo is extremely reasonable for software intended for you to make a commercial product with.

I imagine the reason they are charging a subscription fee is not because they believe it's a better model, but because they are a small company and need the revenue stream right now. IE - they don't have the resouces to wait until your game is finished and making money before they get paid.

I'm not trying to push people away from Esenthel. I haven't used it so I don't really have an opinion about it and I wouldn't be here on their forums if I wasn't at least curious about it.

However... if you are new to game development I highly recommend going with a free engine first. Your first project is all about learning what you didn't know you didn't know and discovering what you need from an engine.

If I were someone with a game creation system or library at the moment I would drop any upfront fees and go to a royalty model. I would also think hard about what differentiates me from UE4 and Unity5 and capitalize on that difference. If I didn't think that was viable I would move into the addon market and create content and systems for either UE or Unity and put it on their asset store.

Originally posted by MaxDiehard:

UE4 is one of the most powerful engines available, and is free to use. What makes this one unique that justifies the subscription?

Hey there, my opinion is that going for an engine is a very project specific choice.
At the surface it might seem obvious to go for a well known engine but as soon as you set some specific custom functionality goals for your project you might see that maybe it's better to evaluate a wider range of engines than just the well advertised ones.

At the time i started i evaluated at least UE, Unity, Esenthel, and Leadwerks having in mind an open world game and the reason that made me choose Esenthel was that it combined a well built-in world streaming system, some very good terrain editing tools, and mesh access via code that allowed me to build a custom voxel solution. Plus Esenthel's API felt easier to follow and find whatever custom solution i wanted to implement.

UE4 has royalties, but only after you make at least $3000 in a 3 month period. So far I've found it to be very intuitive, and their blueprint system makes things so much easier, even for people with less knowledge.

Then there's the graphical capabilities, native PBR support, and the guys at EPIC are working with the blender community to improve the workflow there as well. Not to mention that Unreal engine has a long history of being able to run smooth in pretty much everything but a potato.

UE4 also has a huge and helpful community, as well as a ridiculous volume of tutorials available at many locations all over the internet.

With all the major engines cutting the cost of acquisition, even EPIC understood the need to make their engine more accessible financially.

The earlier post of UE4 being very difficult to use is total crap.

I have worked with previous versions of UE before, and also done one game engine from scratch. I have taken U5 for a test run and am currently experimenting with CryEngine 3. UE handles a true MMO pretty well and is still doing so 12 years later. CryEngine 3 is available on Steam the same as here and also has a royalty based option, has great support and so far is proving better performance than the UE versions that I have worked with in the past, and for me has been easy to work with.

So the question I have is what sets this engine apart from those. I have read the responses in here but not seen anything concrete to justify using this one over Cry or UE for that matter. An idiot proof IDE isn't, by the way, anything that gets points in my opinion. If you do not understand coding at it's basic form, then having a visual IDE that does most of the thinking for you is a handicap. The IDE is not going to fix the bugs or create a better concurency system for you. Rather it degrades a developer's understanding of how everything works.

Dollar signs mean a lot to the bean counters, true enough. But if a developer is going to put their heart into a game project they need something that performs, is versitile, and supports the style of game development needed. Platform support?

I have not been impressed by Unity 5, either. UE impressed me and that isn't easy. Cry has managed to do even better, and with the upcoming support for mac OSx that goes even farther. So before I waste my time taking a test spin with your engine, what sets your engine apart that makes it worth my time to try it out?

:D

Originally posted by esenthel:

With both engines there are costs, UE4 is not completely free, you end up paying royalties, while with Esenthel you don't pay any royalties, instead you pay a subscription fee.

In my case, the lower system requirements of Esenthel is an important factor for me to consider the engine, and it has a nice feature set.

What exactly makes this engine "next gen" as the description states on the store page?