3 ms·

IMHO, 5% works great for indies and small devs. It lowers the downside risk of an unprofitable game and only gets expensive after you can afford it. It does n

IMHO, 5% works great for indies and small devs. It lowers the downside risk of an unprofitable game and only gets expensive after you can afford it. It does not work well for large-budget AAA games. In those setups, only a small percentage of revenue goes to the developer after paying back publishers, marketing and distribution. Taking 5 out of that is a huge hit. That's why Epic explicitly expects large budget games to negotiate a custom deal. That's something Epic has a long history of with UE 1,2&3.

AimHere 12y ago
The 5% Epic takes is from of the gross product revenue rather than the net. In an age where some AAA games can sell a few million copies and still not turn a profit, Epic is smart enough to pick the model that avoids losing out to Hollywood accounting. I don't know enough about the games industry to know whether 5% of the gross is an overly large chunk to spend on the engine developer. It does sound reasonable to me, but if not, the onus would be on the dev, not Epic, to find some leverage to renegotiate a better deal.