Just to add to this, if you use UE4 you now get access to the CPU PhysX code too as described here.

I've been using UE4 since August 2014, and I'm more than happy to pay the 5% royalty. That's nothing compared to what I'm getting in return. Steam takes a 30% cut, so I'm already looking at a 65% cut of any potential sale, and that's before the tax man comes and takes his cut. This is where my accounting skills start to fail -- do I get to deduct the 35% cuts from my taxes as "expenses"? Or do I exclude them from my gross revenue? I don't know, but that's a question for someone more versed with the finances.

I look at it from a business perspective: Even if UE4 costs a 5% royalty fee, I am able to get much more value than 5% by using their tool. Imagine my game makes $1m gross sales (which is crazy wild). I pay Epic $50k. That's equivalent to the yearly wages of an employee -- who has the production equivalent of hundreds of employees. That's like paying 100 highly skilled employees $500 for an entire year to build the state of the art tech. Obviously, this is more of a business case for using a third party engine than anything else. But, in my experience, the place where UE4 really shines isn't just in their editor, but in the rapid development cycle of new feature releases (and bug fixes), the open source code with the opportunity to submit changes to the master branch, the super close community interaction all the epic staff has -- I mean, nobody from Unity has bought me beers while talking about their engine and trying to figure out how to help support me. Just the other day, Tim Sweeny himself answered a burning question I had on their forums. For the value I get from Epic, I have no problems sharing a portion of what I make. When everyone is successful, we all win :)

Unity currently beats UE4 with market place content and a mature community, but I say, give it time and UE4 will surpass Unity here.

Anyways, now that UE4 is free, it's just the icing on the cake for why I love Epic :)

You only have to pay for Unity if your revenue/funding was above $100k the previous fiscal year and only if you wish to keep using the software, it has no effect on products you've allready built(regardless of how well they are selling). The license is for the tools, not the games built using them so you will never owe them anything.

If you're the kind of studio with project timelines of less than a year, sounds like there's a huge loophole there for companies that register a new LLC for each project...
Not suggesting people should do this, but in my experience, having a large collection / hierarchy of independent legal entities for insulation of debt/risk seems to be common for larger studios (so they can declare bankruptcy without actually losing any assets, or having to pay employees severance/redundancy entitlements), and having many legal entities seems common in the Indie scene as the core team often splits and reforms between projects.

As an employee of a large studio, I've seen the registered business number on my pay-cheques change from one month to the next, and then only been told that I worked for a new company now because I enquired... I've also seen differ groups of staff within the same studio have different business numbers on their pay-cheques to each other, because it turns out it was beneficial for the company's taxes to actually exist as two companies. Often shell corporations are used to hold the assets "owned" by dev studios (who then "rent" them from the shell) so that the studio can be folded with zero notice...

Many Indies will found a company to make a game, then move on to a new company for the next game. Even if one of those companies makes millions, it no longer employs anyone aside from directors/executives, so has no need to license any dev tools...

Just to add to this, if you use UE4 you now get access to the CPU PhysX code too as described here.

Actually it seems that if you sign up as developer in nVidia's site, you also get access to PhysX code now.

And starting this month, the PhysX SDK is available free with full source code for Windows, Linux, OSx and Android onhttps://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX. [...]To access the GitHub repository, simply join the NVIDIA GameWorks Developer Program and accept the click-through EULA for PhysX source code. Full details can be found here.

what's the different between this NV Physx SDK and that you obtain on the NV developer site?

It says right in the article. https://developer.nvidia.com/content/latest-physx-source-code-now-available-free-github

It says right in the article. https://developer.nvidia.com/content/latest-physx-source-code-now-available-free-github

thank you. So they just removed the gameworks pogram registration ^_^

thank you. So they just removed the gameworks pogram registration

Um, read it again I guess?

EDIT: Okay, I'll list it:

1. You have to sign up for Gameworks and accept an EULA.

2. Now you get also PhysX cloth and destruction code.

3. Now you also get the sources for Linux, Android and OSX, not just the Windows SDK.

I've been using UE4 since August 2014, and I'm more than happy to pay the 5% royalty. That's nothing compared to what I'm getting in return. Steam takes a 30% cut, so I'm already looking at a 65% cut of any potential sale, and that's before the tax man comes and takes his cut. This is where my accounting skills start to fail -- do I get to deduct the 35% cuts from my taxes as "expenses"? Or do I exclude them from my gross revenue? I don't know, but that's a question for someone more versed with the finances.

I look at it from a business perspective: Even if UE4 costs a 5% royalty fee, I am able to get much more value than 5% by using their tool. Imagine my game makes $1m gross sales (which is crazy wild). I pay Epic $50k. That's equivalent to the yearly wages of an employee -- who has the production equivalent of hundreds of employees. That's like paying 100 highly skilled employees $500 for an entire year to build the state of the art tech. Obviously, this is more of a business case for using a third party engine than anything else. But, in my experience, the place where UE4 really shines isn't just in their editor, but in the rapid development cycle of new feature releases (and bug fixes), the open source code with the opportunity to submit changes to the master branch, the super close community interaction all the epic staff has -- I mean, nobody from Unity has bought me beers while talking about their engine and trying to figure out how to help support me. Just the other day, Tim Sweeny himself answered a burning question I had on their forums. For the value I get from Epic, I have no problems sharing a portion of what I make. When everyone is successful, we all win

Unity currently beats UE4 with market place content and a mature community, but I say, give it time and UE4 will surpass Unity here.

Anyways, now that UE4 is free, it's just the icing on the cake for why I love Epic

Crossy Road has made $10 million, now Epic is getting $500,000 from you. That could pay for quite a few developers or rent a new office for awhile. Granted you still have another $9.5 million gross kicking around but Epic's cut can start to get quite large.

Looks like there will be the official public repository for PhysX run by NVIDIA, and another one inlayed inside UE4.

Im curious how far they will begin to stray from each other. As Nvidia claims to review pull requests from the UE4 branch to the mainline, although im sure there will be disagreements and certain features will be in UE4 that arnt in the main repo.

Although this is fairly common occurence, its not so common for such public codebases (as I wouldnt be surprised if the UE4 version gets more eyeballs than the official NVIDIA version).

In regaurds to the Royalties, UE4 is objectively an extremely good value (as well as Unity/CryEngine/etc...), there is no purpose in further discussing it, as it will just keep going back and forth in perpituity, anything of value has already been said. So I implore y'all to discuss a different reason UE sucks or is awesome or meh.