The engine pricing

[Ellement]

Hello , i would like to know what would be the engine price , after the V1 will be out?

[SolarPortal]

Currently we are looking at a £250 British Pounds version aswell as a £750 British Pounds version.

The £250 version will be a cutdown version of the 750, where you will not have access to the action c++ plugin SDK. This version will allow you to make commercial games that will release on Pc, iOS and Android.

The £750 version will have full c++ SDK to actions, in which you can make your own plugins to the engine and access them from the action editor. This version will allow you to make commercial games that will release on Pc, iOS and Android. Future Releases will also enable scene sharing over a network to enable team development in the same scene.

Obviously this is what we would like to happen and we will try our hardest to make this happen.

P.s. Both versions will possibly contain middleware from the pro industry. We will keep everyone informed of our progress with this.

[ant0N]

in my opinion it is too expensive. £ 250 = $399,875 = R 12 595,6... there Are many similar engines, for a lot cheaper. (Leadwerks = $200, S2 Engine = $108,494 and others)
with these prices you will lose a lot of customers.

[StarFire]

Thank you for your opinion on the proposed pricing ; )

The reason for our price range is that Skyline will ship with some top of the industry middleware such as Umbra (which we are currently evaluating). We could look at releasing a lower priced version with out these extras and being a non commercial version, this is something we will look into at a time closer to the release.

By providing a package with middleware this would compete directly with Unity, but our proposed pricing structure is a lot less than it would cost for similar tools in Unity!

For the money you are not just getting an engine that is crafted by passion, but excellent technical support and pro industry level documentation.

We have been talking about releasing Skyline at a low price such as £50? initially (beta) and when Skyline develops obviously we would hit the proposed price. We will also give many who can not afford Skyline other ways to become involved as we have been in a similar position in the past ourselves. This is all a long way off as we have a long journey to reach the vision of Skyline we started with.

We do welcome any suggestion you may have ; )

[ant0N]

good answer! Nice to hear that you are ready to go on concessions and cooperate.
I walked away from the Leadwerks community, just because a developer too focused on profit. I hope very much that with you is not .

[dbest]

£50: Non – Commercial license, No C++ Action SDK, Full Lua Scripting, Build for PC, plus all other editor features.
£250: Full Commercial License, Full C++ Action SDK, Full Lua Scripting, Build for PC, plus all the other features.
Taken the above from the web-site.

Will you be offering an evaluation version once the engine is released? This should be something to consider, if the engine is to increase its user base.
Torque3D is recently gone open-source. Unity3d offers a free version. Neo-Axis (also using Ogre3D) has a free non-commercial version. I could go on, but I am sure that you are aware of all the above. You should price the engine right.

[StarFire]

Evaluation version: If we maintain the current costing structure there will be some point an evaluation version.

Free Version: Currently our pricing is not fixed and still open to changes but I doubt we will offer a free version other than the evaluation. Although there will be opportunities for low income users to get their hands on a copy(concessions) as we are aware that not all economies are the same.

Pricing:
Ultimately it becomes a balancing act between the cost of Skyline and ourselves being able to afford to keep on developing Skyline!

So far we are self funded but this can not go on forever as we are only a small home studio and need to have an income to live. We do have a lot of passion for developing Skyline but passion for a project is great as long as you can afford to live

What should a product like Skyline cost?
Considering what other indie engine costs and of course the high end pro tool sets which licence for ridiculous prices. We welcome any discussion on pricing to help us make a fair pricing structure.

Our aim is to offer a pro tool set to the indie developer with out the strict licence.

We have been discussing about selling Skyline for £50 for all content including sdk etc but this would rely on a very large user base, we have the rest of this year(2013) to make our final costing decision and direction.

Originally we started to develop Skyline for creating our own games as we can not afford the high end licenses but we wanted cutting edge graphics and tools. We have managed to be able to develop Skyline due to the use of excellent middleware and many years of experience working on game technology, Art and programming. We then though how cool it would be to offer this tool set to others and here we are

We welcome any discussion on how we can set up a fair pricing structure for Skyline

[dbest]

Thumbs up for the evaluation version!

The pricing depends on your user-base and on the engine(s) that you are competing against. If you price High and then reduce the pricing (aka Torque) then you tend to upset a lot of the users who have been with you for a longer period of time. But if you price Low and then incrementally increase, there are chances that users may pay for it.

[StarFire]

Thanks dbest, that sounds like a very good way to approach this and will help to encourage new users, we have had a similar thoughts

If you price High and then reduce the pricing (aka Torque) then you tend to upset a lot of the users who have been with you for a longer period of time

Yes , We were one of these users

[Ellement]

Well all i want to see is good showreel, to prove the engine is really capable of making good looking games with good frames per second. After this i can pay you even 1500 dollars.

MORE Tutorials!!! All newcomers want to see is plenty of tutorials. Its easy as that.


Good luck

[StarFire]

Thanks for your ideas Ellement
We are working towards getting a couple of cool game level demos to show off Skylines capabilities. Currently looking at how to improve performance and make this an easy method for the end user to implement. So hopefully we should have a video available soon

Yes we agree tutorials are necessary and now Skylines look, feel and features are settling down we will find some time to get some tutorials written.

[ant0N]

If you make a lesson of creating the game from beginning to end, this will be a big plus. We can make the first game all together, the entire community

[StarFire]

Yes antON I think a community collaboration would be great. First we need to see how many people would be available to join in. I will make a separate post on this topic

[Ryzon]

I would love for the 750 pound license to include a 4-6 team license. That would sell like crazy. From my recent and past knowledge this is what makes Unity not so team friendly. $1500 per person, so if you have a team of 3-4 you already must put quite a price tag in on development. Now Kickstarter is a good option but people are very picky and not all projects see a penny. If you guys could swing a nice promotional deal like that for the first 1,000 purchases or whatever that would be reason enough for many people to craw to you from other engines. I know myself with kids and other bills looming everyday, that I would love for a powerful engine with great features to actually think of the buyers for once and not their pockets. I know this is a business and it took hard work but in the long run you will have a better community, more buyers, more advertisement worldwide, fan popularity, etc. This will eventually become very good business and keep customers coming back and talking about it to their developer buddies. This is something I have not seen yet. Unity looked promising but soon went to greed. Remember in any business the largest market of buyers in the blue collar.

Sell the engine to 10 rich users or 500 middle classed ones? Just a quick example.

[StarFire]

We have had many chats about engine pricing and licensing. It s one of the main reasons why we started to develop Skyline in the first place due to restrictive and over priced licensing if you wanted access to high end tech.

Another point with pricing is that not all countries have the same economy. We would love to have a general price and have this price be relative to each country thereby enabling everyone access to top game technology, we want everyone to be able to afford Skyline

Our current thought on pricing is £75 (for standard economies and a relative reduced price for others in lower economic areas) for the base level, this is every cool Skyline feature excluding the action development C++ SDK. Obviously with a license to sell commercially
(The C++SDK will be developed at a later time which would probably sell for £250)

Disclaimer: Nothing is yet set in stone and is still been researched, especially with how we can do the relative pricing system

[Ryzon]

Those prices are still a far cry from the over pricing in engines like Unity. I like the pricing as is for now.