Not sure if that price is accurate or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Think of it this way, the alternative is hiring a team of people for a year or two to develop a new engine. Plus, I'm sure that there is a certain level of support and a huge knowledge base to draw from.
There isn't one fixed cost for the Unreal Engine. It varies depending on the nature of the deal with Epic (which can vary a whole lot) the size of the game, how many platforms, etc etc. If you're curious how much it is, contact Mark Rein.
At the College I used to go to, Unreal 3 was 1.2 million dollars, and 40-60 thousand dollars for each install. We had it in about 12 machines. Was really fun to use, though.
Cant see UBER paying that for the engine, there are only about 500,000 entries on the leaderboards, MNC costs a about 10(UK) so they couldn't of made alot of profit.
So, I've read about this in the past (hey, I'm curious). As already indicated, I bet there are different deals, depending on who you are, and what you're doing. Also, I believe there's a considerable distinction between Unreal 2 and Unreal 3 (which is MNC? I would have assumed 2... but I don't know). A link to the unreal developer kit (UDK) licensing page - http://udk.com/licensing.html They have some examples of how to use & pay for licensing the UDK (Unreal 3?) - from their page: "A team creates a game with UDK that they intend to sell. After six months of development, they release the game through digital distribution and they earn $15,000 in the first calendar quarter after release. Their use of UDK during development requires no fee. Upon release they would pay US $99.99 for a Royalty Bearing license. After earning $15,000, they would be required to pay Epic $2,500 ($0 on the first $5,000 in revenue, and $2,500 on the next $10,000 in revenue). On subsequent revenue, they are required to pay the 25% royalty." So, there's some info. And, keep in mind they may be operating under a specially created contract.
We use Unreal 3. Unreal 2 is considered dead tech, and there is no official version that runs on modern consoles. There were a number of Unreal 2 and Unreal 2.5 engine games that were on the XBox and even the PS2, but most of these were heavily modified versions of the engine sometimes to the point of only using the editing tools and rewriting the rendering engine from scratch and large portions of the rest. I know of at least two studios that bought the Unreal engine license and then gutted everything from the ground up but the editor. Depending on the license they signed with Epic they may or may not report that they use the Unreal engine at all. There's also a version of Unreal 2.5 called UE2x that was made for Unreal Championship 2 internally at Epic Games, but I'm unsure how many studios outside of Epic used this version. Bioshock 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction both use Unreal 2 for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but they're in that camp of places that vastly rewrote the rendering engine for previous titles and have simply continued with their own version of the tech. Unreal 3 was designed to work on the PS3 and Xbox 360 internally, so no additional engine work needs to be done to get it running on consoles. I'm oversimplifying it a good deal, but essentially all you need to get Unreal 3 running on a console is the engine and a development hardware for that console.
I'm not sure. My school got Unreal 3 pretty much the day it was made available. We had it installed on about 15 computers and used it for classes and our own games. The fact that it was more widely used on our campus might have been why it was so expensive, but I have no idea. I was a student, not in accounting. =P
I'm guessing you sat down at the software, someone thought that the UDK was expensive for people, and made some bold (and out of control) claim to you that it was so expensive for the school - probably they based it on some heresay, too (telephone game). I don't think any school would ever consider spending that much on software... Really, they'd just use something else since schools are a business (and typically catered to by software companies). Regardless, here's info from the same url as before: http://udk.com/licensing.html "The UDK is FREE for educational use. Feel free to use it in your schools curriculum. Educational institutions can use UDK under our "FREE for educational and non-commercial use" policy, even though they're charging tuition, and we'd love to have you teaching Unreal Engine 3 as well. No additional license is required for faculty or students. Your students are encouraged to use UDK inside or outside of school to learn game development and for any other non-commercial purposes. "
Actually it was one of the programming teachers that mentioned it being very expensive, and I could see my old college spending that much if they felt they needed it. But I do stand corrected.
This is one of those things we can't talk about due to contractual issues. You really need to talk to Epic to get pricing on Unreal. I will say that making games in general is a very expensive proposition.
