Hello Ronbon,
Thanks for your interest again and taking a look at the front side of HeroEngine. I will let users report what they see, and those on current live can report some of the changes and improvements we have made, as well as what they see coming ahead.
When i talk to those interested in HeroEngine i try to make sure what type of project they want to make or learn. If it is a single player or simple multi player game or project, I tend to refer them to another engine, if it is a persistent world for a large scale multi player or an MMO, I will explain more about HeroEngine and what it has to offer then let them ask questions and make the choice they wish.
I believe in the right tool for the right job.
Regarding Pricing: For the pricing, you had mentioned you use Unity in several of your projects. Do note that
$99 a year for two seats/developers (or any subscription package) includes the following:
- Full hosting and sever costs
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Real time collaboration (not in any other engine)
- Customized Repository (Clint side customized FTP) with no setup on users end
- Built in art-pipeline (which you can customize)
- SpeedTree tools for all seats
- Granny3d
- Granny Animation
- and much more
For the revenue once your game starts making money covers the following:
- Pesonalized assistance and support for your games servers*
- Full Hosting costs on Elastic game servers (**up to your 30% revenue costs)
- Unlimited storage
- Worry Free bandwidth and traffic costs
- Custom built Client tools including Client builds (game exe)
- Custom support for when going into Alpha, Beta and Live
- Option to move to Binary or Source (at lower or no royalty costs)
- Option to buy out royalties
* Once you move to Beta, your game will be exported to a personalized server. Where you will have your Dev server, Test/Staging server and Live server(s).
**We do have a 90 day grace period to help you and us bring down costs - most of the time this turns out to be fairly simple to fix. So we do offer that full support for any games that are entering into beta throughout their post launch process as well.Comparisons:I am not sure if you can pay for just servers or even a single Speedtree subscription at this cost. I have looked at and do watch the subscription prices for Unity, and when you go beyond the Personal with many limitations, including users and revenue limitations, the first starts at
$25 a month ($300 a year) per seat/developer.
I am not sure if they offer any of the above yet or not. I know you can opt in for team tools at a cost including storage and limited git/p4/svn integration at a cost.
We also provide support and assistance on top of the above from live support in Discord to personalized support.
Always Open to Ideas:I am always welcome in ways we can improve our services and how we can best fit the communities needs. This is a discussion we actually do have often from both Hero clients and non Hero clients in discord. I have gotten a lot of good ideas from the community for the up coming HE3.
So i ask you;
What can we do to make the pricing better in your mind?
Best regards,
Sarrene'