Look at the new released tech demo of the unreal engine on iphone. and build a game with it. oh, and do it NOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! The first game with this engine will be like pure gold & diamonds coming from the shower! OMG this is really to beautiful, i want UT3 Engine games nowwwwwww EDIT: Make a FPS game with beauty like this and il be happy to pay 20 euro's or more!
I believe it cost about a million dollars to license unreal engine on consoles. Not sure what the price is for iPhone but a game will probably need to sell at 20 euros a copy to make back any money.
It is free to use the UDK. There is a percentage royalty though once you release a game. Not sure if the same percentage will apply to iOS games, but I've read that it is 25% on consoles.
I like that business model... Free to use and develop and have them take a percentage. Some engines are pretty expensive for the advance features and a lot of indies can't foot the bill up front.
Also don't forget that this was just a demo. It takes A LOT to go from a demo to an actual game, and several developers have had issues with Unreal Engine 3 not delivering on features they promised. Now if Epic release a game themselves, that will be a different matter.
And it was a demo that: "...a small team of Epics programmers, artists and testers created Epic Citadel in just eight weeks of development time." If that small team consisted of 7 people it translate to more than a year's worth of man hours. And that's for a project with zero gameplay... For the majority of iPhone developers something like this would be a huge undertaking. No doubt we'll see some stellar games with this technology but it requires some substantial investements both in time and money...
And don't forget that you need a few years to understand the engine and being able to make assets, shaders etc .of that quality. Still quite interesting new engine
It is a very nice demo, but it is the quality of the artwork that is stand-out as much as it is the game engine. Don't assume that you will get that quality just from using the Unreal engine.
I agree with Moonjump, and at the same time I think heavy 3D games on the iPhone are just somewhat of a waste of the mobile phones battery life. I would rather play games with 2D graphics, similar to the DS graphics that will last longer than games that can only last me say 2 hours with amazing PC graphics. That is what my PS3 is for.