There are thousands of players out in the world today who love the simplicity associated with their current iOS games, like Angry Birds. They’re small, cheap, and fun for the most part. But there is still quite a large community out there that wants to see iOS games take the next step. They want to see development teams creating full fledged gaming experiences, much like the new Infinity Blade game. Epic studios put together a masterpiece iOS game, using their new Unreal Engine. Well, that wait won’t be quite as long as originally thought.
Tomorrow, Epic will be releasing its Unreal Engine that was behind the highest grossing app of all time, Infinity Blade, and released to all developers, for free nonetheless. But it will only be free to the developers that will be offering their created content for free to the consumer. In a nutshell, this means that if a company desires to charge for their game developed with the Unreal Engine development kit, it will cost them money. The penalties development teams face if they do try to sell a game developed with the Unreal Engine, will include a $99 fee, along with 25% of royalties of first $5,000.00 in sales. This leads on that we will be seeing a ton of great games using this new engine being made available for download, at the cost of nothing.
The development kit behind Infinity Blade can now rest in the hands of all game developers interested in developing for the relatively new gaming platform, and be able to create games at least as beautiful, if not more so than Infinity Blade. This also means that Epic's Infinity Blade has now emerged as a cornerstone for the next generation of mobile gaming on our iOS devices.
It’s truly an exciting day for mobile gamers! As now we will be able to see what other developers will do with the new engine, to undoubtedly further the evolution of mobile gaming. Before we get too excited about the future possibilities of mobile gaming, we need to remind ourselves of something. Simply because everyone now has access to the Unreal Engine development kit, doesn’t necessarily mean we're going to see games the quality of Infinity Blade release every other day. On top of that, it takes a pretty large heap of cash to develop blockbuster titles on any platform these days. But Ranters worry not, because they will be coming.
Who knows what the future brings for mobile gaming. Ranters, are there any thoughts or ideas you would like to see get explored in future iOS games? What do you think about Epic’s generosity in releasing their Unreal Engine for free? Do you think more development teams will be offering quality mobile games for free, or will it leave a larger imprint with the companies that can afford to pay Epic and charge us for their games?
Sources: ThatVideoGameBlog, Destructoid