Interesting article on T3D

#1 That truly is a shame.

#2 I'm not a fan of Delta use.. but overall this doesnt seem to bad actually.

#3

Quote:Although GarageGames has traditionally offered two pricing tiers for its engines, Torque 3D marks the first time there will be a feature delta between the two.

To get access to web publishing, as well as other advanced features such as globally dynamic lighting and the full source code, developers will have to step up to the $1,000-per-seat Professional license.

Damn! Not only is it a shame, but also the path of marketing evil.

#4 Maybe I'm in the minority here because I don't mind parting with my cash when I think it's warranted, but feature delta isn't a huge deal to me. Those extra features have an associated demand and development costs, both of which naturally cause prices to drift upwards. At the same time, it maintains a market for lower-end versions of the product.

#5 I believe it to be a bad move for GG. If I am going to spend another $1000 of my own money then I will go look at the competitors again.
There are a lot of them on the market and I already own licenses for most.
If the basic version has so many features missing from it then what's the point. Sounds like they went to the Unity 3D website and said hey let's do that. I really don't want to spend that much for the new version.
Very disappointing.

#6 I'm going to post a blog about this tomorrow, guys. The short answer here though is that, if you own TGEA right now, your price for Torque 3D Professional is only $505. That's pretty damn affordable considering all that's included. There won't be any discount for TGEA owners on Basic, as going from TGEA --> Basic would be a step back in some ways (no source code for example). However, Basic will be a really good fit for non-coders and designers who want to work on a team that solve issues requiring source code modifications.

Re: Unity's pricing schema, we're actually *significantly* less expensive per developer, AND you get source code with Pro. Unity offers nothing like that at all, even at $2,000 (the per-developer price for Unity Pro + their required proprietary version control).

If you haven't, check out the IRC log from yesterday for some more details. I think the pricing / licensing schema we decided on is a *very* good deal.

#7

Quote:I think the pricing / licensing schema we decided on is a *very* good deal.

I have no complaints when considering the deep discounts GG gave us. Basically we will get it for 50% off... which in my mind while welcome.. was more than I expected. I challenge anyone to go look around.. you won't find anything similar to GG (unless you like kidding yourself) except Unity, and even then they can't compete with this deal. Sorry Unity people.. I really like your engine, but it's true.


~LK~

#8 @Brett, With such a discount I will be getting the new version of course. That is appreciated, but I do fear that the price will deter new people from buying the engine who did not already own TGEA.
I have been doing this since the 90's and I have seen communities disappear many times when the price increased for upgrades. I am not saying that the engine is not worth the price, I am just saying that GG always stood for the little guy and provided a product with source code at a low price. Maybe I am wrong and things go on as before. Just don't want to see the community shrink. I like all the people here.

#9 @Brett
I was going to wait until you posted your blog on pricing to say this, but since I'm about to head out on vacation in a few hours I go ahead and do it here since my net access will be questionable for a couple day. These concerns might actually be moot by the time you post your blog.

Something I'm worried that may have been overlooked here is that $500 is a lot of scratch to come up with in just the span of a couple months with so little warning. True, you could say that we did have further warning when you started the pricing debate at the beginning of the year when you threw out that you felt the update was worth 1K.

Perhaps I was being a little naive, or just willfully ignorant as I didn't participate in the debate much at the time, but having been around for the past 4 or 5 years I've seen the same type of claim every time there's been a new engine or a paid update. So I was a bit surprised, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, when I saw that it actually was going to be the price. Keep in mind, I'm by no means saying it isn't worth that price.

I just hope this is something that's kept in mind while going forward.

#10 I know the price is more than justified... and that's all I can say about that.

But how seriously is GarageGames going to take support issues and bug fixes for the Basic version?

I predict a decline in community offered support and resources.

It kind of seems to me that for someone to make a full game with Torque 3D Basic will require the additional purchases of "Genre Kits". Will these "kits" replace the standard executable with new features? Before now so called kits were somewhat beneficial and helped quickly build a "genre generic" game but they weren't necessary like I assume they'll be for the binary only Basic version.

How will this affect content (code or art) providers who've had to modify the source to make their products work?

#11 Oh yeah, its definitely justified. That I know. I'm just concerned about the short lead time between price announcement and release.

Fortunately, for myself, I realized the fact that my birthday is next week. So I'm not as concerned as I was a day or so ago about being able to come up with the scratch. I do feel its still something that needs to taken into consideration for others.

I just referred to money as scratch twice in less than 10 minutes. This day is just getting too odd for me.

#12 Scott, can you lend us some scratch? I have an itch.....
:D

#13 Well that depends on the size of the itch.

After all, how much scratch can a code monkey itch, if a code monkey itch could scratch itch.

scratch