Epic recently held a two day “Unreal University” event in London, offering free seminars to students or just enthusiasts looking to make games. The catch? The seminar taught students how to make games using the free Unreal Development Kit, or UDK.
In an interview with PCGamer, when asked how their UDK measures up to the immensely popular Source Development Kit, or SDK, Epic described SDK as “long in the tooth.” When probed further as to why it makes more sense to choose UDK, Epic European territory manager Mike Gamble had this to say: “Because it’s current, right up to now. It’s DX11 if you want it. It’s what we built Gears with. Source is a little long in the tooth, isn’t it? There’s a whole lot of modding done with Source, but I think you’ll find a lot more original content made with the UDK.”
Epic has been pushing the Unreal Development Kit, even raising the bar earlier this year on the amount a developer could make from a game before having to pay Epic for a license. Despite these attempts at muscling Source out, the numbers show that every month Source is consistently and vastly ahead of their competitors in both modding and level design.
In defense of this discrepancy, level designer Alan Willard responded with this: “Valve has a history of buying mods. I think that’s somewhat attractive to people. It’s like hey, maybe if I make a really good mod Valve will buy it.” In the context of success stories such as Counter-strike and Team Fortress, he may have a point.
Gamble goes on to say that while it may be true that there are fewer mods based on the Unreal Engine, their community has their eye on a bigger prize. “Our community is building games. There’re IOS games, there’re PC games. Things like Hawken. That’s a real poster child for us.”
I don’t know what Valve makes of all this, but those sound like fighting words to me.
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