The question is about counterfactuals

If unreal cost money up front, would this have been built? No.

Unreal is saying: hey, we contributed to 1/20th of your success, because you could not have done this without us.

Thus, in the event that you're extremely successful, yes, you'll owe unreal a million dollars. But that's only because you made 20mm and keep 19mm for yourself.

That's an incredible bargain.

Surely better than this engineer having to pay $100k upfront which would likely mean he never made the game at all. 5% over a million seems pretty reasonable to me. I guess it'd be an issue if profit margins were thin, but that wouldn't be the case here.

To be able to use this tech in the first place? I have no glue about business problems but this sounds far better then the 30% rip off by apple and Google app stores....

Yeah, you also get updates to the engine, Steam's share is bigger, and you still keep everything else.

I would be okay with getting 75% of everything earned over $1M.

If you get a million dollars in revenue as a solo dev, it's pretty much just winning the lottery. You've already spent all the working hours to make the game, so it's pretty much all profit at that point. What costs do you even have?

It's a free choice to use the engine, you can use another engine or make your own if 5% is too much for you.

Should unreal give away their work for free? What is your argument. They don’t take a single royalty until $1mm and 5% is not a wild number considering it’s making use of the engine.

Heck steam takes 30% which is much more egregious but factoring in costs of running steam, payment processing and the free marketing its almost always worth it.

Share a counter argument to how it should be please.