UT Master Challenge // Conceptart and UT business model?
polycounter lvl 15
So i`ve seen the announcement being passed around on fb and saw the issue being raised of this being a "free labour" challenge.
Instead of keeping it rumors and rants on social media maybe we could have a topic with some clarification on Epics business model for UT and how you`re justifying this contest? Will UT be a 100% free game (which would make it less of an issue) or will there be money made off of it (free to play with micro transactions?)
First of all let me say , i`ve entered a lot of PC contests so far. I never care about the prices as long as its a cool theme and i have the time then i`m in (like i`m doing with Blood/Petrol).
But in the scenario of it not being a free game you`re asking people to actually do design work for a commercial game without real compensation or the chance of actual compensation when someone wins (like the dota challenges had).
Now numerous students will jump at this and there might be some great entries but i don`t think there will be a lot of working professionals entering this contest and that would be a shame.
Anyway i won`t be entering this contest since i have my hands full already with petrol blood, but i`d hate to see this thing blow out of proportion on social media like a lot of things do these days when it could be resolved with one simple post explaining the situation.
also please don`t shoot the messenger :P i will always love you greentooth
Instead of keeping it rumors and rants on social media maybe we could have a topic with some clarification on Epics business model for UT and how you`re justifying this contest? Will UT be a 100% free game (which would make it less of an issue) or will there be money made off of it (free to play with micro transactions?)
First of all let me say , i`ve entered a lot of PC contests so far. I never care about the prices as long as its a cool theme and i have the time then i`m in (like i`m doing with Blood/Petrol).
But in the scenario of it not being a free game you`re asking people to actually do design work for a commercial game without real compensation or the chance of actual compensation when someone wins (like the dota challenges had).
Now numerous students will jump at this and there might be some great entries but i don`t think there will be a lot of working professionals entering this contest and that would be a shame.
Anyway i won`t be entering this contest since i have my hands full already with petrol blood, but i`d hate to see this thing blow out of proportion on social media like a lot of things do these days when it could be resolved with one simple post explaining the situation.
also please don`t shoot the messenger :P i will always love you greentooth
Replies
It's being developed with the community and by the community with our guidance.
Definitely agree with that. But this game is a strange situation because it's kind of a crowd-sourced community-created and driven game. Or at least that's their goal. They are just trying to encourage more people to participate in their open dev. Weird? yes. Potential for exploitation? Yes. Are they doing it in good faith? So far.
While this does seems like a gray area it is still reflective of an extremely alarming trend that is rising with the whole crowd-source revolution of enterprises deeming the work someone puts into a project enough reward in itself. Artist that participate in such practices must understand that outside the immediate benefit of exposure they may be doing great harm in the long term to their future careers as well as the careers of their peers. Expect to see more companies in the future hiding behind the shroud of 'community driven' as a chance to get free labor. We need to be careful where this road is leading.
Was just having this same discussion with a colleague. Granted I'm eternally cynical, but in an industry that is notorious for exploiting talent, when I see this type of trend I assume the worst instead of adopting a 'best intentions' viewpoint.
So does Epic expect the winner to crank out more concept art for free?
I think this contest is really cool and exciting, but the way it is presented by Epic is a tad odd.
I never participate in a contest solely for the point of reaping rewards. I find it as a fun way to do something different.
That being said, "the opportunity to produce a few more concepts to fully flesh out your vision for the theme or level" seems like clever wording for something ulterior.
I don't think Epic would be seeking to take advantage of people, but perhaps its presentation needs adjustment.
Here's my view (may be completely wrong so please correct me!!)
If I don't have a job, I need to constantly be working on portfolio pieces to reach the level of a lot of the guys here on Polycount/Artstation. Lets say that there is a competition that is like an environment challenge and has super cool sci-fi requirements. If I'm trying to add an environment to my portfolio, why wouldn't I do the challenge?
They build a portfolio of personal work like they've always done...
I could just be naive too..
Edit: Back on topic. Overall, It'll be cool to have a foundation (as others have said) to build mods. Recently, it seems like there hasn't been any good modern/sci-fi FPS's to mod with good editors (definitely not hammer). It'll be cool to have a game out that's easier to mod.
The idea behind that is that one drawing is rarely enough to fully express a design or theme. So one of the rewards would be to iterate with our art director and then produce a few more drawings, if you want to, in order to fully flesh out your designs and ideas.
You know, or don't.
To professional artists who already have an art director, that's probably not that enticing but for someone young trying to get into the industry it could be a bigger deal.
From this Polygon article/interview with Steve Polge, apparently there will be no microtransactions;
I really agree with Epic's practices so far. As eventually producing games will be something that the people will take back from the mega studios with the new technology and tools and stuff like you see in Unreal 4 making it more and more possible for smaller teams to do incredible stuff without breaking the bank.
But much like trying to extend a helping hand to a random stranger in a prison yard, even though it's the nice thing to do, it can come off as awkward and suspicious, BECAUSE it is the nice thing to do.
And for that, I'm going want to be keeping my eye on you Epic. Take that whatever way you will.
The unreal community has actually always been like this - it's one of the reasons it's been so successful
Id like to try and address some of the discussion about this concept art challenge.
Let me start by trying to explain our intent.
UT has always been a game driven by the community. Most of the best content has come from guys working hard on their own or with teams outside of Epic to produce amazing mods and add-ons. A lot of people working at Epic Games, including myself, started in the mod community making content for free, in our spare time.
This new Unreal Tournament game is our way to try to give something back.
I absolutely understand your concerns. As an artist myself Ive been agonizing over how to reward contributors and we have discussed multiple options internally.
One question keeps coming to mind: How do we decide who gets paid and who doesnt?
Choosing not to offer a cash reward to winners was a difficult decision on many levels and weve thought long and hard about it.
We know that this situation is not ideal for everyone.
We understand your concerns and welcome practical, well-thought-out solutions. If you have them, please share. I promise we will listen.
This will be a FREE game. NOT free-to-play. Just free. Period.
We are working as an extremely small (and excited) team in-house.
This is a community centered collaboration, and when it succeeds then the community will benefit. We are merely the facilitators. We will set up the infrastructure that allows it to exist.
You will make it real.
Our plan for Unreal Tournament is to eventually put up a Steam Workshop-style Marketplace where the community will be able to sell content for the game. The content creators will make the lions share of those transactions, and Epic will make the minority.
This isnt a developer trick to get work for free. We are simply asking you to contribute if you like the idea.
No pressure.
There are some prizes, credit will be given, exposure, etc.
From my point of view this is a community outreach challenge that is trying to kick off something groundbreaking; a game developed in conjunction with the creative community. The idea is to allow people who wouldnt normally get the chance to contribute and join in something that could be amazing.
This is a learning process for us and we will fall down a few times before we learn to walk.
Please be patient as weve never done this before.
We welcome input and suggestions as to how we can make the process fair for everyone.
-Chris
Thanks for coming here Chris and directly addressing the community.
As for content being micro transaction based for the steam workshop style store. I just want your input as to how this is fair to the content creators, who did the rest of the game. In order to have that solid base for the store to work off a hell of a lot of hard work needs to be put into the game and it doesn't seem right that i could waltz in at the end being a professional and make higher quality assets (hypothetically speaking) and take a lions share of the profits.
I also want to know how you plan on addressing game credits, as to me it seems like there needs to be some sort of crediting procedure needs to be firmly put in place. Some game companies have trouble with credits and that's just internal!
But again thanks for your input!
No matter what, the guy with the higher quality assets is the one more likely to get the jobs and the pay that goes along with the jobs anyway. My understanding is that it isn't Epic's job to protect contributors to a voluntary project from competition.
I'll try and answer as best I can. We are still working out the details for our version of the workshop. The idea is that it will be a place for the UT community to interact and monetize their content. I'm not sure about details. I do know that content creators will take the larger percentage of the transaction while Epic will get the minority.
As far as credit goes we will keep track of everyone who contributes usable content that is released with the core game. They will get credit for what they do.
As far as fairness goes that's more of a question for the community. We are open to all suggestions.
We will try our best to build the game with the help of the community. We have an extremely small but talented internal team working on this. We are asking the community to help us design and build the game.
The grand vision is that what we build together can be used as a vehicle to drive individuals and teams to create mods and content they can profit from. We succeed only when you do.
This is also a chance for fans of the UT franchise and aspiring game designers and content creators to work hand in hand, have unprecedented access to, and form lasting relationships with developers here at Epic and around community.
We understand this isn't for everyone. We don't have all the answers. We will make some mistakes. Please be patient. It will be worth it.
-Chris
To be honest, the only problem I see with what you guys are doing is that you are trying to make too specific of a game. Instead you should try to make a giant interactive virtual playground which can act as a "guided" canvas for modders, sort of like what Minecraft or Skyrim are for their modders, minus the specifics of Skyrim's story and lore of course. This way, volunetters can add procedurarlly to the overall backbone of the overall world. And everything they contribute will be much more reusable and flexible in that sort of context.
For example, I know you guys have had intense discussions over things such as to double jump, or not to double jump Because in a FPS, PARTICULARLY a multiplayer FPS, movement, control, etc ARE the gameplay, in a way that is different than a Minecraft or a Skyrim. Where in some mods you are given permission to fly, and in others you aren't. And sometimes you are given permission to fly in certain zones of one mod, but not in other zones. In a UT game, the majority of people who mod it will end up rewriting many of the design choices the original volunteers have made instead of simply layering on top of what's already there the way that Minecraft, Skyrim, and Torchlight 2 modders tend to do.
I don't think a UT game made by a bunch of people without centralized leadership is going to satisfy ANYONE, so far as the original product is concerned. That's why I think you shouldn't even aim to satisfy anyone, but instead create a game that is a framework for inspiring modders.
But yes it will be interesting to see how community influence plays into high level play.
One way of supporting the early contributors could be doing it like project spark, give everyone a percentage on all created maps for instance. So if a map with this setting gets created and sold, give the original artist/s a share. Every time a mapmaker uses premade models, give the original artist/s of these models a share. This will be highly complicated, one would have to look how exactly they do it in spark, but it would be the most fair approach.
They really need a fully tracked application that you submit assets through automatically giving full attribution. I can see so much going wrong without a proper system like that.
Counter-Strike is a great example of this because if you look at the history of the game in the last 10 years, basically any time Valve tries to fix something on their own without player input, they end up ruining the game to the point where it's unplayable until the next update rolls around to fix the issue (or until users manually come in and solve the problem.)
This can be seen as recent as two days ago when the new update dropped since Valve decided to buff a pistol (the Tec9) and it is now overpowered and ruining competitive gameplay.
In the Counter-Strike community, there are players that are so dedicated to the point where they spend many months, if not years, testing, experimenting, and researching different ways to tweak the game to make it better, and a lot of the time, they end up coming up with some great ideas that end up making it into the game.
I think this move by Epic is incredible and it could be the competitive shooter that many people have been waiting many years for. My only real concern is about the monetization. Modding in UT is amazing because anybody can make anything they want. If somebody makes an awesome custom map, then everybody can just join the server and have a blast. I feel as if that will be taken away if monetized because everybody will want to make money off the new system and so I'm sure most maps will end up having a pricetag attached to them.
That interests me too and I'm curious as to how that will shake out. Ultimately, I think the community will self regulate in that regard. If level designers find that charging too much for their maps means nobody plays them, then prices will come down. Or go free.
Or the more popular mods might package up "pro" versions and sell them but keep the casual versions free.
Who knows! It's exciting to think about though...
How big or small are the aspects of UT that the community is going to be involved with?
Even just the basics of concepts, assets, setdressing needs an incredible amount of organization and communication between everyone involved. Rather than just people doing random parts of each of these.
Where & what is the organizational platform for this? Is my main thought about this entire UT project.
+1
Incredibly happy to see this discussion happening and big points to Epic peeps who are listening / talking about this as well.
This "UTCore" gets released, for anyone to mess around with as they please ; all the content made for it from there on is community driven (art, maps, guns, gametypes, mods) with Epic making sure that the backend is solid (netcode, server browser, auto-downloader, and so on). At this stage there is still no money involved, and everybody can release anything, just like in the good old days. This approach starting from a very basic game skeleton might also generate more gameplay-oriented content as opposed to mostly decorative art.
But then ... how to even introduce community revenue in this equation ? Maybe the UT workshop will have to be something closer to the Unity asset store (buyers = game devs) which is quite different from the Dota2 store (buyers = players). Dota2 content is very strongly curated by nature, which in turn generates a very cohesive world of user-generated content. And the fact that the assets are curated is actually what makes it work revenue-wise. This appears to be very different from the history of UT and its free user mods, so I wonder if the Dota UGC model is even compatible with UT in the first place ...
Maybe there are some hints to be taken from Second Life ? From what I understand this is yet another successful business model. And then there's also ad revenue ... after all, that's how youtube does it. Maybe there could be ads running on the download page of a model or mod ? That way, there could be two different workshops : The UT Game Community workshop (free game stuff to download for everyone, ad driven) and the Unreal Engine Workshop (game dev content, downloadable for a fee). Anyways, you guys certainly thought about all that and more
By the way - is an art contest really necessary ? A big announcement about the future of UT seems enough to get people excited
personally i think a solid artdirection by epic should be the way to go. but maybe thats just me
Getting your art into a game isnt reward enough and suggesting such is shady. But this isnt whats happening.
Dammit people! Theres a greentooth trophy involved!
Honestly...this is one redundant DDo liscense short and one game credit up on the average return for a pc contest. And concept needs the lurve around here.