f13.net

I figured some people here might be interested in this.

Unreal Engine 4 available for $19/month subscription + 5% royalty (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/03/unreal-engine-4-now-available-as-19month-subscription-with-5-royalty/).  This includes the source code availability.

We got a demo of it at E3 a couple of years ago. The scripting stuff in there is insane. You can do a lot without needing any programmers.

Yeah I watched some blueprint videos.  When I worked at Auran I found Kismet a really good system and Blueprints looks much much better still.

Is this middle-ware moving to a different model in general, or a response to Unity basically eating everyone's lunch in the non AAA market?

I think it's a new model in general. Adobe showed that middleware as a service is the way forwards. Crytek are doing this as well now with Cryengine. Epic also made UE3 available for free if you wanted to play with it, you only had to upgrade to the full licence if you produced something commercial from it.

Unity is good because it's easy to use and makes compiling for different platforms a snap. Most of the other serious engines don't scale well to mobile - X-Com for the iPad was made in UE3 but it's a bloated monster.

Most small developers don't have a ton of money to pay a lot up front, nor are they going to make enough money for royalties to mean much. So a sub service is a good way to extract money from them.

And presumably you can subscribe for one month, and then keep what you've got (you just don't get upgrades/support after the sub lapses)?

Yep, they did mention that that's a fact (though the royalty is still a factor in that case).