I don't see why benevolent needs to be in quotes in your comment.

Regardless of whatever financial or tax upside they get from doing this, the upside the game development community gets is the same.

They are doing something they really didn't need to do, and as GP pointed out, most companies don't do.

"As with all of Epic’s internally developed assets, the Paragon assets are only licensed for use in Unreal Engine 4."

This is marketing for their game engine. They don't have to do it, sure. But SaaS companies don't have to provide free blogs, webinars and e-books either but we don't pretend they are benevolent for doing so.

Don't get me wrong. I think more art assets available in the game dev community is a good thing. I think more free stuff from one company (Epic in this case) will beget more free stuff from their competitors (Unity mainly). I'm just pointing out that this isn't free for the sake of being benevolent. It's free for the sake of capturing market share.

> I'm just pointing out that this isn't free for the sake of being benevolent. It's free for the sake of capturing market share.

this seems like it could be a false dichotomy. it's not obvious why it can't be both.

Benevolent: "(of an organization) serving a charitable rather than a profit-making purpose."

That's not how this word works. We can use another one.

I hasten to add, again, that I'm attributing nothing pejorative. I'm glad Epic have done this. It's great marketing that may be helpful to lots of people.

"benevolent" wasn't being used to describe the organization, it was being used to describe a particular action.

The issue is this action isn't benevolent. It's nice, but as said previously it's to promote their engine. So they will profit from it indirectly.

If on the other hand they would release the assets without strings attached (for use with any game engine / in any way) then I'd say this word would apply.

and my point was that this seemed like a false dichotomy.

True. A dichotomy cannot explain for example tax deductible donations: they're obviously self advertising at much lower cost than a real PR campaign, still they benefit someone, so we probably should use a trichotomy like "I'm doing good even if it has a sustainable cost" - "I'm doing good only if it somehow benefits me as well" - "I'm not doing good because being evil brings even more profit than the above".

> This is marketing for their game engine.

Which faces _stiff_ competition against the Unity engine. Epic is the incumbent in the space and the success of Unity in the last several years must be a huge concern for Epic.

Epic has always been a game engine developer first and foremost, so anything to claw back market share from Unity is going to be a calculated strategic move on their part.

I don't think it's quite that clear. Sure Epic has been in the game engine market longer, but it was only relatively recently that they entered the non-AAA market due to a major change in licensing. Unity was really the incumbent in that space at the time. In some ways Epic is the up and comer. You can also see that as Unity has had to react strongly to Epic's entry into the market.

Indeed. Tired of people associating benevolence with no monetary reward whatsoever.

I'd argue benevolent belongs in quotes. Not to question the very clear upside to the game development community. But rather to acknowledge that Epic is likely anticipating the benefits to itself as a company will be higher than the costs.

I would disagree that a prerequisite of a corporation being benevolent is losing money.

There was no requirement of giving away the assets in order to gain the tax benefits.

> I don't see why benevolent needs to be in quotes in your comment

> most companies don't do.

Because most companies are for-profit entities. Most companies don't do this because they aren't in this specific situation. Most gaming companies have really delicate economics (high up front capital costs, with less than guaranteed returns).

Call me cynical all you want, but the idea that video gaming companies (of all industries) are somehow out to provide benevolently for it's software developing community is laughable at best (see EA, Ubisoft, Zynga etc). The video gaming market is rife with abusing long hours out of it's employees.

> see EA, Ubisoft, Zynga etc

You're cherry picking a handful of awful companies for the sake of making a point about the entire industry.

I take it you haven't worked in the industry? There's literally an industry term for it ("crunch") because it's so bad.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/257143/Working_time_amon...

http://www.gameinformer.com/themes/blogs/generic/post.aspx?W...

https://kotaku.com/crunch-time-why-game-developers-work-such...

https://venturebeat.com/2016/03/20/why-crunch-time-is-still-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/opinion/work-culture-vide...

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PaulTozour/20150120/234443/T...

You built your own straw man.

Nobody said that video gaming companies "are somehow out to provide benevolently for it's software developing community."

If we were talking about Epic Games giving $100 to each American, that wouldn't follow either.

But if you can't acknowledge that some decisions are more well-meaning than others, you're just sour grapes.

Asking employees to work long hours in order to meet deadlines is not unique to the games industry.

It's not an ask when made a condition of employment.

It can be both. Doing good by others does not require absolute zero benefit for yourself. The total refund is a win for Epic and it’s customers alike.

>reduce their tax burden

Why do people always make this argument? Loss is loss. You're financially better off if you make money, even if you have to pay taxes on it.

Yeah, I don't understand how this reduces anything.

Can someone explain?

You pay taxes on capital gains.

Suppose that Epic made P income from Paragon and I income from everything else. They are taxed at T.

So if they return P to customers, that's a loss. So they will pay (I - P) * T in taxes and end up with (I - P) * (1 - T).

Suppose they kept P, that's gain. So they will pay (I + P) * T in taxes and end up with (I + P) * (1 - T).

So even though they pay less in taxes ((I - P) * T < (I + P) * T), they will end up with less money ((I - P) * (1 - T) < (I + P) * (1 - T)).

Whoa, even I couldn't follow this :)

Basically, what it means is the following:

Year 1 - I spent $10M on Paragon (let's pretend I've made a single dollar from it). I therefore have negative -$10M in profit, so I pay zero taxes.

Year 2 - I shut Paragon down. I still have $10M in losses from Paragon. Fortnite does $30M in Revenue and it cost me $20M to build Fortnite in Year 2. Theoretically I profited $10M in year 2 and I'd have to pay ~30% (thats not the real number, so don't correct me) of that in taxes, so I really only get to keep $7M of that to reinvest.

But I get to carry my loss forward from Year 1 onwards. So in theory I get to keep more of my profit due to a smaller tax burden. Generally speaking this is usually done over 5 years. So I'd take $10M and amortize it $2M ever year. Meaning Year 2, instead of paying 30% of $10M, I would pay 30% of 8M, so $2.4M versus $3M. It's obviously way more complicated than this, but this is the gist.

You're describing the situation assuming that Epic has already taken the loss.

I'm describing the tradeoff between intentionally taking the loss (i.e. allowing returns of the game) vs keeping the profits they've made.

I don't get your math, but (I+P) - (I-P) = 2P. It seems wrong that that the difference between the two scenarios is 2P.

You basically can take a Tax deduction on capital losses, meaning paying less tax (Super simplifying the complex US Tax Code) https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062713/capit...

It reduces the taxes they pay, but only because they make less profit.

They still have less money and it is in no way better than if Paragon had made a profit.

The "yeay it failed! we get a tax write-off" thing is stupid and wrong.

its not that clear when you international subsidiaries. companies, when it comes to taxes, can have the cake and eat it too.

I come in peace. You're not a benefactor given that you are the one who benefited

And hopefully get more devs to use their platform (Unreal Engine) using these assets as their entry point, giving them dank licensing money if there is a good game amongst the many mediocre ones.

It still takes time and energy to package and release something to the public, even if it is assets.

Deleted

Paragon was/is already a F2P "monster".