Hummm thinking

Well it’s a big step and risk now you ask $600 to update to the next engine.
And on this the Indies income must not exceed $80.000 and budget $40.000 (restriction)

All the big engine go on lowering the price for indies like Bw, He, Ue…

Perhaps the risk can be the both side like this.
You can take the $600 and split in 2 like $300
We pay 300 to obtain the new game engine but we cannot publish a game until we pay the balance of the $300.
If you go bankrupt we can publish that the risk for you.

This will probably put more money in your pocket and the step for Indies will be a little bit easy.

600 USD is a BIG risk?
also the budget of 40k usd for a small indie isn't exactly a problem in well..almost every case.

if your income exceeds it you just upgrade the license.

All the big engines you mention, unsure what He is though.

Big World Tech Indie
299 USD a YEAR
Maximum 10,000 subscribers/accounts
10% gross royalty on any commercial revenue from the game.
Any company with less than 25 contractors, part-time or employees,
< US$200k annual revenues or investor funding
This also includes only python scripting.

Big World Tech Indie
US$2,999 annually and 300k income gross, same restrictions except for extra source to client including c++
Both with XML Entity persistence instead of proper database.

UDK license with its US$99 license fee. After earning US$60,000, they would be required to pay Epic US$2,500 (US$0 on the first US$50,000 in revenue, and US$2,500 on the next US$10,000 in revenue). On subsequent revenue, they are required to pay the 25% royalty.
Also mostly limited to pure unreal script some c++ module interfacing existing.

HE (Hero Engine):

Free to use for indie developers and they give you the server + bandwidth for "free". Royalties are 30% and they take care of the rest (download, packaging, server hosting, etc).

Con: You get 70% from net profits, so after server costs (and derivatives hereof) are substracted. Only 25 people can work on a project on the same time (so if you have say, 50 people for a "decent" MMO, you would have to upgrade OR change accounts the entire time).

I have a HE account, but I prefer Esenthel. The scripting in HE is quite powerful, but Esenthel "feels" better to use. It's mostly in C++ and not in HSL (Hero Scripting Language).

As for the budgets: 600 is actually quite small. And once you exceed it, as Zervox mentioned, you have enough money to upgrade to the version of your likings.

P.S.: Hi, first post since ages again

There are many other downsides to Hero as well:

It's on a cloud. You use their engine on the cloud. Your game is stored on the cloud. If the cloud gets hacked or goes down, you're SOL. Your game dev halts, your finished game halts, you lose players, you have no control.

You have to pay extra for things like speedtree when EE includes speedtree

If you don't know how to use it or need/want to learn how to use it you have to pay $995 per person for a training course

Just to name a few. Free isn't always the best choice. EE is far better and allows you to keep full control.

HeroEngine just had some updates in which all "big" softwares (like SpeedTree, FaceGen and even Umbra!) are included now in the software.

Getting "hacked" is quite unlikely actually, as no one can see your email with which you registered. Just keep your computer safe etc. Besides, they have backups as well, and they also check regularly if nothing is wrong on everyone's cloud.

As for learning it, the wiki has some basic tutorials to get you started; HE is not for the average programmar who has "just" a 2 year experience in any programming language. Whereas it is powerful, it also comes with the price of being somewhat more difficult to master. Having more years of "real" experience can help.

If you want to make an MMO, you need a team of Esenthel (or direct derivatives hereof). But that is also true for other Engines as well.

Only other downside to HE is that it is too much of parameter-driven. 50+ parameters per particle emitter (I can make particles virtually do the cha-cha dance )

I checked the HeroEngine. And I think its a powerful engine but one prob is the scripting and the other prob is the alltime online working. Not everybody from my team have a gigtransfer and must wait many minutes to do anything at the world.

I tested SpeedTree but dont like the faces of leaves which alltimes watch directly to the player.

The best reason to use this engine is the new free licence to developer with a team less 25 members.