Yeah no kidding. I believe the UE3 engine costs somewhere around $350k to license. In the past, I don't think you could get non-commercial access to mess around with. That said, this is pretty huge for indie developers.
I grew up playing UT99, UT2k*... UT3 was a tragedy on the PC but nevertheless, Unreal Tournament was the reason I got into my first startup. We licensed our tech to Quake Live but yeah... there's a reason we died, Oracle is too expensive for game developers given all the other costs associated to development.
You're asking the wrong person. I was the creative/mkting director... but also, the startup began in 2005 and died in late 2007-ish. AFAIK, there were not very many scalable solutions for a gaming platform when we first started. But again, I'm not the right person to ask about this. :)
I grew up playing UT99, UT2k*... UT3 was a tragedy on the PC but nevertheless, Unreal Tournament was the reason I got into my first startup. We licensed our tech to Quake Live but yeah... there's a reason we died, Oracle is too expensive for game developers given all the other costs associated to development.