Oh boi, I just got a nice email from Simplygon. They stated that they reworked their pricing model and here is how it looks like:
In addition:
Should you in the future decide to sell your game, and it becomes very successful, you will pay 2% of the revenue in royalties. You do not have to pay any royalties on the first $25,000 you make every calendar quarter.
If any dev reads this thread, now is the time to test Simplygon with your project 
Might be a good idea to say what Simplygon is.
Simplygon Cloud offers you a solution to replace tedious work with an automated process to make everyone happy! You can rapidly create all the Level of Detail (LOD) models for your game and automatically generate optimized assets for mobile or when porting a game (e.g. from PC to mobile), just by creating an account and uploading your content.
Automatic LOD Creation. Draw-call reduction. Polygon reduction
sounds kinda pointless to me?
save a little bit of time maybe and then pay royalties
but yeah pretty neat optimization for those triangles but arent there free programs that do the same thing
Unfortunately none that reach the quality of Simplygon. Blender has a simple one, but it’s not reliable enough to reduce complex meshes without any issues. 3dsmax has a more stable optimisation functionality, however it optimises single meshes and not entire scenes. In addition it is a nice to have when it’s also a Ue4 plugin.
Well there is a tiny difference between drawing 10 mio tris per frame versus 1 mio.
This is taken from an interview with Konami:
“Simplygon saved the labor equivalent of 10 man months” said the development team of Konami. “The benefits are clear as we used the tool to reduce polygons as much as tenfold in models ranging from 5,000 to 100,000 polygons. The best result is that players can’t see the reduction because the models keep their fidelity at all distances which keeps the players immersed.”
https://www.simplygon.com/news/konami-uses-simplygon-for-metal-gear-solid-v
And take a look at this Screenshot from a GDC talk held by 2 Epic Games employees about Paragon:
We aren’t interested in using Simplygon. Unreal has a LOD system in 4.14 for free.
