[Tichy]

Is there even a demo I can try for free? Sorry, but chances are just as high that the library costs me time - time I invest to understand it, only to eventually find that it probably won't do what I need, and I can't easily fix it or extend it. (Playing devil's advocate here).

Even if it does what I need now, who knows if it does what I need in two years? If it were open source, somebody could pick it up and keep developing it. Now if the commercial dev just abandons it, my investment in learning "impact" was wasted.

[mainguy]

This is my problem, I'd be willing to pay much more if I could try it out and kick the tires. Abandonware is a problem in the gaming engine community... even a success story is only going to be around a few years.

A big problem is that by the time you fully understand any game engine (I've looked into) it might just be obsolete. The cost of learning the engine dwarfs the cost of licensing... Assuming your time is worth anything.