One of these is a video. The other one you can touch.
Unreal Engine cannot run in a browser. The only way in is pixel streaming, which puts a cloud GPU behind every single viewer. Here is what that costs, what it breaks, and where it is still worth paying for.
Same tower. Two completely different products.
Cinematic fidelity and mass distribution are not the same product, and pricing them as one is how a software margin quietly turns into a hosting bill.
- Left: rendered on a server you rent by the minute
- Right: rendered on the phone already in their hand
- The buyer cannot tell. Your P&L can.
Unreal Engine has no browser runtime. It never came back after 2019.
There is no way to ship an Unreal build to a phone browser. The only route is pixel streaming: the engine runs on a server, renders frames, and pushes compressed video to the viewer over WebRTC. Everything below follows from that one fact.
Same 5,000 sessions. Three very different bills.
Beautiful. Now try to pick it up.
You cannot. A pixel stream is a compressed video feed with a control channel. It looks cinematic because a server GPU rendered it, and every second of it is billed to someone. Scroll one section down and drag the unit below with your finger. Same phone, same browser, no server rendering anything.
This one runs on your device. Drag it.
A real Augmento unit model, loading in your browser right now. No GPU server, no session cost, no waiting room.
Unreal pixel streaming vs interactive real estate
Both put a property on a screen. Only one of them can be handed to ten thousand buyers without a bill attached.
| Capability | Interactive | Unreal stream |
|---|---|---|
| Runs in any browser, no app to install | ||
| Works on phones and tablets | ||
| Full camera control, walk the unit yourself | ||
| Zero cost per additional viewer | ||
| Camera passthrough AR, place the tower in the room | ||
| Loads in under 3 seconds | ||
| Survives a weak or capped mobile connection | ||
| Indexable by Google, deep linkable, embeddable | ||
| Unlimited concurrent viewers at launch day peak | ||
| Presence signals: camera, motion, hardware attestation | ||
| Real time global illumination and ray traced reflections | ||
| Unlimited polygon and texture budget | ||
| Pixel identical output on every device |
Beyond the checkmarks
How the two actually behave once real buyers are on them.
Interactive | Unreal stream | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it renders | On the buyer's own device | On a cloud GPU you rent by the minute |
| Time to first frame | 1 to 3 seconds | 5 to 20s warm, 60 to 180s cold |
| Cost curve | Flat, one viewer or fifty thousand | Linear, one GPU per viewer |
| Mobile data burn | About 60 MB once, then cached | About 270 MB per 6 minute session |
| Weak network | Degrades and keeps working | Session drops below 4 Mbps |
| Peak concurrency | Effectively unlimited | Capped by cloud GPU quota |
| Data captured | Full stack, camera and motion and GPS | Wrapper page only, no camera |
| Stack you need | Next.js, Supabase, Vercel, in house | New engine, new DevOps, new hires |
| Gross margin | Close to 100 percent | Real COGS on every view |
Why the bill looks the way it does
Pixel streaming is not expensive because of bandwidth. It is expensive because rendering moved off the device and onto something you rent.
The full monthly bill
Fully loaded: GPU, egress, signalling, TURN relay, storage and amortized ops. Six minute average session, 1080p30, GCC region.
500 sessions | 5,000 sessions | 20,000 sessions | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unreal, self-hosted AWS | $750 | $1,288 | $3,215 |
| Unreal, managed platform | $560 | $2,280 | $8,010 |
| Interactive, browser based | $41 | $41 | $43 |
| Cost per session, in that order | $1.50 / $1.12 / $0.08 | $0.26 / $0.46 / $0.008 | $0.16 / $0.40 / $0.002 |
| What this looks like | Pilot scale | One active tower launch | Portfolio scale |
The thing a server can never render
The most persuasive moment in off-plan sales is the one pixel streaming structurally cannot reach.
AR is off the table for pixel streaming
A pixel stream renders on a server in another country. It has no access to the phone camera, no ARKit plane detection, no LiDAR. The moment a buyer wants to place your tower on their own desk, the entire streaming approach stops being an option. This is not a tuning problem. It is architecture.
Where Unreal earns its keep
This is not an argument against Unreal. It is an argument against making it the default.
Flagship tier, not default delivery
Real time global illumination and ray traced reflections are genuinely beautiful, and for a buyer signing at the top of the stack that fidelity closes deals. Author in Unreal, gate the stream behind a booking form, and price it as its own line so the cost never leaks into your license.
Author in Unreal when the fidelity is worth it. Deliver interactive so everyone can actually open it.
Bake the Unreal work down to optimized assets for the mass layer, and stream only what someone has specifically booked. One art pipeline, two delivery paths, and a hosting bill that does not scale with your success.
Unreal vs interactive: common questions
What developers and marketing teams ask before they commit to a stack.
Let us scope the right tier for your tower
30 minutes. We will look at your launch, your expected traffic and your fidelity bar, then tell you honestly which parts deserve a stream and which parts should never have one.