Unreal Engine 4 Is Now Free

jones_supa writes In 2014, Epic Games took the step of making Unreal Engine 4 available to everyone by subscription for $19 per month. Today, this general-purpose game engine is available to everyone for free. This includes future updates, the full C++ source code of the engine, documentation, and all sorts of bonus material. You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. The business scheme that Epic set in the beginning, remains the same: when you ship a commercial game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. Epic strived to create a simple and fair arrangement in which they succeed only when your product succeeds.

Comments

Re:Why?

[Opportunist]

I don't know. Why don't you ask the makers of these games.

Oh look. They ain't UT clones. There's a RTS. There is a survival horror game (ok, this now almost forces the "and how many survival horror games..." question). And I think over there's an Adventure game. There's a racing game in there too, go, try to find it!

Re:How do they know they're getting paid fairly?

[Kjella]

EULA

6. Records and Audits

You agree to keep accurate books and records related to your development, manufacture, Distribution, and sale of Products and related revenue. Epic may conduct reasonable audits of those books and records. Audits will be conducted during business hours on reasonable prior notice to you. Epic will bear the costs of audits unless the results show a shortfall in payments in excess of 5% during the period audited, in which case you will be responsible for the cost of the audit.

Software Corp uses brain when licensing ...

[Qbertino]

Software Corp continues to use brain when licensing its software, remains perpetually popular. What a concept. These guys deserve our respect. I remember buying Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004, one of those rare games that acutally shipped with a Linux binary back in those days.

You guys are Epic! (pun intended)