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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.
That's why Notch wrote his own engine for Minecraft and sold Mojang for $2.5 billion.
Oh wait ... maybe success is not only a factor of the engine, but _gameplay_.
You left out the really critical part of your argument, which is that Notch wrote a shitty new engine, and still made billions. It wasn't even a competent job.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You know, that is one of the most reasonable clauses I've seen in a very long time.
Basically, we expect you to make decent efforts at bookkeeping. If we think you're shafting you, we'll pay for the audit, unless you really are shafting us in which case you pay for the audit and the licensing-related costs.