At GDC yesterday Epic Games announced that they were going to be making their Unreal Engine 4 game engine free to use for all users, including all future updates to it.
There will be no imposed limits on use of the game engine, with users utilising it for purposes from game development, education, visualisation or architecture. However despite free to use Epic will have the royalty fee - five per cent on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter - remain in place.
Last year Epic launched the Unreal Engine 4 with a subscription fee of $19 (although it was later made free for educational establishments) and said that they wished to make the Unreal Engine attractive to creative consumers. Removing the subscription fee will probably go someway to making that a reality for Epic. Current subscribers will get a pro-rated refund for their most recent month's payment and anyone who has ever paid for the subscription for the Unreal Engine 4 will also receive $30 credit for the Unreal Engine Marketplace.
"This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games. It scales from indie projects to high-end blockbusters; it supports all the major platforms; and it includes 100 per cent of the C++ source code." said co-founder of Epic, Tim Sweeney. "Our goal is to give you absolutely everything so that you can do anything and be in control of your schedule and your destiny. Whatever you require to build and ship your game, you can find it in UE4, source it in the Marketplace or build it yourself – and then share it with others."