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.”

The market for eSports is expanding quite rapidly at the moment, with tournaments of the best players in the world drawing huge crowds to watch their matches. So it makes sense that Y-Combinator-backed Kickback is looking to make their mark on the scene.

They’ve already provided a free server hosting service for the Minecraft community last summer, called Triangle; and now they’re planning to build on top of this existing system which is hosting over 200,000 server already to put in place ways to help the competitive maps work much smoother.

Their method treats the entire experience as a single product; able to run the match-hosting servers, arrange the games, codifies the rules for the game and even keeping track of each player’s wins and losses within the game. They’re already testing out with members of the Minecraft community that has come to be using Triangle; with matches ranging from two to ten players, in game types from team-based combat to free-for-all. Community members are also able to contribute maps to help diversify the content available.

This matchmaking service is provided free to players just as Triangle is, provided they’re just playing for bragging rights. However if they want to actually bet money on it, players can pitch into a prize pot from as little as $1 to bet that they’re the best player and stand a chance of winning money in the process.

One of Kickback’s co-founders, Vlad Nov has said that the paid dynamic of these matches has helped the startup in two ways. Having money on the line obviously helps the experience, giving the game a different atmosphere from a match just for bragging rights – you’ve another reason to want to win over all the other players. But Nov says that those players who win also tended to be the service’s most vocal activists, bringing in more friends to play with them and so growing the potential number of users who would use the system for the offered aspects that they couldn’t get elsewhere.

Right now they’re working on utilising the enormous power Twitch has for bringing an audience to gaming-related content by making it possible for players to jump into a match being streamed from the web app of the service, hoping to make it so that matches can both be watched and joined in with should the fancy take you. The other two big focuses are attempts to further widen the number of map types available and also the types of matches within Minecraft.

Kickback also hope to be able to build similar systems around other games that maybe are not as well known and easy to modify as Minecraft is. The backend code and matching making systems were actually designed to be carried over though to make it as easy as possible for this to be done, so maybe we’ll see this system expand to other games fairly soon.

Tools firm Autodesk is due to debut their entry into the game engines market at GDC in San Francisco with a preview of their Stingray Game Engine.

Built on the tech found in the Bitsquid engine that Autodesk acquired last summer, Stingray is supposed to be designed to be user-friendly for both experienced developers as well as those just starting out; helping them create what Autodesk says will be “graphically advanced games” for a range of different platforms. Last year Autodesk said that the new engine would “change the way games are made and buildings designed”.

The demonstration will take place on Wednesday March 4th in Room 3003 of the Moscone Center’s West Hall from 3:30pm to 4:30pm. They hope to demonstrate how the engine will allow developers to evaluate how their games run on multiple platforms as well as the integration with 3D content tools, among other things.

Already one developer, Fatshark Games, is using the engine for their Warhammer: End Times title, Vermintide.

Studios will be able to learn more about the engine, as well as gaining Beta access from the www.autodesk.com/stingray site.

It was announced this morning that the UK retailer GAME has acquired the gaming events company Multiplay in a deal worth about £20 million.

GAME is a well-known gaming retailer in the UK, with a store in most major cities and many towns as well. They are known for holding competitions to win games, gaming related mechandise as well as being a collection point for special free exclusive content such as prize Pokemon; they also are usually the focal point for midnight releases of big name games. Multiplay is an events company that also provides servers for online multiplayer gaming, with their most popular event being a gaming festival called Insomnia that takes place 3 times a year and will have its 54th event this April.

The deal will see GAME paying £12.6m of the £20m up front, with the reminder of the price being made up by cash and shares over the next three years. The CEO of Multiplay, Craig Fletcher, will remain in charge of Multiplay reporting in to GAME CEO Martyn Gibbs; so far no jobs are reported to be under threat due to the deal.

“With our combined passion and expertise, we are looking forward to delivering more, bigger and better experiences for our communities and are excited for what the future holds.” said Gibbs about the deal.

GAME itself had troubles a few years back when the company went into administration, with a number of stores closing down as a result. Happily they managed to survive and this deal only proves that they’ve managed to recover from the problems of the past.

In their “Utopia in Progress” presentation at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona earlier today, HTC announced that they have entered into partnership with Valve to develop virtual reality technology, showing off a small video presentation to show off their new headset – the HTC Vive.

We’ve already heard from Valve that they’re planning to develop VR hardware called SteamVR that will be properly shown off at GDC in a few days, but the announcement of a partnership means that HTC, developer of smartphones and other related devices, will be one of the first to be making use of the SteamVR system.

Speaking on stage to the crowd HTC CEO Peter Chou talked about Valve as the leader in gaming saying that they were “dedicated to bringing the best” to their customers. He said that HTC were “so excited” to be working with them on this project and that HTC believes that virtual reality will have the ability to “totally transform” the way we interact with the world, and will eventually become a mainstream device for the general consumer, with the possibilities being “limitless”.

The Vive will make use of 70 sensors allowing for full 360-degree exploration and will have a 1200×1920 screen in each eye, powered by a 90Hz refresh rate. HTC have also announced two VR game controllers that will work in tandem with the headset so each hand can be represented accurately within the virtual space.

HTC will be at GDC along with Valve, and we know that Valve plan to demonstrate the SteamVR there so it’ll be interesting to see if the two companies are planning to do presentations and demonstrations in tandem there or not.