Epic Ditches Subscription Fee for Unreal Engine

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Five percent royalty rate still applies to commercial projects

At last year's Game Developers Conference (GDC), Epic Games made the decision to license its next generation Unreal Engine 4 to anyone and everyone for $19 per month, giving subscribers unfettered access to its complete C++ source code hosted in GitHub. If you sold and/or made money from your creation, you'd end up paying Epic a 5 percent royalty on top of the subscription fee. Nearly a year later, the 5 percent royalty remains in play, but Epic has now removed the $19 per month subscription for Unreal Engine 4.
Future updates will be free as well, though we want to be careful not to haphazardly throw around the F-word. As it stands now, the 5 percent royalty applies to gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. So if you code an awesome game, sell it online, and gross $1 million next quarter, you'd owe Epic $49,850 by our fuzzy math (5 percent of $997,000), leaving you with $950,150.
This is same Unreal Engine 4 the big boys and girls use when developing blockbuster titles; it's not gimped for casual or curious programmers or hobbyists. And beyond the tools, you have access to an entire ecosystem.
"Chat in the forums, add to the wiki, participate in the AnswerHub Q&A, and join collaborative development projects via GitHub. Buy content in the Marketplace, or build your own and sell it there," Epic stated in a blog post.

For current subscribers to the defunct paid plan, Epic will be issuing a pro-rated refund for their most recent month's payment. On top of that, anyone who has ever paid for a UE4 subscription will receive a $30 credit line that can be spent in the UE Marketplace.
We'll have to wait and see if this has any effect on Crytek, which licenses its CryEngine for $9.90 per month with no royalty commitments. The difference there is Crytek doesn't include the full source code -- there's a separate license model for that.
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