Unreal Engine 4 is now FREE

[motorsep]

Wasn't sure where to post it, but it seems like a news worthy mentioning - Unreal Engine 4 is now free!

[The Happy Friar]

Guessing their business model didn't work as well as they thought.

OR...

Maybe D3 BFG GPL was to much for them to handle.   

[motorsep]

Lol, it worked great. Now having UE4 free will get massive inflow of developers (how many projects will be completed is a different story) and hopefully more royalties dripping to Epic's pocket.

[oneofthe8devilz]

I am agreeing with Friar... I don't see anything particularly interesting on the marketplace, so my guess is too that EPIC's new move to the "free" model is based due to the lack of a big and talented enough developer pool...

In any case this takes the competition between UE4, Unity and Cryengine to a new level and is generally a good thing for us potential developers...

[argoon]

Wasn't sure where to post it, but it seems like a news worthy mentioning - Unreal Engine 4 is now free!

Is free if you don't sell your game, if you do is 5% royalties (edit: 5% After the first 3k per quarter to be precise. It is not 5% straight up), after Steam or any other seller gets its share (i've heard 30% for steam), any extra 3rd party tool plus all the licences for the software (if you don't use free open source software) how much do you make?
Also i've heard that by accepting royalties EPIC has the right to audit your account books to see how much do you really made, i find this part really bad.

[motorsep]

Is free if you don't sell your game, if you do is 5% royalties, after Steam or any other seller gets its share (i've heard 30% for steam), any extra 3rd party tool plus all the licences for the software (if you don't use free open source software) how much do you make?
Also i've heard that by accepting royalties EPIC has the right to audit your account books to see how much do you really made, i find this part really bad.

Eeh, you don't have to pay a penny upfront to build your game, unlike with Unity or CE. You don't need any 3rd party modules at all, unless you are going all fancy with trees. I am not aware of anything else that is external to UE4. Tool? I am sure you know that Epic made sure Blender works with UE4. GIMP does too. That's all you need really. All other tools are inside of the UE4.

True, instead of 30%, you would pay out 35%. Which is a way better than paying $1500 to Unity, per platform. Or than paying 80% to a publisher (sometimes, rarely nowadays, you can get a deal for 50-60%).

And yeah, it's called doing business - keep all your receipts. Not sure about account books, never had one. But when you are running garage indie enterprise, it's expected of you to file taxes, keep receipts and tax forms and so on. Actually, instead of saying "I've heard", you might want to read EULA

[argoon]

Is free if you don't sell your game, if you do is 5% royalties, after Steam or any other seller gets its share (i've heard 30% for steam), any extra 3rd party tool plus all the licences for the software (if you don't use free open source software) how much do you make?
Also i've heard that by accepting royalties EPIC has the right to audit your account books to see how much do you really made, i find this part really bad.

Eeh, you don't have to pay a penny upfront to build your game, unlike with Unity or CE. You don't need any 3rd party modules at all, unless you are going all fancy with trees. I am not aware of anything else that is external to UE4. Tool? I am sure you know that Epic made sure Blender works with UE4. GIMP does too. That's all you need really. All other tools are inside of the UE4.

True, instead of 30%, you would pay out 35%. Which is a way better than paying $1500 to Unity, per platform. Or than paying 80% to a publisher (sometimes, rarely nowadays, you can get a deal for 50-60%).

And yeah, it's called doing business - keep all your receipts. Not sure about account books, never had one. But when you are running garage indie enterprise, it's expected of you to file taxes, keep receipts and tax forms and so on. Actually, instead of saying "I've heard", you might want to read EULA

Has i said free if you don't sell your game, i thought that was explanatory enough. Is not a matter if i need to keep receipts or pay taxes is a matter of principles, even tho you didn't rob anything would you like to have the police searching your house just to make sure? 

Why should i have said that? I didn't read the EULA's, i learned from other developers that passed from that experience. I'm not here to lie or to make myself seem more knowledgeable than i'm truly am, if i'm wrong is better to be corrected than to be caught lying, but that's me. 

[The Happy Friar]

I think it was 5% gross, which isn't bad, but you're already losing ~25% to the tax man anyway & (like said) another ~30% to company publishing it for you (steam, etc).  That makes the 5% looks like nothing.    ($3000/quarter would be $1200 take home after all that!  Yeash!  )