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Unreal Engine is Now Royalty-Free Until a Game Makes a Whopping $1 Million

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 14 2020, @03:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the vendor-lock-in dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Unreal Engine is now royalty-free until a game makes a whopping $1 million:

Since the rise of Fortnite as a popular game and Unreal Engine 4 as a popular game-making toolkit, Epic Games, the studio behind both, has been keen to capitalize on this momentum. That has included an aggressive push to lock down game makers in its ecosystem, and Tuesday saw Epic announce its most generous developer-specific offer yet: a massive increase to its "royalty-free" grace period.

As of today, any game or software maker who uses Unreal Engine for commercial purposes doesn't owe Epic Games a penny until a single piece of software exceeds one meeeeeeellion dollars ($1,000,000) in gross revenue. This is on top of the company's existing policy to not charge Unreal Engine users a monthly fee, whether they're using the software suite for commercial or educational purposes.

Previously, Epic offered a royalty-free grace period for a game or app's first $50,000 of revenue, then began requiring payment of 5 percent of the software's "worldwide gross revenue" from that point on, including DLC, crowd-sourced fundraising related to the software, and other related revenue streams. That 5-percent fee still applies, but it now leaves game makers unaffected until a $1 million threshold is hit.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:48PM (3 children)

    by looorg (578) on Thursday May 14 2020, @12:48PM (#994213)

    Isn't it Unreal the engine that is so unoptimized that the graphicscardfans screams like /a/ jetengine(s) after only running whatever it is you are running for minutes. At least that is how I remember it, not that I really run a lot of things written with UE.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:09PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday May 14 2020, @01:09PM (#994223) Journal

    Maybe, but it sounds like you are recalling an experience from 15-20 years ago. Chances are that things have changed since then.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @12:12PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @12:12PM (#994588)

      Yep. Nowadays it doesn't matter how nice the graphics or new the game is, my 3y/o box still plays on maximum. Hardware is waaay beyond what software can keep up with.