Epic Announces Unreal Engine 4 Now Available for Free

During this year’s Game Developers Conference, Epic Games has announced that their Unreal Engine 4 will be available to everyone for free, with all future updates free as well. According to the Unreal Engine Blog, anyone can download the engine to use for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. If you happen to ship a game or application, all developers pay is a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. Not exactly a bad ‘partnership’.

The Unreal Engine 4 is the complete technology Epic uses to build their video games. UE4 is used on a variety of different projects including indie productions to high-end blockbusters. When you download the engine you not only get support for major platforms, but it also includes 100% of the C++ source code that you need.

Epics overall goal is to give developers everything that they need to create so they are able to do anything and have total control. Whatever the steps need to build and ship a game can be found in UE4, sourced and referenced in the Marketplace, or built and shared it with others.

Here is a snippet from Epics founder and CEO Tim Sweeney that was posted on the Unreal Engine blog:

In early 2014, we took the step of making Unreal Engine 4 available to everyone by subscription for $19 per month. We put all of our source code online, available to all who signed up. We flipped the switch and crossed our fingers.

The past year has been a whirlwind for everyone at Epic Games. Our community has grown massively. The quality and variety of creative work being done has been breathtaking. When we asked people to submit their projects to be shown this year at GDC, we had the challenge of picking just eight from over 100 finalists that were all good enough to show.

The state of Unreal is strong, and weve realized that as we take away barriers, more people are able to fulfill their creative visions and shape the future of the medium we love. Thats why were taking away the last barrier to entry, and going free.

In Epics 25 years as an independent company, we have seen no time of greater opportunity for developers than today. Whatever your development aspirations, Epic stands with you, both as a technology provider, and as a fellow game developer counting on UE4 to power our own games.

For the full Unreal Engine blog post, you can go here: www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free