“Super hard core AAA developers used it to build major games and we knew that market well. “The Unreal Engine community were tight knit in the past,” Sweeney says. I think that's what's defined Epic also historically.”įortunately for Epic, it turns out that making a 3D engine that anybody can download for free opened up a lot of doors for the company, doors even it didn’t realize existed. “The complexity to the technology we build is so high, it will be insane to try to build it and separate it from any game business, and we're always trying to push forward with the absolute capabilities of the hardware.

“The company has always been built on the synergy between developing games and technology,” he says. We would have died three times.”įor Epic to work, Sweeney says, it has to build games that make its engine better and release new versions of the engine, which allows it to make better games. If we didn’t have the engine, we would have died.

“This technology and having so many partners. “The engine has been a stabilizing factor,” Sweeney says. The Unreal Engine, while maybe not as well known by players as Epic’s games, has always been the safety net for a company that likes to reinvent itself every half decade or so. Following that move, Unity’s engine become completely free to developers making less than $100,000, and after that there is a flat fee.ĭespite the competitive back and forth, it couldn’t have been an easy decision to make: essentially throwing away all the established fees on the chance that royalties would make up the difference. By a significant margin.”Ī limited form of Unity was made free prior to Epic’s announcement of a subscription approach to the engine. “Last year was our best engine year ever. But you can also talk to us and if you're going large-scale project - we have the ability to develop custom terms which typically involve negotiating a lower royalty in exchange for paying some money upfront.”

“Anybody who downloads the engine uses it under a standard license, which is a five percent royalty. “Last year was our best engine year ever,” Sweeney says.

Tim Sweeney knew that Epic's 2014 decision to drop the typically upfront high cost of licensing a game engine and charge a monthly subscription fee instead had resulted in a spike in Unreal Engine use. It was a gamble, but not one based on just a gut instinct - and perhaps it was a gamble prodded along by Unreal Engine’s long-running competition with Unity and its own significant price drops. In 2015, Epic surprised the game industry by dropping the monthly charge for its incredibly popular game engine and giving it away to anyone who wanted it: hobbyists, scientists, artists, architects, game makers.

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