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Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, has announced a new pricing model for its Unreal Engine. Starting next month, non-game developers will be charged an annual subscription fee of $1,850 per seat to use the Unreal Engine. This is a departure from the royalty-based model that Epic Games uses for game developers.
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The Unreal Engine is a game engine that simplifies the work of creating both 2D and 3D game environments. It takes care of a wide range of graphics work, including creating realistic textures, shadows, and reflections. It also handles a lot of the heavy lifting where animations are concerned, leaving developers more time to focus on the creative aspects of their work.
The new pricing model does not affect game developers. They will continue to pay a 5% royalty on games using the engine, but only on titles which exceed $1M in lifetime revenue. The engine is also used by animators and others for things like films and theme park rides, and it is these users who will now pay the per-seat fee.
However, there are several exceptions to this new pricing model. Companies that earn less than $1 million in annual gross revenue, as well as students, educators, and hobbyists, are exempted from the fee. Companies that make plug-ins for the Unreal Engine can continue to use it for free. In these cases, Epic will continue to get its cut via the revenue share model in its Unreal Engine Marketplace. Developers can also continue to use older versions of the engine without charge, as the fee applies only to Unreal Engine 5.4 and up.
This new pricing model is seen as Epic Games’ attempt to learn from its competitor’s mistakes when it too announced a new pricing model. It remains to be seen how this change will be received by the developer community.
