“They’re students, they’re new game developers, and they’re people doing things in visualization and architecture,” says Paul Meegan, president of Epic Games. One of the drivers to the change? Many Unreal Engine 4 projects come from teams as small as one or two people where the upfront cost proves prohibitive. “There is no cost of getting in and because our business is built on a royalty-based model, we succeed when developers succeed with the Unreal Engine.” “We were blown away by the amount of amazing work that the community was doing with the engine, so this year we decided to eliminate all the barriers to entry and open the technology up to absolutely everybody,” Sweeney says. Tim Sweeney, Epic’s founder and CEO, tells Fortune that the user base for his company’s game engine grew 10 times larger after it moved to a $19 monthly subscription model a year ago. (For its part, Epic Games is highlighting eight of its standout, independently produced games at its booth at GDC, including Adrift by Three One Zero, Into the Stars by Fugitive Games and Nelo by Magic and Mirrors.) This announcement comes during this year’s Game Developers Conference, held each year in San Francisco, where more than 24,000 game makers from around the world converge to learn about the latest technology that will power future mobile, console, PC, and virtual reality games. In lieu of an upfront charge, it will charge developers a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product and per quarter. Epic Games, which received a $330 million investment from China’s Tencent in June 2012 in exchange for 48.4 percent of the company, is giving any developer access to its Unreal Engine 4 game engine.
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