Epic Games offers Unreal 4 engine in subscription form

Epic Games has announced that its Unreal 4 engine will now be available as part of a subscription. For $19 a month, game developers get access to all the tools. However, 5 percent of the proceeds of released games must be relinquished.

So said Tim Sweeney, director at Epic Games, in a presentation at GDC 2014, reports Engadget. The announced subscription form should form an alternative to taking out an expensive license; For a price of $19 per month, developers can get started with Unreal 4, where in addition to access to the Unreal Editor, the source code in C++ is also available.

Epic Games probably wants to compensate for the cheap subscription form by monetizing games based on the Unreal 4 engine. Developers have to give up 5 percent of the profit for commercially released games. For example, the subscription form is probably especially attractive for game makers who work with a small budget, but still want to release a game based on the Unreal 4 engine.

The Unreal 4 engine has also received support for OS X. Traces have also been found in the source code that indicate that the Oculus Rift and SteamOS will be supported in the long term. Epic Games is also said to be working on HTML 5 support.