Have you ever wanted to develop your own game? Maybe just make your own characters? Or just see what it’s like to be a developer? Well now that Unreal Engine 4 is free, you can tinker around till your heart is content. This widely used engine was used in a subscription base in the past, but  now thanks to Epic Games, anyone can try it out. If you have already purchased this engine and feel shortchanged over this new development, worry not, as you should be receiving a $30 credit in the Unreal Engine marketplace. This is all explained in a blog post on the site titled “If You Love Something Set It Free.”

They are going with the business idea that “Epic succeeds only when creators succeed.” In exchange for free use of the UE4, you pay out 5% of your revenue once you have earned $3,000 per unit of your resulting product per quarter. Keep in mind that this is not a free trial; this is the full engine which you now can get your hands on. 

Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, had this to say about the engine: “You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation,” he went on to say that “This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games. It scales from indie projects to high-end blockbusters; it supports all the major platforms; and it includes 100% of the C++ source code.”

In a video below is a message from Tim Sweeney, about UE4.

If you would like to check out everything Tim Sweeney has to say about the engine in his post, you can follow this link. I don’t know much about programing, but those of you that do should go download the Unreal Engine 4 and let us know what you think. There are sure to be some amazing things that will come from this engine going free, and it’s a sure bet that everyone will be dying to see what will come of it.