Epic Games offers $5 million to devs for using Unreal Engine
Epic Games Inc. has announced that it will be giving out $5 million in financial grants to developers with “no strings attached” provided that they use the company’s Unreal Engine to develop their games.
“When a developer succeeds with the Unreal Engine, we succeed,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told GamesBeat. “We are trying to make developers more successful more quickly. We have heard pervasively that money is a real issue.”
The new grant program will give developers between $5,000 to $50,000 solely for using Epic’s game engine. According to Sweeney, there are many reasons for developers to use Unreal Engine, including its accessibility and efficiency. The new program is intended to let developers make games “without having to mow lawns.”
“There’s not any sort of contract involved in this,” Sweeney told Engadget. “If your project merits awesomeness, then we’ll give the award out. We don’t want to put ourselves in a position of accounting for anybody’s funds. It’s your money at that point and you can do with it what you want. The kind of teams that we’re looking at doing these projects are super motivated to do good work, and so I doubt we’ll see anybody doing anything other than furthering their project goals.”
“The technology is the special sauce”
There have been four versions of the Unreal Engine released since 1998, and dozens of classic games have been created with it, including Unreal Tournament, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and the entire Bioshock series.
Epic unveiled Unreal Engine 4 at GDC 2012, and it was later opened up to the developer community in 2014. Shortly after it was announced, Sweeney credited Unreal Engine 4 with the studio’s success at making large scale, high earning games like Gears of War with a relatively small team.
“Some of these giant AAA studios at Treyarch or Activision have teams of 300-500 people,” Sweeney told Forbes at the time. “We make Gears with a much, much smaller team. The technology is the special sauce.”
Developers who are interested in taking applying for Epic’s new financial grant program can email information about their project to the company at unrealgrants@epicgames.com.
Screenshot via Unreal Engine/YouTube
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