https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

Great work, Epic. 

When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. 

if it's because they didn't make enough money, or if they made too much money? 

Very self-aware use of the fedora icon. 

Get some!

Spirit - Do you actually have a problem with that or are you just being argumentative? I think we're being pretty damned liberal here. :) 

Warren: Ignore me, I'd never be a customer anyways. It is free with special needs, not free without strings attached. Free software is something else as is open source software. 

SPIRIT - Y U SO GROUCHY?! 

Even 10% would still be generous for not having to conjure up a modern engine for your project first. Heck it was pretty much already free when it was 20$ a month. 

I got a free pass in November and did fuck all with it so far. 

actually it's GNU/Unreal (pronounced ganoo) 

5% is a very good deal. I don't think Spirit has a problem with that. 

Considering the user base probably will consist of a fair share of 10 and 13 year olds, I would consider it defacto free for non-commercial usage.

It is unlikely they would be interested in harassing a 10 year old who made something and wanted to share.

How many initial mappers were under 15 when they made their first map? 

I'm not sure that you get to decide which definition of "free" other people are using. 

Glad they went free to use instead of the subscription model, one of my grievances was that $240 a year was a bit much if, for instance, someone just wanted to mod the next Unreal Tournament or any UE4 game... or people who just wanted to learn the engine but weren't in school.

Even back in the day, the $50 bux for Worldcraft or however much it was wasn't something I was able to pay as a kid just to learn how to map, so I stuck with shitty editors for so long. 

My first quake map was made with THRED which came with aftershock for quake. I made a WW1 style trench and it fucking blew chunks, it was so bad. I couldn't figure out how to make curved or slanted walls so I just abused the hell out of the cylinder brush. 

Remember that one? A map editor so awesome you couldn't map to a binary grid, only a decimal grid.

What's texture alignment, precious? 

$240 a year was a bit much if, for instance, someone just wanted to mod the next Unreal Tournament

Yeah, this bit sucked the hardest. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the main decisive factor at work here.

Also, I guess Unity is officially yesterday's news, now. 

Unity is announcing something today. Should be exciting! 

That's just low man.

No need to kick a dying dog. 

I'm serious! I have no idea what they're going to announce. They might surprise everyone. Going free? Becoming a publisher? Getting bought? Who knows!

I love GDC... 

...and GDC. 

And the Unity manual is offline today:

"All will be revealed..." 

I'm fed up of spending weeks writing a new system in Unity, only for the next update to have their own version built-in.

Happened with Navmesh, happened with the new GUI stuff. Happened with (some of) Mecanim.

I swear to god I am literally spending all my time writing code that gets obsoleted by the next engine update.

Should have gone with Unreal. 

Before everyone leaps on me with "so you'd prefer Unity didn't update their engine?", what I mean is I wish I'd gone with an engine that was pretty much complete for what I needed to do with it in the first place... 

I get your point. Writing stuff that gets replaced with built-in functionality that you didn't know was coming sucks. At least if you KNEW they were going to add FeatureX in the next version, you could skip writing that code and do something else instead.