I’ve searched through various locations and I’ve found responses clarifying no royalties need to be tracked/paid for completely free games (i.e. they don’t even have advertising revenue), and have found at - Frequently Asked Questions - Unreal Engine
"Are any revenue sources royalty-free?
No royalties are due on the following:
(a few lines down) - Truly free games and apps (with no associated revenue)."
However I haven’t found any clarification on whether a notification of a free games release is still required to be sent to release@unrealengine.com, as I’d prefer if possible to not have to go through the process of emailing them for each free alpha/beta build of a project nor any smaller 1-2 week projects that will be released without any form profit.
I’d greatly appreciate a response in regards to this.
Hi Swift,
If I am correct in assuming you are just making and releasing games for purely for fun or experience, then you are perfectly fine to share your games with the world. As long as you are not bringing in any profits from selling the games or “items with embedded data or information, such as QR codes, that affect the operation of the product”, then you have no real need to inform us. Unless you just wanted to show off of course, we always appreciate seeing what people are up to with the engine.
Cheers!
Thank you very much for your response and the good news it brings :)!
Mostly yes. I’m hoping that if multiplayer is an option for my current design via Blueprint/visual scripting in UE4 soon, as it is for me in Unity with Playmaker/Photon Networking, then I’d like to be able to develop a small scale project to test how it feels and release that for free to thank those following my project, and hopefully somewhat alleviate the extended development time of the project by restarting it in UE4, which I’m releasing free builds of pre-completion just to gain feedback on its experience.