Sorry for the 3-month lag. There have been some ongoing forum discussions on this:
We’ve designed the EULA to allow developers of UE4 games to open up their games to modding, with the caveat that the modders have to be UE4 subscribers in order to access the UE4 tools and source. There has been a lot of community feedback on the desire to make some of the tools redistributable freely without requiring a subscription.
We understand this, but this is a delicate area, for several reasons:
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Each type of game and each individual modder has a different view of what tools and degree of programmability would be essential for modding, and the union of everyone’s desires is the full UE4 editor plus the full UE4 source! We’d hate to go to the effort of developing an awesome new feature if it was only available to a limited subset of the community, and inversely we sense general discontent in the communities of content creation tools around reduced-feature versions available for free or for a reduced price.
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We are very reluctant to do anything that would bifurcate the community by proving access to UE4 outside of the official channels or with a reduced feature set. There is a positive feedback loop associated with keeping the entire set of UE4 game developers and modders together in a united community, such as a larger Marketplace enabling content developers access to more developers, etc.
My feeling is that it’s worth proceeding to develop moddable games with UE4 on the expectation that folks who are serious enough to invest the time into modding a major game can afford $19 to subscribe to UE4 for one month and then cancel.
We see a very high value to keeping the entire UE4 community united with a common feature set and Marketplace, so philosophically I can’t imagine Epic distributing a reduced-feature version of UE4 for free, or for creating a framework for moddable games redistributing a reduced-feature version of UE4 for free.
-Tim