I’m wondering if there is any plan for educational licensing of UE4. While 20 dollars/month is truly incredible offer for indie studios and industry professionals, it’s certainly a hit into a budget of students interested in mechanics of UE4. It was mentioned somewhere that it’s just price of couple of books, well, these books are mandatory and that puts UE4 into luxury spendings.
From my standpoint, I don’t plan to release game on UE4 in any longer horizon, I don’t even need access to this “market” thing nor have access to new templates or support. All I need is basic access to stable branch, once in a while, to get basic hotfixes and features. Then I can think of learning UE4 in spare time, which in long future may lead to some “monetized” project where paid subscription license has obviously it’s place. I know about juggling with subscription cancelling, which was mentioned in some other topics, but I find it bit over the top. UDK seems out of options too, unless you have project already in work or enough knowledge of it, to build something on it in near future.
In short, we’re (I’m) really missing subscription plan for those who aren’t active part of the industry. This could actually benefit Epic in long term. I don’t think I’m only one who would be happy, to have option to get free or one time payment based subscription to just bare UE4. This kind of accessible free/one time purchase edu licensing isn’t anything new among development tools and seems to benefit companies by standardization of their solutions (Autodesk, Microsoft etc.).