Please help! Problems figuring out the royalty payments

Hey everybody and thanks for the awesome community and products! :slight_smile:

We are having an issue with figuring out the royalty payment rules. I have lately spent a good amount of time reading the EULA and forums without finding any real answers to our questions.

Here is a short description of our situation… We started making a Virtual Reality environment of an upcoming school here in Finland on february of this year. The project should be ready by latest at the end of this year so we are now finally checking the royalty rules in detail. The enviroment will be available to the public free of charge, yet we did get a two time payment for creating it based on our progress. There is no more payments coming or other kind of income from this project.

I have also tried reaching the phone service without any luck yet and I haven´t found any direct email to Epic to talk about royalty. Also every contact info just seems to be about accounts, games etc. so I am resorting writing here as the last option since I´ve understood it can take a long time to get an answer or it might not happen at all and we would really like to get this sorted asap.

Question 1:

Do we own roaylties or not?

In the EULA it reads:

(Part) 5. Royalty

  1. Consulting fees or work-for-hire fees which are non-recoupable for services performed using the Licensed Technology (e.g., an architect-created walkthrough simulation or a contractor-developed in-house training simulator);

The thing is that we were hired to do work for a finnish school to create a public prototype VR-environment of the architects vision. The payment we got is non-recoupable as I understand (we don´t have to pay it back) and we were working with the architect creating the environment based on their plans. It´s a walktrough simulation of the school since you can basically just teleport around and look at the architecture - it does have some functionalities though like moving the sun to see it in different time of days, vanishing some furniture to see the space better without it and changing the size of the player. So there isn´t any mechanics and it isn’t a game - main thing is to be able to walk around and see how it is and experience trough virtual reality before the building is built.

So we are wondering now is it still considered a walktrough simulation? If we worked together with the architect does this fall under the examples (or whatever else e.g. includes) given in the part 3? I think that sentence isn´t detailed enough to make a clear choice ourselves, if we are royalty free or not and we would love to get a precise clear answer.

Question 2:

How to pay the royalties and are we under sanctions?

It seems that if we need to pay royalties, then we are under the sanctions since we received the first payment on march of this year (Q1). We received the second and last payment on june (Q2).

We could have avoided the second sanction which was 10 days ago (on 15th of august - 45 days after Q2), but it´s taking long to find an answer to this so that time window passed. Of course we were definitely foolish to not to dig into this subject sooner, so this wouldn´t have happened. We were aware of the 5% roaylty though but not in this much detail and we thought we can pay the 5% when the project is finished.

Do we get the payment information after sending the royalty report since I couldn´t find Epic´s account number etc.?

Are the sanctions counted on your end or how does it work?

Would it mean that now we owe 9% royalty on the first payment and 7% on the second one?

Question 3:

Why the heck does it seem so hard to get hold of Epic to pay them their share? I would think that it´s made as easy and streamlined as possible for people to pay them for the awesome product :smiley:

Thank you for reading and for any feedback or assistance with this! :cool:

You don’t owe any royalties, you were hired to make the product, so the only ones who would owe royalties would be the people you made it for if they were selling the product (which you said they aren’t) so no one owes royalties on this project.

That is awesome news and makes sense! Thank you for the reply o/