Hi everyone! About a month has passed since we applied for Unreal Dev Grants and still our links and gameplay videos are not viewed. Does it mean that Epics just haven’t seen our application yet? If yes, how long we should wait?
Many people including myself have sent in projects that were either never clicked or downloaded, and never heard back. The idea of dev grants are nice, but I wouldn’t suggest revolving your project around one. Just submit it, and if in a few months you haven’t heard back and have made significant progress submit another. Good luck. =)
The truth is get lucky or know someone from the inside and get lucky.
Chances are that lightning would strike in the same place before you get a anything. Don’t wait for it or expect it just move on and don’t waste time with it. Same goes with investors, VCs, Corporations you name it. All talk and all luck with these guys.
Thanks for your response guys! We thought that Dev Grants is a good thing, but as you told it isn’t. Thanks for making this clear, so now we will focus on other ways to get money.
It can be a good thing, but it’s not something you should expect/depend on
At this point it’s probably a completely wasted effort to apply as they do not look at anything you send them to read or view like others have also said. They most likely only look prominent stuff from the community at random times and then offer the grants themselves as PR.
It takes little effort to submit something so it’s not a waste of time. But, there’s probably a lot of submissions.
This has been more or less the grave issue with “investment” or grants and social media, even though grants are meant to give a helping hand to the most promising prototype or demo, these days they tend to lean unproportionally towards lets say candidate A with mediocre WIP title (or no title at all) but with Social media presence VS candidate B which has no social media presence but with superior looking and more promising title who doesn’t wish to have the online buzz at this very early stage of development.
I’m not saying this is the case all the time but i’m saying it has become more and more the go to must do situation to even start to have a chance for any grants or investment to be considered your way if any.
Whatever happened to good old investor instinct instead of relying on the number of “likes” on a post. But like some mentioned here it’s simply a case of PR with larger corporations, it’s like telling the community "look we care for the “little” guy you all “liked” so like us in return. after all a few million thrown at such games is much cheaper but more effective PR for them than a full fledged yearly PR work to reach same amount of audience.
That’s why forget the whole thing just do your own game work hard and aim to stand out, and post ONLY when you feel it is time you need to share and expand on that Social media. It’s the only way in this business all else is just all talk and no play.
That’s not likely the case with the Unreal Dev Grants, they’re looking for projects that best show off what the engine can do, they’re using the project for advertising that, not just to say that a popular project is using UE4.