I had a couple questions about the Eula I was hoping somebody could clarify for me. A lot of that legal jargin is more confusing than anything else.
First off I was aware of the 5% fee upon reaching $3,000 and after. I noted it mentioned money gained through public funding like kickstarter. Does that mean that If I were to get say $100,000 from a Kickstarter I would have to pay Epic Games 5% of that funding?
My second question is about licensing. Am I giving some of the rights to my game to Epic Games by using the Unreal 4 Engine?
If so does that give any kind of protection for products produced using the Unreal Engine or would I still need to take out additional licensing, copyright, or trademarks?
I just want to be 100% sure about what steps are covered and what steps i still need to take to make sure my project is protected. I would hate to pour my heart and soul into this and have it swiped out from under me because I missed something.
–You only have to pay royalties on crowdfunding money if the reward gets the person access to the game. So say you have a tier that’s $20 for the game, that would require royalty off the $20. But if you have a tier that’s the game plus a T-Shirt for $50 then it would still only be for the $20 value of the game.
And it counts even if you intend on giving the game for free, since people would still have to pay to get access initially for the kickstarter.
All rights are yours, your only responsibility is to pay the royalty.
I do have a question, when do royalties need to be paid for crowdfunding? The team I am working with raised all of their crowdfunding money while using a different engine last year, and just recently switched to UE4 last month.
So what would that mean in the following scenario:
A game company asks for crowd funding money to support its development studio, which is busy working on a UE4 based title.
The money is obviously flowing into the game, but technically the supporters fund the studio, not a specific game project.
Although the company uses the game project in the crowd funding campaign marketing-wise.
There is also no advantage in terms of access to the game. The game later sells for 20$.
The way I see it, Epic would not get any royalties from the crowd funding. Even if that UE4 based game is the only title the company is working at.
All they would get is royalties from the 20$ sales revenue, if exceeding the threshold…
Someone from Epic feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe it would be retroactive if you raised funds without using UE4 in any way. Any future crowdfunding would qualify however.
Here’s a post from Epic’s Michael Noland which may help to shed more light on this.