Hello all,
Apologies if this has been answered before, but I searched and couldn’t find the answer to this question. Maybe because it’s sort of an involved question, maybe because I am insufficiently caffeinated, maybe both.
Anyway: Epic Games announced way back in December of 2018 that Unreal Tournament, the UE4-driven follow-up to Unreal Tournament III, was no longer in active development. It’s still available in the Epic Store as Free To Play, community members can still release content for it, etc., but it has only ever existed on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. All of that is a given.
Here’s the question: Since Epic has released the engine source code, and since there’s a ton of free content available for UT, and since we know for a fact that UE4 games can and do run on the PlayStation 4, could a game dev that has a license with Sony (giving them access to the Sony middleware as well as the UE4 executables needed to run on PS4) port UT over the PS4 under the FTP model?
Obviously, this dev couldn’t sell the game because it’s Epic’s IP. And this dev couldn’t sell content for it directly, because the license terms clearly require content for UT to be sold through Epic’s marketplace (where devs get something like 25% of revenue). But if no money is being made (or sought) and the content being used is freely available (both the engine and the assets and the specific coding that makes it UT as opposed to some other UE4 FPS games) and the release on PS4 is fully licensed pursuant to Sony’s rules and Epic’s (which from what I can tell only require one to be validly registered with Sony as a PS4 dev), could it be done?