Really just wondering how a scenario like this works.
A client such as an engineering firm contracts a small company that does advertising to make something in WebGL for their site, and that small company subcontracts a portion of the work to a freelancer with experience in the given area.
The engineering firm isn’t going to care how it gets done so long as the result is good, and their profits wouldn’t come from the WebGL app made in UE4, however it would be a source of advertising or perhaps product customization. They also aren’t willing to pay 5% off the top for a minor cog in the machine, so to speak. The small company’s profits are from being paid for the work and would be unassociated with the UE4 portion because that’s why they hire a freelancer.
So who pays it? What is it paid from? Does the freelance pay 5% of however much they made? Because they may not make $3000 per product per calender quarter for a job that they spend perhaps a week on.
To re-phrase the entire question - Help me get away from Unity!
Neither of you would have to pay royalty–as a contractor, you don’t pay royalty, and since they are only using it internally or in a way that they aren’t actually selling it as a product they don’t have to pay royalty.
So for instance, you could make a VR demo for them that they would use at conferences, and they wouldn’t have to pay any royalty, but if they then sell the demo on their website they would have to pay royalty on that.
It could also be used for something like a rendered animation or rendered images that are used in advertising and they wouldn’t have to pay royalty.
EDIT: One note though–UE4 does not support WebGL, if you want something that runs in the browser you would need to use HTML5
I’m unsure about what you say about UE4 not supporting WebGL, I’m certain that it does, especially since it tends to go hand in hand with HTML5. Got any sources for this? Because google is doing me no favours.