Why developers in Belarus were blocked ? It is longer impossible to download UE4.

Alexey_Kryshen · March 3, 2015, 11:39pm

Ra10000;236020:

Hello, the same problem (Belarus).
Sorry for further mistakes in my English.
All stuff is very suspicious and scary. I subscribed UE engine several months ago, and that was successful. But now when UE is free, it is impossible to download it due these 403 issues. I hope (as others developers from Belarus) that they are technical issues only. But if these answers about legislation sanctions are correct, then it means we have two possible reasons for such Unreal team behavior:

Unreal legal team have misinterpreted current US sanctions and just have tried to keep themselves away from any sanctions stuff as far as possible

US government has just-just issued some new sanctions against Belarus.
Why am I writing these two options only? Maybe US have had technological sanctions against Belarus for a period of time? The reason is the state of the whole IT industry in Belarus. Belarus in spite of its small size has one of the best developed IT industries among other post-USSR countries. We have a big bunch of IT-outsourcing companies (one of them, EPAM, is being represented on the US stock market) which develop their projects using all modern IT technologies and we have no problems with using these technologies. No bans, no prohibitions, no sanctions. There are a lot of small and middle-sized gamedev companies which develop (and even more important, sell) their games based on Unity engine. As you see, still no sanctions. And last, but not the least, one of the biggest modern free2play MMO’s World of Tanks is being developed and operated in Belarus.
So, I hope that it’s only the small misinterpretation of laws in Unreal team, not the real existing laws. Otherwise, that is the very big warning to the whole IT-industry in Belarus. If Unity joins embargo, gamedev in Belarus may collapse. Also, such “law attack” on our country would mean that the whole our IT industry would be in danger.

Just because of importance of IT industry of Belarus, any even insignificant sanctions in area would lead to serious buzz in IT-community of Belarus. And there are no such buzz at all … it would be like the hurricane literally in a case of appearance of such sanctions, just like you said. We all (the Belorussian developers) would know it immediately, the next second they will be worded.