We living in the best country of the world. :mad:
I fear that unless the whole thing about restrictions is cleared up the Unreal Engine 4 becomes a no-go for developers from Belarus. Well, if only you’re not willing to move to another country along with your project. Merely lifting the access restriction to the website and downloads isn’t what is about anymore. Surely there will be some ways around to still use UE4 for toying and development, but I can’t think of a way to actually release your game project and pay royalties to Epic if you can’t oficially license it.
Let’s wait for a staff official position on after the investigation. I believe we need a definite statment from Epic regarding with sanctions/regulations/export restrictions/local legislation, and what’s even more important — some specifics on them. If there is indeed a legal restriction that prevents Epic to license its tech to Belarus residents (or Epic legal staff believes there is) — it should be backed up with some USA goverment document or something like that. I’m pretty sure there is no such documents, as (again) I’ve never been aware of any restrictions on software export of such kind to Belarus (except the mentioned encryption software). If we get to know what exactly forced Epic to take such approach to Belarus — then there is a that the whole thing will be cleared up.
Belarus isn’t the only one. Lebanon too, and a few others. is no technical. USA has issues with these mentioned countries. So I’m pretty sure it’s not a technical on Epic’s side to fix but an official letter that has obliged them to cut the service on these countries.
That 19 per month wasn’t really anything, but a real barrier appeared the same day that ruined the party. 
Pondemicus
+100500
It’s bad news for all of us. Waiting for answers from the Epic support about licensing.
If USA sanctions will restrict sales, i should drop the engine.
The problem is. If is the case, which it propably is, Unity will propably have to drop support too, same for cryengine.
Although it may be just amazon not being available in your country. That would answer the question why you can get it on github. It may be, that using and licensing unreal engine is ok, and it’s just amazon being blocked.
At least Crytek is not USA company, they are German AFAIK.
But problem is not in any embargoes, there are just no any that could affect the game engines.
Yes, that’s a summary of the restrictions applied to Belarus by US goverment. The only item that can be interpreted as somewhat possibly related to Unreal Engine and software in general is the “ban on provision of certain services”, but I believe it is not. The thing is that AFAIK bans applies only to a limited number of persons and entities specifically designated by US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN), and not to the residents of a whole state itself. The SDN list is public and outside of list there should be no restrictions applied to providing services, licensing software and doing business with Belarus residents.
is a speculation, but at the moment my best guess is that Epic is not fully into “sanctions” thing and as a safety measure they just abruptly in whole cut off “unsafe” states, just to be sure. I’m writing in thread on behalf of both Belarus residents such as myself as well as Epic, which is renowned as a very community-friendly company. I hope that if my guess is indeed correct then the staff at Epic will see message and do a complete and thorough investigation.
And the thing hard to understand is why not to send simple e-mail notification to subscribers that there are some restrictions were applied (if it were the case) ?
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.
Hi everybody!
I’d like to clear the air here and give at least a temporary official response. We’re not ignoring the at all, I swear! We have been working to make sure that we are blocking IP addresses as is required by US law when we made UE4 available with a subscription, but we are also trying to make sure that we do not block the wrong IPs. We are looking into the exact nature and wording of the sanctions, then once we have come to a conclusion, we will be able to get back to the community with a more detailed response.
As much as I read the applied sanctions I cannot relate it to Epic and it’s services really.
Oh, nice to see the response. Please, note: Belarus is not Crimea, Transnistria and so on. 
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.
There was buzz around Belarus sanctions quite some time ago but i didn’t heared anything about software distribution, i guess some companies don’t keep that in check. I don’t think it’s related to recent events, aspecially as Belarus mediating in it.
EPAM is not Belorussian company, Wargaming too.
Hello Epic, i from Belarus (i bought license to UE4 in 2014) and i have too.
I don’t have access to:
-online UE4Launcher, hi is offline
-https://www.unrealengine.com/
When i go to https://www.unrealengine.com/ i get :
Oh god, the Epic Games team, are you serious?
****, I thought it was some website problems, but now I can see that problem is really deeper.
After so many years with nice support and software we are (in Belarus) getting such a slap in the face. You know, that’s not a good thing.
I really hope that you will solve thing ASAP. Seriously.
Sorry for my language.
One more thing for you - Epic Games. In Belarus, we have only one provider. Beltelekom. And we have a problem. We do not have enough ip adresses. So we are very often are blocked by google. You must check situation. Google already had . It banned the whole Belarus for a long time, saying that he is been attacked or something like thath. As far as i know, they solved the problem and everything work fine.
Thank you.
Our community is watching and waiting the news.
We are blocking IP addresses from certain countries to comply with our understanding of US and EU law.
Having said that, we are also investigating whether we are blocking too aggressively / too many people and are engaging with specialized legal counsel on topic.
Our apologies to anyone erroneously affected by while we are investigating further. Rest assured that getting clarity on what exactly we can and cannot do is a priority for us!