I do not know about companies in the game industry that are into charity. $20 and only 5percent is without a doubt charity because this only covers a meal for a developer and maybe some clothes on his back.
Whats the catch here epic? You made me drop Unity 3D in a split second and came rushing over to UE4 when I saw this Engine on youtube.
This seems relatively obvious, to be honest. First of all, there’s many people who’ll sign up and use the engine for several months for personal projects (portfolio, demo reels and so forth). Typically, these people wouldn’t be able to afford the high costs of previous iterations of the engine. As such, $20 a month over the course of a year or more. That’s additional revenue in Epic’s pocket right there.
Then, you have the smaller indie titles. They, as you’d expect, obviously can’t afford to splash on a massive licensing fee upfront. So, having the option to spend $20 a month and pay 5% royalties on any revenue is far more accessible for them. The majority of titles surely won’t bank millions in revenue - but there’ll be the occasional smash hit, that will. If a title isn’t published, the developer has still chalked out the cost for their subscription. Again, this is money that Epic would potentially have been missing out on.
This doesn’t even factor in the people who are using it for other forms of multimedia projects, or architectural visualization and the like. They’re paying a subscription just like me and you.
In addition to their subscription-based service, there’s still custom licensing arrangements with other publishers and developers; such as Lionhead Studios (Fable Legends), Deep Silver (Dead Island 2), Namco (Tekken 7) and so forth. These are where Epic no doubt makes a fair amount more than with the smaller, independent developers that they’re offering this at $20 for 
In the end, this is simply Epic opening up their fantastic technology to the masses, allowing for further innovation within the games (and other) industry. It’s setting a trend, now that SpeedTree, Mixamo and others are now taking a similar approach.
ow man yeah this thing is a blessing but needs a **** good PC.
As a student I really appreciate this, it has potential for me to sell my work in future i really appreciate this. Unity free engine looks like garbage compared to this.
It’s perfect for end users at this price, and it also benefits Epic, if this was several thousand like UE3, they’d get a large sum of money sure, from AAA studios. But now they have a larger base of users, from students and indies to AAA studios. I for one try and keep my subscription open for updates, especially UMG etc. But knowing when money is short I can still use it - that’s perfect. I don’t feel like I’m paying to rent … I feel like I’m paying for continued support via updates etc.
20$ per user is to keep the servers and support up and running really. If you really want to give Epic what they deserve, make something and pay the royalties. 
ow yes sir I am attending university from today my first semester and by the time I am done my goal is to show off to the university and the world what I can do with UE4. And using this would make me king because everyone else has used Unity free etc and their games will look nothing close to a UE4 Engine. hee hee
I shall do epic justice by making a game to sell millions.
I intend to open a game development studio locally as we have none in the Caribbean “only business software development companies” but our university says they aim to change this and they said they would help us become entrepreneurs etc
Well as a theory I don’t think there is much of a market left in selling a game engine that only a AAA game development company can afford. I’ve heard numbers like nine hundred thousand to as high as one point million per title license and with that kind of money involved the amortized cost of developing their own in house engine makes more sense. Be kind of like Burger King paying MacDonalds to use their hamburger meet.
I also think Epic is one of the last, if not the last, companies that is still more or less family owned than corporate owned and still into the ideals of making great games.
Look what happened to poor id, if there is even still an id?
Lower Prices = More Units Sold = Money
Higher Prices = Less Units Sold = Equivalent Money
Epic probably make no loss either way, you sell something in a large enough volume you’ll still make money. Don’t forget they also have a huge variety of other revenue streams, and big-bucks companies can pay to escape the royalty system too.
I don’t know about that. Chinese company Tencent Holdings own 40% of Epic and has significant influence on its operations.
This is a long term strategy. Without it Epic would risk having an entire generation of new game makers fluent in Unity and with no knowledge of Unreal Engine. When these people later start working at the big studios it would influence the companys choice of engine. Add to that the increasing importance of indies and hobby developers, and the current direction of Epic starts to seem more like a necessity than a crazy move.
Royalty!
and who can’t afford pay 500-1000-3000$ for a license but want try or learning going to download the pirate version, better 20$ than nothing.
and you going to catch new developers who learn and pay royaltys in the future.
Epic win!. Unity lost, and cryengine… cry.
Bit of offtopic but about 48% of Epic is owned by Tencent.
If you don’t know what Tencent is. It’s one if biggest corporations in the world, originating from China (Hong-Kong as far as I remember).
But to be honest, it doesn’t seem like Tencent owning 48% of Epic, made any negative impact thus far.
Maybe they just wanted Engine in their portfolio. Or engine to use for their future games. Who knows…
Interesting.
I looked them up and this popped up.
http://www.tencent.com/en-us/ps/internetservice.shtml
With HTML support it makes a lot of sense.
Having UE4 free (almost), works in everyones best interest. All those customers of Epic who generate big income and pay big money for their UE4 licenses are going to start to find it very easy to find employees with experience in UE4. They will not need to spend money and time training up their new staff, which could very well be a couple months before someone is proficient, that expensive in terms of paid salary and reduced productivity. This means that those customers are less likely to move away from UE4, Epic keep that income source and pickup new ones. Everyone wins.