Epic Relaxes Royalty Fees For UDK Projects
Epic wants to help out indie devs by making it a little easier for them to make money on their games.
Epic has increased the amount of money that a game using its Unreal Development Kit, or UDK, must make before the developers owe Epic any money in royalty payments. The new threshold is $50,000, a tenfold increase from its previous level of $5,000.
Writing on the UDK forums [http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=764485], Epic vice president Mark Rein said that many of the teams using the UDK were just starting out, and that not having to pay royalties on the first $50,000 of revenue would help them to get properly established. He also explained that the royalty threshold only applied to money that a developer actually received, so it was the wholesale revenue that mattered, not the retail revenue. There was still a licensing fee of $99 required to sell a game made with the UDK, but that was the only charge levied against the first fifty thousand dollars.
In summer of last year, Rein said [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/101845-Epic-We-Have-Not-Abandoned-the-PC] that despite a focus on consoles with the Gears of War series, Epic had not turned its back on the PC, and this move would seem to make his point. $50,000 is a pretty significant sum of money for small, independent studios, and will hopefully help them to make bigger and better games in the future.
Source: Edge [http://www.next-gen.biz/news/epic-relaxes-unreal-royalties]
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Epic has increased the amount of money that a game using its Unreal Development Kit, or UDK, must make before the developers owe Epic any money in royalty payments. The new threshold is $50,000, a tenfold increase from its previous level of $5,000.
Writing on the UDK forums [http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=764485], Epic vice president Mark Rein said that many of the teams using the UDK were just starting out, and that not having to pay royalties on the first $50,000 of revenue would help them to get properly established. He also explained that the royalty threshold only applied to money that a developer actually received, so it was the wholesale revenue that mattered, not the retail revenue. There was still a licensing fee of $99 required to sell a game made with the UDK, but that was the only charge levied against the first fifty thousand dollars.
In summer of last year, Rein said [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/101845-Epic-We-Have-Not-Abandoned-the-PC] that despite a focus on consoles with the Gears of War series, Epic had not turned its back on the PC, and this move would seem to make his point. $50,000 is a pretty significant sum of money for small, independent studios, and will hopefully help them to make bigger and better games in the future.
Source: Edge [http://www.next-gen.biz/news/epic-relaxes-unreal-royalties]
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