Epic Games distributes $ 100 million to developers

The attraction of unprecedented generosity was arranged by Epic Games, announcing the distribution of grants for a record amount of $ 100 million . Developers, digital artists, students, teachers, schools, etc. can apply for gratuitous funding under the Epic MegaGrants program. Formally, it is not even necessary to use the Unreal Engine 4 toolkit; it is enough to participate in open source 3D projects.

Epic MegaGrants - an evolutionary development of the previous Unreal Dev Grants program. This fund of $ 5 million was founded in 2015, and the last grants were distributed just this week.

Epic MegaGrants provides grants ranging from $ 5,000 to $ 30,000. Although participants in any open source 3D projects can apply for them, preference is given to “UE4 development teams of any size” who are already using this engine or trying to transfer an existing project to it. According to the documentation, film and television teams who want to use UE4 can also count on the grant; corporate development teams using UE4 in non-player areas such as architecture, product design and automotive, students and teachers using UE4 for educational and research purposes; and open source developers creating tools that can be useful to the wider UE community.
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Grants do not impose any obligations. The recipient retains all intellectual property rights and is free to dispose of their developments as they please.

According to Epic Games, the number of Unreal Engine licensees has grown to 7.5 million. By the way, new versions of the game engine were announced at the GDC conference. In the coming weeks, Unreal Engine 4.22 will become available in which “the compilation time has been significantly reduced” and “many optimizations and performance updates” have been carried out. UE 4.22 comes with several “long awaited features including ray tracing (see the demo below), a new Live ++ hot reboot for live coding, multi-user collaboration in the Unreal Editor, improvements to Niagara VFX, support for streaming Microsoft HoloLens 2 May) and support for the new streaming gaming platform Google Stadia. ”


Real-time ray tracing with complex soft shadows and reflections.

The new funding program for developers Unreal Engine will work on an ongoing basis, while funding is available, there is no deadline.

“This is our way to share the incredible success of Fortnite,” Epic Games wrote. The number of registered users of Fortnite has already exceeded 250 million, and the game has become “define the life of a whole generation,” as expressed in some media. This game brings the company hundreds of millions of dollars every month. Recently, Epic Games has allocated the same amount of $ 100 million in prizes for e-sports competitions in Fortnite. Each week, online players will play a million dollars, and the marathon will end with the Fortnite World Championships in July with a final fund of $ 30 million.

At the conference for game developers GDC, the company also announced that the number of users of the Epic Games Store platform on a PC has reached 85 million, and several new games will be released on a PC exclusively on this platform. Among them are games from Quantic Dream - Heavy Rain , Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human . Previously, they were released only under the PlayStation. Other exclusives:

• Afterparty from Night School Studios
• Control from Remedy Entertainment and 505 Games
• The Cycle by Yager
• Dauntless from Phoenix Labs
• Industries of Titan from Brace Yourself Games
• Journey to the Savage Planet from Typhoon Studios and 505 Games
• Kine by Chump Squad
• Phoenix Point by Snapshot Games
• The Sinking City by Frogwares and Bigben
• Spellbreak from Proletariat Inc
• Solar Ash from Heart Machine and Annapurna Interactive

Epic Games is looking forward to a successful Epic Games Store competition with the Valve Steam platform. To do this, she is trying to win over game developers by offering them a profitable profit sharing of 88/12.