Good Guy Epic Games Gives Unreal Engine Asset Creators Huge Pay Raise After Fortnite Breakthrough
Epic Games is raking so much cash from Fortnite that it has decided to take a smaller slice of sales from creators in the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Instead of the previous 70 percent (developers) / 30 percent (Epic Games) split, Epic Games is reducing its cut to just 12 percent, effectively giving developers a raise to 88 percent.
It gets even better. The new, more generous split not only applies to current and future sales, but past ones as well. Epic Games is retroactively applying the 88 percent rate to previous transactions that date all the way back toe the Unreal Engine Marketplace's launch in 2014.
"Thanks to both the Marketplace’s growth and the success of Fortnite, Epic now conducts a huge volume of digital commerce," said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic. "The resulting economies of scale enable us to pass the savings along to the Unreal Engine Marketplace community, while also making a healthy profit for Epic."
You don't see this sort of thing very often. Epic Games is spreading the wealth, and while there is a self-serving element here, it's not as though the Unreal Engine Marketplace had been struggling to attract developers—Epic Games says it experienced 30 percent growth in active sellers during the first half of 2018. And as of July, more than 6.3 million developers have used Unreal Engine 4 for their projects.
Developers who have been along from the get-go stand to receive a nice bonus, depending on their sales to date.
"The new revenue split is amazing, and retroactively paying this back is not only generous, it’s just down right magnificent," said Mike Clephane, director of Synty Studios, whose co-director, Andrew Stairs, added, "It's humbling that a company as big as Epic is giving back to the little guy in such a huge way. Thank you, this is truly Epic!"
In total, the Marketplace now has over 1,500 creators offering more than 5,000 curated products. In addition, there have been more than 1 million downloads of the free Paragon assets to date, representing $300 billion in total value to the development community.
