Epic takes 25% royalty on UDK projects

Epic Games receives a 25 per cent royalty rate on all games that use the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the group has revealed.

The Unreal Engine group offers out its UDK at no charge, and today the indie giant has lifted the lid on costs for using the engine for commercial business.

Developers working in a commercial capacity will have to pay Epic $99 up-front, and will take 25 per cent of revenues from games built with the engine. The first $5,000 earned by a developer is however free of charge.

The UDK itself, downloaded for free from the company’s website, has proved to be remarkably popular with the PC indie and mod scene. The engine was downloaded over 50,000 times in its first week of release.

However it remains unclear how popular the egine is in regards to commercial use. Few companies have announced their use of the engine, though Florida-based Trendy Entertainment said it used UDK to develop a game in just four weeks.

Elsewhere in the company’s summary report, the firm revealed that businesses using the UDK internally, though not for game releases, will need to each year pay Epic a license fee of $2,500 per ‘UDK developer seat’.

The free to use engine space is already become hotly contested, with Epic and Unity both offering their engines to the market.

Crytek has also stated its intentions to release a free version of its CryEngine.