Oculus offer to cover royalty fees for Unreal Engine VR development

There’s a lot of news coming out of Oculus Connect 3 over in San Jose today, but perhaps one of the most interesting parts for potential VR developers is Oculus’s pledge to cover royalty fees for all Unreal Engine titles that ship on the Oculus Store for up to $5 million in revenue.

This isn’t a small amount of money. If current estimates that there are less than 200’000 Oculus Rift headsets currently in the wild, $5 million in gross revenue is substantial. It’s enough in fact that some mid-sized developers might want to start thinking about bringing their games to Oculus, too.

The Unreal Engine is already available for all developers to use for free, with Epic asking for 5 per cent royalty on gross revenue from the resulting games. To hit 5 million in gross revenue, an Oculus developer would need to sell a 500,000 at $10. This means Oculus’s offer could have you covered for a while. 

In an emailed press release, Nate Mitchell, VP of Oculus, says: “We’ve been close partners with Epic since the very beginning, and we’ve used Unreal Engine for countless projects including Toybox, Dreamdeck, Farlands, Lost, Henry, and the upcoming Dear Angelica from Story Studio.”

There’s no news on whether this offer will restrict devs to using Oculus’s storefront and also whether it’ll stop developers from releasing on other virtual reality headsets.