Epic Games gives developers $ 100 million

An 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 gratis funding under the Epic MegaGrants program . Formally, it is not even necessary to formally use the Unreal Engine 4 toolkit, it’s enough to participate in 3D open source projects.

Epic MegaGrants is the 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 members of any open source 3D projects can apply for them, the advantage 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, the cinema and television teams who want to use UE4 can also count on the grant; Corporate development teams using UE4 in non-gaming areas, such as architecture, product design and automotive, students and teachers using UE4 for educational and research purposes; and open source developers who create tools that can be useful to the wider UE community.



Grants are not binding. The recipient retains all intellectual property rights and is free to dispose of its developments at any time.

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


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

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

“This is our way to share Fortnite’s incredible success,” Epic Games wrote. The number of registered Fortnite users has already exceeded 250 million, and the game began to “determine the life of a generation”, as expressedin some media. This game brings hundreds of millions of dollars to the company every month. Epic Games recently allocated the same amount of $ 100 million in prizes for Fortnite eSports events. Each week, online players will play a million dollars online, and the marathon will end with the Fortnite World Championship in July with a prize pool of the final part of $ 30 million.

At the conference for GDC game developers, the company also announced that the number of users of the Epic Games Store platform on the PC reached 85 million , and several new games will be released on 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 by Night School Studios
• Control by Remedy Entertainment and 505 Games
• The Cycle by YAGER
• Dauntless by Phoenix Labs
• Industries of Titan by Brace Yourself Games
• Journey to the Savage Planet by Typhoon Studios and 505 Games
• Kine by Chump Squad
• Phoenix Point by Snapshot Games
• The Sinking City by Frogwares and Bigben
• Spellbreak by Proletariat Inc
• Solar Ash by Heart Machine and Annapurna Interactive

Epic Games expects the Epic Games Store to compete successfully with Valve's Steam platform. To do this, she is trying to entice game developers to her side, offering them a profitable 88/12 profit sharing.