The Make Something Unreal Contest has always worked incredibly well for Epic: in exchange for a few cash prizes and an Unreal engine license, they’re able to get the community to extend the lifespan of their flagship game tenfold. Not only that, but they’re then more than happy to hire the winners, adding more talent to one of the industry’s most respected studios.
Well, this year’s Phase 4 winners have been announced, and the results aren’t entirely surprising.
The familiar favourites are all present and accounted for, with third-person horror mod The Haunting earning a well deserved place in pretty much every category in the book. Other notables include physics puzzler The Ball taking best FPS mod, the recently reviewed Planetstorm winning best vehicle set, and Alexander Bruce’s level-cum-philosophical-art-piece Hazard: Journey of Life coming on top in the best level category.
The winner of the grand final for the MSU contest is awarded with an Unreal Engine commercial license, allowing the team to turn their expertise into cold, hard cash, most notably Red Orchestra and Killing Floor, both produced by Tripwire Interactive, a company launched after winning an Unreal license in the contest with their Red Orchestra mod.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the MSU contest, and the winners, as we get closer to the Grand Final!
Isn’t the Unreal engine free now anyway? But you have to pay them royalties when you start making money out of your game? So I take it the prize in this is a license to use their engine without having to pay them diddly-squat?
Pretty much! The UDK allows you to use the engine for non-commercial projects. If you do want to make a commercial project out of it, you’ll have to pay a $99 one time fee + 25% of revenue after you’ve started earning over $5000. Which is a lot of cash :P
So yeah, the winners get a commercial license, which means they avoid all those extra fees. That’s what started Tripwire up really.