Epic Games has committed $100 million (£76 million) to help developers, content creators, and students working on projects using the Unreal Engine. The funding program – dubbed Epic Megagrants – was announced earlier today during the company’s State of Unreal address during GDC.
Epic MegaGrants will offer funding ranging from $5,000 to $500,000, and Epic says that any recipient of the grant (which has no firm deadline, allowing for submissions as long as the money lasts) will maintain the rights to its IP, and will be free to publish its games however it likes – as long as it’s using Unreal Engine to make them. Information about how to apply for funding from MegaGrants can be found here.
According to a press release from Epic, MegaGrants is supposed to mark “an evolution” from the company’s previous funding efforts. The company’s Unreal Dev Grants program awarded its last financial boosts earlier this week. Having launched in 2015, Dev Grants was initially set up in order to award $5,000,000 in funding to developers working with Epic’s engine.
Epic has proven pretty generous elsewhere in the past. Early this year, during rival engine provider Unity’s spat with SpatialOS developer Improbable, Epic was quick to launch a $25 million fund to help affected developers transition to Unreal Engine.
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MegaGrant rewards will be handed out to Unreal Engine 4 developers “of all sizes,” as well as content creators, students and educators, and tools and open-source development teams. Who says Fortnite is just for kids?