Dive Brief:

• Epic Games, the studio behind Gears of War and other shooting games, recently announced that it will give college students free access to its newest 3D-graphics engine for creating video games.
• The program, Unreal Engine 4, is provided free to students enrolled in accredited video game development courses, as well as students in computer science, art, architecture, and simulation and visualization courses.
• Epic has more than 60 colleges and vocational schools using Unreal Engine in their courses.

Dive Insight:

In addition to encouraging video game creation, maybe this licensing model provides a catalyst for the development of education technology. This isn’t a huge discount — private developers can acquire the engine for a $19-per-month subscription — but it represents a change in the Epic Games business structure this year. With Unreal Engine 3, licensing typically cost millions of dollars, and access was therefore restricted. Under the model for academic use, as well as the per-month subscription, Epic claims a 5% royalty on gross revenues from any game developed on the platform that makes more than $3,000 per quarter. Besides learning how to build games on the platform, academic users can access and modify its source code, and create textbooks and other instructional materials.