
Epic’s free Online Services launch for all game developers - grawprog
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-s-free-online-services-launch-for-all-game-developers
======
JoshuaAshton
All they have is telemetry right now.

Why even bother making an announcement?

~~~
jeeva
Possibly a reaction to Valve and Discord's recent announcement of similar
(more fully featured) releases. But I may well be wrong, and this was planned
for a while, with a sturdy roadmap and a MVP release.

~~~
glenneroo
Or it's a late-ish reaction to the drama[0] surrounding Unity's "sudden"
blocking of Improbable's SpatialOS cloud platform (if you believe Improbable -
Unity said they were warned months in advance, Improbable said it was without
warning). Then, within a couple days, Unity made an announcement[1] for their
own paid cloud gaming plugin. It was all over HackerNews[2] in January when it
happened with lots of commenters quipping that it's time to move to Unreal or
GoDot Engine. During these days of back-and-forth drama between Improbable and
Unity, Tim Sweeney from Unreal Games jumped into the fray and was tweeting his
constant disapproval (and further muddying the waters with inaccurate
information), at the end of which "Epic Games and Improbable announced the
establishment of a US $25m fund to help concerned Unity customers shift their
games over to Epic's Unreal Engine."

I'm still waiting to hear how they plan to fund devs but after following Tim
Sweeney's recent behavior (i.e. the tweets above, plus paying Coffee Stain
Studios to move their upcoming and popular (at least on Reddit) game
"Satisfactory" off of Steam and do an exclusivity deal with Epic Games Store,
which has caused nothing but bad press on Reddit), I would expect this fund
will be nothing more than vouchers to use the paid-version of Unreal Engine
for a limited time period, after which you will hopefully be reliant and
forced to continue payment. Only time will tell I suppose. And competition is
always a good thing.

[0]: [https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2019/01/unity-announces-
cloud-...](https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2019/01/unity-announces-cloud-server-
hosting-amid-controversy-surrounding-terms-of-service/75088/)

[1]: [https://unity.com/solutions/real-time-multiplayer/game-
serve...](https://unity.com/solutions/real-time-multiplayer/game-server-
hosting)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400)

