Gameitall 
Late last week, Epic Games announced that they have set away $5 Million dollars to give away to small development teams that are working in and around the new Unreal 4 Engine. The Unreal Dev Grants Program is a no strings attached grant that allows a team to earn between $5,000 and $50,000 to help fund their project.
In an interview with Polygon, Epic founder Tim Sweeney explained the difficulties of building a game. “It’s really hard for an indie now, given how crowded the market is. Even if you’re going to start a Kickstarter campaign, that takes a significant effort. And that’s a big change from the original days. So we set up this grant program to help people make that first big leap, which we see pretty consistently now requires some financial resources.”
To apply for the grant, Applicants will need to introduce themselves and their team, discuss their project in brief and then provide a video demonstration of a working prototype. Epic will take care of the rest.
“Eighty percent of nominations will be publicly known, publicized, and the developers of them will actually want the publicity because it helps bring props and awareness to their project,” Sweeney said. “We’re happy to promote things for customers through our blog, our official media channels where it’s desirable. But some of them are often top-secret until they launch, and some teams try to derive some competitive edge from that. We’re open to that too. So there might an announcement of the sort that ‘Epic has awarded $20,000 in grants to an awesome project that is still unannounced, so stay tuned for details later.'”
Is there a catch? Well, Epic will not require any share of the game’s revenue and the creating team will get to keep their IP, and while games are one of the bigger aspect of the grant, Epic is also opening it to development around the engine including books, educational projects, university programs, government and military projects. However, Epic needs to feel comfortable on an Ethical level on a project before it can be considered.
This statement comes from the release of Hatred, a genocide simulator which gained infamy for it’s content. The game was promoted to be powered by the Unreal 4 Engine, in which Epic pulled away from
“We would consider any project,” Sweeney said. “We have two contrasting positions on those efforts. First of all, Epic absolutely supports free expression of all the creative folks who work with the engine. When we launched Unreal Engine 4 available to everybody last year, one of the key terms of access was the engine can be used for any lawful project. As long as you’re not breaking the law you can build it. From that point of view it’s kind of like Microsoft Word. You can use it to write theDeclaration Of The Rights Of Man or Mein Kampf and the tool is neutral on that. On the other hand, there are things — expressions — that we don’t agree with. I imagine we probably would consider very carefully whether we would award a grant to a project that we felt was not in mankind’s best interests, though we would certainly not do anything to prevent the developer of it from using the Unreal Engine 4 for building it.”
Epic is accepting applications right now, you can find more information and apply for the grant at https://www.unrealengine.com/unrealdevgrants
