Epic crowdsourcing Unreal Tournament
Free shooter will have marketplace for players to buy and sell mods, assets
Epic Games today announced it would be making a new Unreal Tournament game. Well, part of one, anyway. The developer expects the rest of it to be made by fans.
"Work on the future of Unreal Tournament begins today, and we're happy to announce that we're going to do this together, with you," project lead Steve Polge said in a blog post detailing the plan. "We know that fans of the game are as passionate about Unreal Tournament as we are. We know that you have great ideas and strong opinions about where the game should go and what it should be. So let's do something radical and make this game together, in the open, and for all of us."
Polge will lead a "small team" of developers at Epic who will work on the game, but the company is planning to rely heavily on players to help with development at every step. All of the code and content Epic makes for the game will be available freely to registered Unreal Engine 4 developers on GitHub.
The game itself will be free--"not free-to-play, just free"--and Epic will make its money from a marketplace where players can buy, sell, and give away various content, mods, and assets for the game. Epic will pay for development by taking a split of each transaction in the marketplace.
"A lot of this is brand new for Epic, and we don't yet have everything figured out," Polge said. "Things will probably definitely go wrong from time to time, and when they do, we'll have to work through them together. There will be a lot of tough decisions to make, and not every feature will make it into the game. But if you're a fan of Unreal Tournament, a UE4 developer, or a future modder--or if you just want to learn how we make games--we hope you'll join us. It's going to be fun."