14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Epic Games working on the newly announced Unreal Tournament believes that the entirely free business model that the title will use will both make the experience fair for the players and will also allow the studio to be generous with its fans.
Steve Polge, the project lead and senior programmer on the project, tells VG247 that, “We like this model because it’s fundamentally generous. It allows us to succeed by doing the right thing for the community, and it keeps all of us, at Epic and in the community, on the same page with what we are trying to accomplish.”
He also explains that the marketplace that will be used to sell mods, maps and new items made by the community will be created as an extension for the one that Epic Games is already running for Unreal Engine 4.
Polge adds, “For the mod community to succeed, we first need to create a successful game that appeals to and sustains a sizable and vibrant community of players. We’ll work with our mod developers to support their development needs with the core game platform and we’ll make sure it’s easy for players to discover the mod experiences available in the UT marketplace.”
The Epic Games developer says that, at the moment, his team has not settled on the percentage that it will take from all the transactions linked to Unreal Tournament, but it wants to make sure that it’s low enough to make it attractive for gamers to create their own content.
The new installment in the first-person shooter was revealed via an announcement last week and the biggest surprise was that the entire experience would be offered for free to all those who wanted to play it.
The studio says that it will use none of the known tactics of the free-to-play genre in order to force gamers to use real-world money to access content.
According to Epic Games, the entire development process will involve the player community as much as possible, although the final decision about the mechanics still lies with the team.
The core features of the series will remain unchanged, but it seems that some changes will be made to accommodate the more competition-focused modern shooter experience.
Epic Games says that it plans to launch a first playable version of Unreal Tournament in a few months, but that a lot depends on how involved the community is.