Unexpected: Unreal Tournament will be completely free and transparent

Epic’s going transparent. The developers will be communicating with prospective players and UE4 developers through the official forums, and providing updates via Twitch, where the announcement was first made. 

Even with the team of UT veterans, Epic says it’s going to take a while, with months to go before it’s in a playable state. But throughout development, everyone is going to be kept in the loop, the studio assures.

And Epic wants modders and other devs to get involved while it’s being developed. All code and content will be available on GitHub for UE4 developers. A marketplace is in the works, which will be used by modders and UE4 devs to promote their creations and make them available to a larger audience, and they’ll be able to decide if they want to give them away for free or sell their work. 

"If you know what you want, you can make it part of the game," said Polge.

“A lot of this is brand new for Epic, and we don’t yet have everything figured out,” explains Polge. “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.”

Tutorials, videos on YouTube, Twitch streams exist to help out UE4 developers, and specific tutorials for Unreal Tournament will be created as well. 

If you want to get more detail on the plans for the next Unreal Tournament or get involved, developing mods you can take a gander at the official Wiki and forums.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/unexpected-unreal-tournament-will-be-completely-free-and-transparent

Someone pinch me, cause I must be dreaming. For Linux as well? Sounds totally unbelievable. What spurred this idea?

If you didn't watch the video, while they said it would be "free" and not "free to play" most of that video was going on and on about how the mod content would be so easy to find and how modders could sell their content, etc. They completely disregarded their claims of the game being free the instant, not even a minute later, when they said people could either give their content away or "sell it."

The Unreal Tournament franchise is now dead.  Might as well port this over to mobile where all the dead and dying classics go.

NiKKoM was right!

But all the content that Epic makes will be free, having a marketplace where the community can sell their own creations doesn't contradict that at all. And I would imagine most of the community content will also be free. It should work similar to TF2 how the community makes content that can be sold but the core game is free. Except they are going one step further by giving the UE4 community access to everything from the source code on up, meaning everything from game modes to entire story driven campaigns can be created and given away or sold. Honestly this is probably the best model for a multiplayer shooter in this day and age. Team Fortress, Counterstrike, DOTA, Natural Selection and many more came out of the modding scene. Having Unreal being a platform for the community where they can create any game mode theat they want and then if it's good enough start selling it sounds amazing. Hell the free core UT experiance Epic are developing is just a bonus.

Interesting, I haven't played Unreal Tournement before. I guess this is my chance to see if I get future installments.

very very very very very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very veryvery very very nice...

Uhm... are you serious? This is an incredible innitiative and because modders will have a chance to earn some money with their mods it will spur the community on to make a lot of great high quality mods. And this model makes the original game completely free. 

If any this new UT game will probably be the most popular ever.

This actually has me quite excited, with the new low level access UE4 offers for modders/developers, this could quite possible/hopefully mean that will be the Unreal Tournament yet, there's certainly no reason this game should lack vital gamemodes/features.

Welcome back home Epic!

I look forward to this, it's been to long since the last game!