Next-gen Unreal Tournament unveiled by Epic Games, will be free-to-play

It has been seven long years since Unreal Tournament last came out. Backed by Unreal Engine 3, it was one of the best games of its time.   And now Epic Games has started work on the next iteration of Unreal Tournament. This time the game will be jointly developed by Epic Games, UT fans and Unreal Engine 4 developers. The icing on the cake is that it will be completely free. According to a post on Unreal Tournament blog, a team of Epic Game programmers will be working on this project. The aim behind this is to encourage UT fans to actively participate in creating next iteration of Unreal Tournament.   The post further says, “From the very first line of code, the very first art created and design decision made, development will happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers. We’ll be using forums for discussion, and Twitch streams for regular updates.”   UT fans can be a part of this initiative by creating a free account on the game’s site and can participate in forum discussions with other members. Being developed for Windows, Linux and Mac, the game’s entire code and the content will be made available to UE4 developers on a GitHub repository.   The blog post further explains how Epic Games plans to generate revenue. It states, “We’ll eventually create a marketplace where developers, modders, artists and gamers can give away, buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from the marketplace will be split between the mod/content developer, and Epic.”   Since the entire initiative is collaborative, there are bound to be some delays in development such as code conflict revision, story changes and bug fixing. So the catch here is that it could be several months before the game is playable. And there’s no indication of when the game will be available for download.