Unreal Development Kit ( UDK ): Royalty Threshold Raised to $50,000

Unreal Development Kit ( UDK ), a free set of tools and complete framework for game development, advanced visualizations and 3D simulations, based on Unreal Engine 3, becomes even more attractive for developers with new licensing terms by Epic. Mark Rein, vice-president of Epic Games, in official forum stated that licensing terms of UDK are changed — revenue threshold was raised by 10 times and now it's $50,000 instead of $5,000.

In this way UDK looks like even more attractive tool for game developers — raising revenue threshold should help new companies to keep more funds from their projects in the beginning and get on their feet before they should pay royalties to Epic.

Mark Rein, vice-president of Epic Games:

"We just wanted to let you know that we've raised the revenue threshold for UDK. Under the new rules you are not required to pay royalties on revenue earned from the use of UDK until that revenue exceeds US$50,000 which represents a 10-times increase over the previous threshold of US$5,000.

We're really excited about folks making some amazing things with UDK and we realize that a lot of you are just started in the business so not having to pay royalties on your first $50,000 should help you get a financial footing toward building a quality game development business.

One thing some folks didn't seem to realize is that whether you sell your product through digital distribution (or a retail location) the company doing the sale to the end user (called the "retailer") takes a cut (typically around 30%) for their efforts. The price they sell it for is called the retail price. The amount of money they pay to you on each sale is called the wholesale amount. When you pay us royalties you pay on the wholesale amount, i.e. the money you actually receive."

Well, that's pretty cool for those developers who can use all of the potential UDK provides and make commercial successfull projects on their own — first $50,000 of revenue will be completely yours, yey! 
 
Meanwhile Epic releases March UDK Beta with DirectX 11 support and some other cool features.