Many people were surprised when Epic Games decided to offer Unreal Engine for free last year, and although they do get standard royalties and license agreements on large scale projects, it seems that the move proved very profitable, as Epic's co-founder, Tim Sweeney, said in a recent interview with Polygon.
Indeed, according to Sweeney, "last year was our best engine year ever. By a significant margin."
And even if people thought that this project would hurt Epic's business, Sweeney said that Unreal continues to be a bulwark against financial uncertainty: "If we didn't have the engine, we would have died," Sweeney said. "We would have died three times."
It certainly looks like the decision to offer their engine to developers for free turned out to be a good one, and if you think that among those games which have taken advantage of the initiative are ARK: Survival Evolved and Rocket League, it seems that Epic has found their golden goose.