Today Unreal Engine announced that it would be dropping the subscription fee from it’s popular game development engine. This comes on the heels of the news that the company had released a massive new update to UE4 that added a significant amount of better support for VR development.

Previously, Unreal Engine cost $19 a month, as well as promising a royalty commitment of 5% of your game’s royalties. That subscription fee has been dropped (although the royalty commitment still remains). Additionally, Unreal is going to gift anyone who was a previous subscriber $30 in credit to spend within their asset marketplace.

We have previously reported that Oculus has been developing internally on the Unreal Engine for a while now. In fact, the majority of the demos that they have shown in the past few months have utilized the engine. With this news, the barrier to entry for the engine has been lifted and it could lead to it becoming a far more widely adopted standard. Unreal’s main competition in the VR development space, Unity, still costs $75 a month plus an additional $20 for each team member that you add. Granted, that comes without a royalty commitment. For smaller indie developers, and those learning however that royalty fee is potentially negligible until the game reaches a certain scale.

Unreal has lowered the barrier to entry for VR development, and that is a good thing for everyone involved. This can only bring more developers into VR and more experiences.

So what do you think, does this move by Unreal lead to them becoming the industry standard for VR development?