On Monday, Epic Games announced that its Unreal Engine 4 solution for game and graphic creation, which had previously launched with a $19 per month subscription fee, would be free to download and use. Now, if you want to dabble in game creation with Epic's engine, you no longer need to pony up for a solo subscription, latch onto a company's subscription plan, or even fake that you're a student.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed the details in a blog post in which he said that anyone can now freely access the engine's entire toolset—along with the Unreal Engine Marketplace, which allows users to buy and sell custom-made art and programming assets. "This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games," Sweeney added. He confirmed that current subscribers will receive a pro-rated refund effective immediately and that anyone who has ever paid for the engine will receive a $30 credit at the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Yes, that's $30 for everyone, regardless of how many hundreds of dollars you may have pumped into subscription fees already.

What hasn't changed is the other, potentially more expensive aspect of building a game in Unreal—namely, that the creators of a finished UE4 game owe Epic five percent of a game's revenue after the first $3,000 they make each quarter. Those fees were in effect while Epic was also insisting on a monthly subscription fee that added up to $240 a year. For comparison, the industry's current leader in cross-platform development tools, Unity Pro, costs game makers $75 per month to use, but it has no follow-up payment requirements. (The lesser toolset, simply named Unity, is free to use with no strings attached.)

In September, Epic began to chip away at its subscription requirement by allowing students to freely access the toolset, but those students could only log in to UE4 by receiving credentials from an approved teacher or administrator. Now, any hopeful game maker can simply hop on to unrealengine.com, sign up, and download away. If Epic coughs up any further details at its Game Developers Conference keynote on Wednesday, we'll let you know.