UPDATE: The game was just named. It is simply "Unreal Tournament," there will be no suffix on this one.

This news comes after Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney previously told us directly that there would be "no new Unreal Tournament game" and that they were moving on as a company. The new UT was hinted at last week, where rumors spun that it'd be based on UT2K4. It is now clear that the new game will be a completely new title using a crowd-sourced development model. I'll be referring to this as "Unreal Tournament 4," for sake of this post, though it is yet unnamed.

The Epic Games Twitch livestream today announced the development of a new, free Unreal Tournament game that will be crowd-sourcing development from the community; the game will be "not free to play, just free," meaning no microtransactions, no subscriptions, no purchases. "It's just free. That's it," Senior Programmer Steve Polge told the community, an Unreal Tournament 2004 cutout in the background.

Epic's new Unreal Tournament will be a competitive FPS built for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The company stated that it wants to create "the best possible shooter for those platforms that can really bring the community together." Development will be outsourced to devs working with the new Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) that we've posted about before, but they're also looking for design and discussion from gamers. All development decisions will be made from the official Unreal Tournament forums once they're put online; gamers can contribute to decisions, but if you'd like to get involved in development, we've got an intro to UE4 video over here.

Mods will be fully-supported in the marketplace with Unreal Engine 4 and the code will be completely available through GitHub. Epic Games stated to the press that "the game will be true to its roots as a competitive FPS," and will be retaining its twitch shooting elements.

We were told that there is no "catch" here, as far as money, just time. It's going to be built from the ground-up starting today -- this is the first day of development, and it's entirely public, so the game is still pretty far out in the timeline.

The press release noted that "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. That's how we plan to pay for the game."

Epic Games will first put out a straight-forward deathmatch game mode for development purposes. Epic has a team of senior development staff working internally on UT4's core mechanics and making final calls on decisions, but will be relying heavily on UE4 developers.

You can learn more about UT over on the Wikipedia page and Twitch page:

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.