Speculation: Unreal Engine 4 May Soon be Free for Oculus Rift Dev Kit Owners

Just last week we reported that Oculus Rift support would be made available for developers using the free version of Unity, the 3D game engine, previously only available with Unity Pro costing $1500 or $75 per month on subscription. Now Epic, the company behind the competing Unreal Engine 4, may be about to announce that its UE4 engine is available to Oculus Rift Dev Kit owners for free!

Courting the Future of Games

In VRs beginning there was Unity. Recently estimated by Oculus’ VP of Product Nate Mitchell as responsible for something like 95% of early DK1 based content. It’s certainly been the engine to help enable VR enthusiasts and developers to follow through on their dream to make and experience awesome VR content. Of course, it didn’t hurt that DK1 shipped with a 3 month trial of Unity Pro, complete with Oculus Rift support.

Unreal Engine 4 was released back in March and offered an affordable subscription model to prospective developers along with a cut of any retail earnings should the game make it into the world proper. It also shipped with ‘out of the box’ support for Oculus Rift and a cutting-edge set of productivity and rendering technology, making it extremely attractive.

Well, an eagle eyed redditor (acatalept) spotted a note at the top of UE4s front page, complete with a dead link. The note disappeared shortly afterwards (although not before an screenshot was taken – see top), firing up speculation that Epic are responding to Unity’s recent announcement to finally allow Unity Free users access to Rift support too.

Careless web developer? Is Epic toying with the emotions of 1000s of VR developers? We’re not yet sure, but we’ll report back as soon as we know more.