With Epic Games making the decision to close down Paragon (on April 26th) back in January, they’ve now made the decision to release all of the games assets (Unreal Engine 4) for free on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. And what is even more incredible is there are no strings attached.
The design of these assets cost Epic over $12 million dollars; there’s a large number of character assets already available as well as over 1500 environment assets from two maps. These assets are indeed AAA quality and it will be interesting to see how other game developers will use these assets. This is truly EPIC especially for someone like myself who is playing around with the engine.
This is also a very clever move by Epic because while they say there are no strings attached, the only catch is that these assets must be used with Unreal Engine 4. And commercial deployments for UE4 has to be licensed (they’ll be able to re-coup some of that via what will be a relatively small number of actual large scale titles but the real benefit is the goodwill gesture). And for the artists who designed and created those assets, their work would not have been in vain where it is just sitting in some company vault never to be enjoyed by anyone else.
