Epic tells us why the new Unreal Tournament is totally free and "fundamentally generous"

Unreal Tournament developer Epic Games has discussed the shooter's free nature with us, stressing a need for it to be both "fundamentally generous" and fair on community members making paid content. We caught up with Project Lead and Senior Programmer Steve Polge to straighten out the facts.

Hit up the link if you missed the new Unreal Tournament announcement and first details. We suspect a lot of people thought Epic was joking around by saying the shooter will be absolutely free, but it's true.

Still, we tapped up Polge over email to ask some questions for an interview you can read here soon, but there were a few things he said about the game's free stance that caught out eye.

After telling us that discussions about the Unreal Tournament's project direction won't be internal, and will instead be informed by the community, Polge said of the free model, "We like this model because it’s fundamentally generous. It allows us to succeed by doing the right thing for the community, and it keeps all of us, at Epic and in the community, on the same page with what we are trying to accomplish."

"The marketplace for Unreal Tournament will be an extension of the Unreal Engine marketplace, which you’ll be able to see taking shape with every update to Unreal Engine 4," he added.

"For the mod community to succeed, we first need to create a successful game that appeals to and sustains a sizable and vibrant community of players. We’ll work with our mod developers to support their development needs with the core game platform and we’ll make sure it's easy for players to discover the mod experiences available in the UT marketplace."

When we asked about a potential percentage cut for paid map creators, Ploge replied, "We haven’t figured that out yet, but our goal is to provide a model that is attractive and fair for our content creators."

It's clear that these are early days, as Unreal Tournament development only started last week, but you can get more details on the project in our full interview soon.

Are you eager to return to Unreal Tournament? Does this free model make sense? Let us know below.