Unreal Engine EULA

This agreement gives you a limited, personal license to use and modify the Unreal Engine, but comes with real financial obligations: you need to pay per-developer subscription fees unless your business is below $1 million in annual revenue, and you owe royalties to Epic once any product you release earns more than $1 million. You cannot use Unreal Engine to train generative AI, cannot mix it with certain open-source code, and if a dispute arises with Epic, you must handle it individually rather than through a class action.

The Unreal Engine EULA establishes a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license for users to privately use, reproduce, display, perform, and modify the Licensed Technology within a defined set of conditions. The agreement imposes a tiered financial structure: per-developer seat subscriptions are required for most access (with an exemption for corporate groups below $1,000,000 USD in trailing 12-month gross revenue), and royalties on worldwide gross revenue become payable once a Product directly generates more than $1,000,000 USD. Users are expressly prohibited from integrating the Licensed Technology with copyleft-style code whose license would impose its terms on the Licensed Technology, and from using the Licensed Technology as training input or prompt-based input to any Generative AI Program that trains on input data. Epic retains audit rights over user books and records, the agreement requires users to bear full indemnification and defense costs for covered claims against the Epic Parties, and the Epic Parties' aggregate liability is capped at the greater of $1,000 or amounts paid by the user to Epic in the preceding twelve months. Dispute resolution is restricted to individual proceedings, with class and representative actions expressly prohibited.

For an individual developer or small studio, the most immediate practical effect is the revenue-based exemption: no seat subscription fees apply while your entire corporate group earns less than $1,000,000 USD in gross revenue over the prior 12 months, and no royalties are owed until a specific product crosses $1,000,000 USD in gross revenue. Once either threshold is met, per-seat subscription costs and worldwide-gross-revenue royalties apply. The agreement also bars you from feeding any Licensed Technology into generative AI training pipelines and from joining a class action against Epic — your maximum financial recovery from Epic is capped at $1,000 or what you paid Epic in the last 12 months, whichever is greater. If you believe you may be approaching either revenue threshold, you should track your corporate group's gross revenue against those figures, as crossing them triggers binding financial obligations.