The arrival of Fortnite Money has meant that Epic can afford to spend a lot more and charge a lot less for everything they do. They opened a studio in Vancouver and started hiring whoever they wanted from other companies, e.g. The Coalition, with starting salaries that made jumping ship a no-brainer for the engineers they were picking up.

For Unreal, I think it fundamentally comes down to:

1. We want to be the biggest and best game engine out there

2. We want everyone to use our technology if at all possible

3. The vast majority of our money is going to come from the top 1% of the huge players in game dev (CD Projekt Red, The Coalition) and not from anyone else

4. The more people who use Unreal to make games, the more Unreal devs there are in the world, and the more Unreal devs there, the more likely those huge companies (or potentially blockbuster indies) are to choose Unreal for their projects because talent is readily available (see point #3)

Edit: Per their court case with Apple:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-...

They made over $5bn in profit from 2018 to 2019 from Fortnite, and $5.1bn in revenue in 2020.

Just as in game microtransactions, it doesn't matter how much or little the median person is paying, because all the profit is in the minority of very big payers / 'whales', so you optimize the payment structure of the small payments to ensure that they don't prevent you from capturing the whales.

If your game doesn't earn a million dollars, it doesn't matter to Epic, because all those (many!) tiny games in total don't earn enough that even a much higher pricing would move the needle.

However, if the low-end pricing structure means that one more (or one less) blockbuster chooses this engine, that makes all the difference, because they are going to pay the full rate out of the billion dollars they earn.

Take a quick look at how much fortnite is making per day in 2018.

https://www.cinemablend.com/games/2454545/the-insane-amount-...

Just remember how many AAA or big name titles use Unreal as engine. Those can sell millions of copies at 60 per copy. And even if they have much better rate it is still probably half a million to millions a game.

That's mostly a contribution fee, game engines don't make a lot of money from their software, in their case the real revenue comes from Fortnite.

Technically if your game is not F2P Unity will still be much if your revenue i a couple if millions (even with their bizarre and convoluted per install pricing).

Also I don’t think they have that many people working on the engine (they have less than half the employee count of Unity) and it’s probably subsidized by Fortnite revenue to some extent.

They’re financed by blood diamonds. I.e. tencent making their initial funds from gacha on the Asian market and now trying to buy legitmity with it.

The side benefits are enormous. Its not like Unity where Unity fees are the bread and butter for the company.