Epic Games announces they are dropping subscription fees from Unreal Engine 4, making the game engine and all future updates free to use for everyone, with the only stipulation being a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 in quarterly gross revenue per commercial product. The latest version of Epic's development system launched about a year ago with that 5% royalty as well as a $19.00 monthly fee, which has now been dropped. There's a post from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney covering the news on the Unreal Engine website including this video. Here's word on the deal:

This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games. It scales from indie projects to high-end blockbusters; it supports all the major platforms; and it includes 100% of the C++ source code. Our goal is to give you absolutely everything, so that you can do anything and be in control of your schedule and your destiny. Whatever you require to build and ship your game, you can find it in UE4, source it in the Marketplace, or build it yourself – and then share it with others.