Unreal Engine is an "source code available" game engine, written and provided by Epic Games. It is governed by the Epic Games EULA and the distribution of games and applications developed with the engine are bound to royalties; titles sold through the Epic Marketplace face additional fees as per the Epic Games Store EULA.

The Epic Games EULA, clause g (now clause c as of EULA update 17), forces developers of non-C++ language integrations, who wish to distribute their solution to other developers, to open source their project, relinquish all intellectual property and patents rights, and provide their work for free (to the royalty benefit of Epic Games) to all engine users. The rationalization by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney can be found here.

The EULA forces developers of such technologies, who wish to distribute their work, to provide their novel solutions for free which in turn generates revenue and royalties for Epic Games. These restrictions do not apply to other types of extensions, assets, etc... distributed for the engine under the EULA. This creates a very unfair and uneven playing field for developers looking to extend the open-source nature of Unreal Engine with non-C++ language supports.

Our solution, Code Orchestra, is a use case agnostic framework that allows a developer to automate generating interlanguage bindings. A developer can write C# code that can run in a C++ application with performant and safe bindings with compile times of milliseconds.

Here are some examples of how well integrated and performant our novel patent-pending solution is:

Overview Video
Blueprint Video
Instant recompilation / Nuget video
Performance benchmark

We have approached Epic about this dilemma and they have chosen to continue enforcing clause g. and not make an exception for Code Orchestra. This means we must forcefully participate in royalty generation for Epic Games without the ability to protect our patent rights if we wish to support customers using our technology for the Unreal Engine game engine.

We ask Epic Games to reconsider clause g. and to provide a fair amendment to allow monetization of such tooling or agree to play by the same rules and forego royalties and fees on titles using non-C++ technologies falling under clause g. We've seen how this decision has ensured that projects such as Mono-UE, USharp, UnrealCLR are bound to fail without any path to sustainable monetization.

Forcing developers to make their software free, relinquish patent rights, participate in royalty-generating activities for Epic Games, while blocking them from being able to create a sustainable support and development structure is unsustainable and puts prospective users at risk. This is even more true in our case as our software is use case agnostic and the Unreal Engine is one of the hundreds of use cases the software addresses.

Please sign this petition to let Epic Games know you request an amendment/exception to clause g. and allow developers, whose technology is used to generate royalties for Epic Games by extending C++ in Unreal Engine, to have a fair chance at monetization of their innovations.