Back on April 10, 2022 I posted "Probably a Good Time to Start Learning About Unreal Engine". I guess maybe now might be even better. Maybe.

Back in late 2020 unrealengine.com announced a competition involving learning how to use the Unreal Engine platform. There were five courses to take for the competition and I blogged about my progress. Since then I've put learning about Unreal Engine lower in the queue to focus on learning Python programming.

What I really like about Unreal Engine is its ability to generate pretty good photorealistic environments in 3D. Like most others I also like the equitable royalty-free payment grace period. If I use Unreal Engine for a commercial product I don't have to pay Epic Games, Inc. any royalties until my product exceeded $1 million USD in gross revenue. After that the royalty fee is 5%. Calculations different for revenue from selling in the Epic Games Store.

Great deal, right? It seems better to me than Unity's new fee changes.

I didn't know this until I saw this article yesterday - Unreal Engine has a plugin for blockchain integration. From what I can tell with my limited knowledge Polygon and Avalanche are a few of the blockchains that can be integrated into games. I don't think Hive or even Bitcoin can be integrated yet. If that's wrong please let me know in a reply to this post. I am still a beginner and I want to know more about this.

There's no guarantee that Unreal Engine won't ever adopt a stricter fee structure in the future like Unity has. So probably now is a good time to start learning Unreal Engine AND an open source game engine like Godot.