They can definitely also EEE with this. Take a game engine, create a fork for your platform, wait until your platform and fork has a significant market share, and then start introducing features to your fork, which are not directly available on the main-branch.
I can't seem to find anything on how UE4 is licensed, but even if Microsoft is forced to release all of their source code, if their fork is different enough from the main-branch, it might be extremely hard to backport all of these features into the main-branch.
> They can definitely also EEE with this. Take a game engine, create a fork for your platform, wait until your platform and fork has a significant market share, and then start introducing features to your fork, which are not directly available on the main-branch.
Exactly. Or if it's not even a fork anymore (let's say it was merged upstream), make those features platform dependent / unportable even in the main codebase. It will still be EEE.
And everybody using the fork still has to pay Epic according to the UE4 license, it doesn't matter for Epic which version they use: they get their 5% profit share either way.
If Microsoft were to discourage Win32 apps Epic would have to adapt UE4, but the MS fork can't really make that harder.
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They can definitely also EEE with this. Take a game engine, create a fork for your platform, wait until your platform and fork has a significant market share, and then start introducing features to your fork, which are not directly available on the main-branch.
I can't seem to find anything on how UE4 is licensed, but even if Microsoft is forced to release all of their source code, if their fork is different enough from the main-branch, it might be extremely hard to backport all of these features into the main-branch.
> They can definitely also EEE with this. Take a game engine, create a fork for your platform, wait until your platform and fork has a significant market share, and then start introducing features to your fork, which are not directly available on the main-branch.
Exactly. Or if it's not even a fork anymore (let's say it was merged upstream), make those features platform dependent / unportable even in the main codebase. It will still be EEE.
I seriously doubt the UE license will allow this.
The source code may be available but it's not "free software".
And everybody using the fork still has to pay Epic according to the UE4 license, it doesn't matter for Epic which version they use: they get their 5% profit share either way.
If Microsoft were to discourage Win32 apps Epic would have to adapt UE4, but the MS fork can't really make that harder.