Epic Games awards $500,000 in final Unreal Dev Grants
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Epic Games has awarded $500,000 in awards to the final recipients of Unreal Dev Grants, a $5 million fund supporting developers working with Unreal Engine 4 (UE4).
This is the last round of grants, and they give no-strings-attached financial assistance to more than a dozen projects. Recipients come from a variety of industries, including games, film, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, education, and more.
“With today’s announcement, we’ve reached our $5 million goal for the Unreal Dev Grants program. As we look back at the list of those we’ve been able to support throughout the years, we can’t help but feel deeply honored to have played a part in the stories of hundreds of projects,” said Chance Ivey, partnership manager at Epic Games, in a statement. “We remain inspired by the talent and dedication that the Unreal Engine community continues to exhibit, and look forward to where everyone will take things next. Though Unreal Dev Grants is now behind us, it’s not the end of our ongoing support. Tune in to Epic’s State of Unreal opening session at GDC for more information.”
The goal of Unreal Dev Grants has been to empower talented artists, designers, and programmers to build upon their outstanding work in and around Unreal Engine 4 while alleviating financial stress. The embedded YouTube video is a highlight reel of all of the award winners over the past four years.
In addition to numerous stealth projects, the latest Unreal Dev Grant recipients are as follows:
VR game
Project M from EVR Studios
Forge digital relationships in Project M, an interactive VR experience from Korea’s EVR Studio. In this narrative-driven adventure, you’re encouraged to interact and build friendships with the game’s hyper-realistic non-player characters. Combining responsive artificial intelligence with high-quality 3D scanned images, EVR Studio uses Unreal Engine 4 to blur the lines between the real and digital, creating characters that are recognized as being some of the very best in VR today. Preview Project M’s fidelity yourself via Dream, a teaser available now on Steam.