Epic Games releases $12 Million worth of Paragon Assets... FOR FREE

[WelshDdraig]

Source #1: https://www.reddit.com/r/paragon/comments/85jq5o/epic_games_releases_12_million_worth_of_paragon/

Source #2: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-releases-12-million-worth-of-paragon-assets-for-free

 

 

 

Yes - you read the title correctly.

Seemingly out of nowhere- Epic Games (Creators of Unreal Engine amongst other things ***COUGH - FORTNITE - COUGH***), Has announced that they will be releasing

over $12 Million worth of assets for free for all developers using Unreal Engine.

 

This includes the following assets: 

Quote

Characters: 20 Paragon Hero characters will be initially available including all skins for distinct character variants. The release also includes base meshes, thousands of textures, VFX and animation cycles, and dialogue with hundreds of sound cues. The character Shinbi comes with an animation Blueprint which can be tailored to specific needs. Epic sends special thanks to OTOY and 3D Scan Store for granting permission to keep intact the high-quality character
materials using their facial and body scanning technologies as part of this release.

Environments: The Paragon release includes over 1,500 environment assets created for the Agora and Monolith maps, including a sample map for developers to use and customize as desired.

More to Come: Epic will release millions of dollars worth of additional Paragon asset packs beyond the initial $12 million offering through spring and summer 2018.

1

 

Again, this seemingly came out of nowhere - but its great to see this from a developer and publisher.

Rarely - if ever - has another huge dev done this, let alone on the scale of Epic Games right now.

All these assets are free to download and use in anyone's unreal engine product - not sure about publication, but I assume its fine since Epic Games are literally giving it away.

 

My Thoughts:

HOLY SHIT! - As a game developer (well, studying to become one at university), and currently teaching myself the Unreal Engine - since my course uses Unity3D...
This is fantastic news. I love the support from companies that do this. GG Epic Games, GG.

 

Your thoughts, Please leave them down below!

[BuckGup]

What else you gonna do with a dead game? I mean Fortnite is making them BANK 

[EunSoo]

Also worth noting that Paragon was a failing game that is going to be dead in April. Provides a little bit of useful context

[SquintyG33Rs]

i mean yeah it's cool and all but ultimately it's for prototyping and stuff. and you can essentailly get models for that a bit everywhere on the internet. because when you're going to make your game for real you will have to do your own assets in like 99.99% of the time. the one thing you can really reuse efficiently is like textures, maybe

[Eduard the weeb]

11 minutes ago, Alexp10v2 said:

 Epic Games (Creators of Unreal Engine amongst other things)

or the people that made the slightly relevant game called fortnite lol

[ImNotDeViLzzz]

Very cool of them, Epic Games, to do this.  I just wish I had the talent to make use of the stuff.

[WelshDdraig]

3 minutes ago, Eduard the weeb said:

or the people that made the slightly relevant game called fortnite lol

Yeah - but I didn't want to say that

[Bcat00]

Fun little news, me like. 

[Razor01]

3 minutes ago, ImNotDeViLzzz said:

Very cool of them, Epic Games, to do this.  I just wish I had the talent to make use of the stuff.

 

 

If you got a good eye for art and proportions, I can teach.  Of course you will need a copy of 3d max of course lol.

[WelshDdraig]

7 minutes ago, Razor01 said:

If you got a good eye for art and proportions, I can teach.  Of course you will need a copy of 3d max of course lol.

1

I have one of those, and its not the art or proportions

[ItsMitch]

Who's ready for the asset flips with Paragon

[Ryujin2003]

So what would the purpose be? This is all material from a game that already exists. It's not like you can use it and then rebadge as you're own thing can you?

[ItsMitch]

Just now, Ryujin2003 said:

So what would the purpose be? This is all material from a game that already exists. It's not like you can use it and then rebadge as you're own thing can you?

Epic have no need for the work anymore, it's a good move to the community they're packaging it up and giving it away for free. Good PR move, that's for sure. 

[PocketNerd]

3 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

So what would the purpose be? This is all material from a game that already exists. It's not like you can use it and then rebadge as you're own thing can you?

It's actually very possible to turn these around into something that looks more original and fitting for your game. This is assuming you know what you're doing, of course.

Especially since the characters are coming with their skins, so it's quite possible to learn how to make your own modifications over time.

But for most people? This is purely for prototyping.

[Razor01]

33 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

So what would the purpose be? This is all material from a game that already exists. It's not like you can use it and then rebadge as you're own thing can you?

 

 

You can use them if you want in your project, as long as you use the Unreal engine.  If the game does well, Epic gets money for it.

[apm]

short reminder that you can still get a full refund for any purchase you made in paragon, founder packs and ingame currency.

[Okjoek]

Can't compete with free. 

 

I mean unless you paid others to take it, but I digress.

[leadeater]

Awesome, +1 internet points to Epic.

[Bouzoo]

8 hours ago, Eduard the weeb said:

or the people that made the slightly relevant game called fortnite lol

Or if you are older than 10 years, a slightly relevant game called Unreal Tournament. 

[Terryv]

1 hour ago, Bouzoo said:

Or if you are older than 10 years, a slightly relevant game called Unreal Tournament. 

I do wish there were more people on the UT servers. I'd play more often.

[Doobeedoo]

Yeah it's really awesome though. 

I know it's not their primary focus now, but wish to see UT4 development to ramp up. They did say they're at code refactoring stages. 

[Danielx64]

Is this the first time that this happened? I never seen assets for a game being made public for free like this. So where does one download it?

[yian88]

10 hours ago, ImNotDeViLzzz said:

Very cool of them, Epic Games, to do this.  I just wish I had the talent to make use of the stuff.

You dont need talent you need hardwork, really hard work, just 1 character from paragon has assets of 1GB + very hard to put togheter lots of coffee and hair pulling, putting all these togheter wont be easy just because they are free, ive been using UE4 since 2014 and i really wish i had people to work with, its way too difficult to be a jack of all trades, you need people specialized on certain tasks its too difficult to it all on your own.

 

Prepare for shitstorm on steam, tons of asset flipping games will popup i dont even wanna open steam in a few weeks, i bet there already is at least one game that threw these assets in and released on steam like endless runner or something.

[Eduard the weeb]

2 hours ago, Bouzoo said:

Or if you are older than 10 years, a slightly relevant game called Unreal Tournament. 

Fyi Fortnite has over 40 million bigger then overwatch, and alot of people who play it are over 10, actually most. like it has more downloads then one of steams most know Ip's Counter Strike a better game imo.

[Taf the Ghost]

I've got to give Epic some credit here, as this is kind of brilliant. 

 

What they're doing is ensuring that the Unreal Engine is what every smaller studio will automatically use. That means they're making more from the Engine license than from their normal games, at this point. Possibly minus Fortnite. (What a hilarious turn of events that was for them.) They take a game that was dead (and that I can barely recall hearing about) and turned it into a really important Marketing approach. And, depending on their tax structure, I think they can take an utterly massive write-off for the next few years, which might have turned Paragon into a profitable venture.

 

What this does mean, for certain, is we're getting 80% of the market as UE4 games for the next 3-4 years. Nvidia must be so damn happy about that.