I'm honored...
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I think it's fine for Epic to want to make some money from this, but they should have been more honest about it instead of dodging the question in the official announcement. Claiming it to be a totally free game kinda falls into false advertising: It doesn't take much time to realise that you'll have to pay to make content, and you may have to pay to download content aswell...
As much as it sucks to pay to contribute, I'm OK with the 20$ paywall as a way of both funding and quality control (keep noobs away) for the early stages of game development, but you really should be given your money back somehow if your work makes into the final game. Doing the work and
paying to do all that work... isn't it supposed to work the other way around?
I'm most concerned about the modding part of it, once the game is finished: The whole marketplace idea sounds plain terrible to me... wasn't it supposed NOT to be a microtransaction-driven game? :tdown: Yeah, you can still give your content away for free, but the monthly fees won't encourage designers to do that... For example, I would no longer expect a hypothetical CBP4 pack to come out for free, which would be a huge step backwards from the previous games...

It just doesn't look like the right way to make a platform for modding, no matter how awesome their engine is...
I'd much rather have a UT with hats than a marketplace to pay for
actual content. The 'map stamps' thing from TF2 looks like a much better approach IMO, so that all the content is given away for free, but there's still a way to donate to map/mod authors for whoever wants to do it.
I dunno... so far they're trying to make it sound like an awesome, free, open-source, community-driven game, but I can still feel the greedy company that brought us GOW behind all this...

Still very excited though, so let's see how it turns out!