You pay for a subscription - $19.99 - then cancel it. You still get the engine and all of the tools, just no updates or templates. Develop your stuff. If you see a significant update or something, renew your subscription, get the update, then cancel again and continue your work. This is coming from Flak on the Epic forums.
I suspect that the only people who will need a constant renewal are those who engage in huge projects. Those who want to map or work on smaller-scale mods won't need a constant subscription to develop or publish work.
To talk of cracking the engine when you can essentially buy it for $20 is pretty lame. Such versions would not only not receive updates, etc, but I would hope that there would be something in the final builds or at the point of release that would be a roadblock to making public content developed with illegitimate versions.
Sure having to pay something for the Engine and tools will motivate some to charge for their work, but $20 is not a lot of money. Sure, something on the Red Orchestra scale might be costly to develop in the end (though probably not), but I bet that most content will emerge free of charge. Paying to get your work into the official repository is likely optional: you can probably publish your map anywhere, but it won't perhaps get the coverage it would in the official location.
I am not sure what exactly your $19.99 buys, but Epic probably realize that a recurring monthly payment will turn many people off and thus have likely put together a good, workable package for the one-time subscription.
Anyhow, all of this speculation is fine, but ultimately meaningless. Either get involved somehow or wait; those are the real choices. Epic are taking the forum talk seriously; if you go over there and register, your ideas, thoughts and concerns will get heard. My big concern is that I will have to pay to play in the end. If I want to play online but all of the servers are running paid-for mods and maps, then I will likely be unable to play there until I pay as well. This might be problematic, but then again, there might be 'pure' servers are well; ones without any custom content.
Statistics: Posted by Carbon — Sat May 10, 2014 2:17 am