MAXON receives Epic Megagrant
Sep 14, 2020 by CGPress Staff
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MAXON has announced that it has received an Epic Megagrant of $200,000 to strengthen integration between Unreal Engine and Cinema 4D. Read the press release in full on MAXON’s website.
I thought these Megagrants were geared toward indie companies. Shouldn’t Maxon just use the millions of dollars they already have to work on this integration on their own?
I was asking myself the same question. However is Maxon in any financial trouble? Maybe Epic wants to encourage and make this happen in order not to delay?
I am not sure about all this. I am wondering though what is the Mega grant for? How is Cinema4D integrated into UE4? What are the benefits here?
They don’t provide Megagrants to anyone who just asks. They usually require some sort of a pitch about the way provided Megagrant would benefit Epic. It has to be mutually beneficial exchange.
In this case, the symbiosis is quite clear:
Maxon may not be in financial trouble, but they’re not really growing much lately, so they likely need to be mindful about spending their resources, and therefore some explicit Unreal Engine integration support would be quite low on the priority list of features to add to make users buy more of their product.
However if Epic pays for that, under the condition it’s used to improve UE integration, then it’s beneficial for both Maxon and Epic. For Maxon, because they can get improvements to C4D I/O capabilities basically for “free” without diverting their own resources from their own roadmap, and for Epic, because if C4D has a good UE4 integration, then it makes decision of C4D users about which game/realtime engine to pick and use quite a bit easier 🙂
There’s really no mystery here.