When "serious games" first became a topic, before Unity was a thing, probably before UE had any kind of free option. It was a long time ago. Anyway, there was a GDC with a whole separate track dedicated to it. Bogost was at the head of the kickoff panel, and there were all manner of weird tones: "storm the gates" of developers of retail games, force them to give their tools to the academics.
I spoke up, "Hey, I'm guessing I'm not the only retail dev here, so others should chime in, but you're acting as though we're placing this stuff out of reach, like we're intentionally keeping the ball away from another player. We're just trying to ship our stuff on time. If you want the stuff, ask for it, you might find people who're into sharing, but it's not a game of keepaway we're playing. Maybe start from a place where you're not treating potential partners FROM WHOM YOU WANT SOMETHING like enemies."
Was there a response?
Them: "Um, yes. Sure, I mean of course. But how do we even approach getting an engine or tools?"
Me: "Just start by asking, see where it gets you."
It was weird: it was as though they had forgotten they were at GDC, were being hosted as a subset of game development, and were treating it as though it were the same ivory tower in which academia tends to sequester itself.
Could you guess at a year for this? The Something Unreal contest dates back to 2003 or 2004, that's when Red Orchestra won the first one. Epic started giving out licenses around the year earlier.
Unreal was "free" for some time prior in terms of access to the UDK, it was not supported to the level that 3 became but you could easily produce a game on it. Goldsrc from Valve, Quake engines, etc. all had "free" no official support tiers. Even early on in Source's life people were producing racing games and fighters and everything else with it even though its tools were complete garbage.
It's true that you needed a "publisher" for a long time to eventually take care of the licensing costs, but PC games, especially from other countries, often got waivers for a lot of these engines by the engine companies. Valve and iD did a lot of looking the other way on engine licensing until the game was all but ready to go. That's how they did so well with being licensed in the PC only world. By the time Unreal and Renderware were all but console defaults you had tons of options on PC, it was really just console access to some of the middleware that was a hangup and generally you could get around it quite easily. And with the 360 and UE3 packaging that basically all fell away.
Unity and Unreal actually spent quite a bit of time, after earning such strong market penetration, trying to sell themselves to small indie developers who thought "oh, I couldn't afford that, let alone get to play with it" and they were out there going "no no it's all free, just when you're ready to release we need to talk some payment options" and none of it looked like the contracts somebody like EA was signing.
Some of these teams just don't do any kind of research or like you mention ask anyone anything. I came across a developer some time last year in Early Access on Steam lamenting their lack of access to new versions of UE4 which was holding back their ability to keep working on whatever it was and how they were looking at starting over on Unity. They had signed that deal from a few years ago where you got a snapshot version and then never had to pay until you sold so many copies. But, it's like, right there in the EGL, it's the same shit upgraded that everyone except a specific few gets, there's hours worth of tutorials, tips on bringing in your stuff from earlier versions, gobs of asset stores, everything. The deal they had signed is now everybody's deal in terms of how you have to pay royalties.
A lot of people think the engine companies are going to come down on little devs like Crytek is to StarCitizen for their "find/replace" and stop paying gambit. When Epic basically no longer cares, their R&D department basically is a rounding error now for the company.
