Do you need a license of Visual Studio to publish unreal made games?

Looking at Visual Studio I found that their developer license is not all that indie developer friendly. It’s $800 for a subscription so for a student in-home developer with no budget it’s a stretch. Unreal engine downloaded a version of visual studio when you first start a C++ project and I am very eager to migrate from blueprint only to a mix with C++ but what happens when the game is finished?

Aside from the Unreal % of revenue, do you need to own a Visual Studio license too?

Visual Studio Community is free and fully allows commercial products with no revenue limit, as long as you have 5 or fewer programmers in your company using it. It works perfectly fine with Unreal Engine 4 C++.

Well that is really really really bad, most companies have more than 5 than means in order to make anything with unreal engine with over 5 programmers you have to pay a massive ammount of cash to Microsoft. 2000$+ /license/year.

I was first not gonna reply to this but I couldn’t help myself. 2000$ is a fair price for an ANNUAL license. If a company with more than 5 programmers can’t even pay a “silly” amount on software they use to create their games, they should consider their finanicial situations. If they can pay for more than 5 programmers (this includes other professions as well, artists, designers, etc…) they should be able to spit up 2k for an annual license.

If you still think this is a bad price, feel free to write your own IDE that even comes close to what Visual Studio can do and post it for free for everyone forever. See how you would like that mate.