Clarification on using Unreal Engine 4 with Patreon

Hi there, I recently read this Q&A about the royalty fee for Patreon:

https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/450475/how-do-royalties-work-with-patreon.html

But I’m still a little confused. There are two other situations where I’m not entirely sure if royalties need to be paid.

The first is: if you let your patrons vote on what game your going to be focusing the majority of your time on (if you’re working on multiple games) do you have to pay royalties on the money you take in with votes on a game that would use the Unreal Engine?

For example, if you have 3 games that you’re working on: 1 is made with Unreal, and the next 2 are made with Unity. When the voting is over, the Unreal game had $4000 raised to make it the game to be focused on, while the Unity games had raised $5000, and $2000 each.

The people that voted for the Unreal game aren’t getting anything other than knowing that it is the second priority of the developer (there not getting early access or downloadable content). And all of the games are free after they’ve been developed. Would you have to pay royalties on the $4000? I think the answer is yes, because the patrons are specifically choosing that game to be worked on.

The second situation is: if you take out the voting mechanic and just accept donations to work on games in general. If you’re working on the same three games and raise $11000, do you have to pay royalties because one of them is an Unreal Engine game? Since the voting mechanic is gone, it doesn’t seem like you would since you can’t tell what game patrons are donating for.

Those are the situations I’m a little confused about. I’m sorry if I’m right about both of those and this was just a waste of time, but I wanted to make sure.

And thanks for taking the time read this.

Thanks for the question. If the donations you receive from your patrons do not provide any in-game benefit or provide any special access to the game (such as early access or additional content), then no royalties are due. It sounds like you are not provide any of these benefits to your patrons, so no royalties should be due on their donation.