I think they love us

Even more free stuff! Epic has released their engine for free with a handy software development kit (SDK). That's the super powerful Unreal 3 engine. The fine folks at CryTek did the something similar a while back by releasing their engine (the big monster that powered Crysis) to universities in UK (also for free). And earlier I mentioned what Unity Technology did for their game development system (if you got side-tracked by the other links and couldn't bring yourself to click the one labeled "earlier", all you need to know is that Unity was also released for free to independent developers).

The UDK (Unreal Development Kit) showing you it's shine.

There are various restrictions around these releases, obviously (like what happens if you start making money with your game using the Unreal Dev Kit), but for the most part, that's not much of a limit. It allows people who would otherwise never have a chance to try out game development to test the waters and for those who have been struggling to build their own engines or use flabby free ones, they get a chance to use shiny professional engines. For free, in case you missed the repetition.