A nice gesture, but nevertheless weird in its own way. Why don't Epic make a free download on their own website? Why they only hand it out from a backdoor? Are they ashamed of it? Because it doesn't represent the status of Unreal Engine? Well maybe they could do something against it? Pay a game dev studio to create a remake with state of the art UE5 technology. If not, they should consider renaming their game engine to something else.
Epic Games, the creators of the Unreal engine, have granted permission for free distribution of the 1998 classic Unreal and 1999 smash hit Unreal Tournament on the Internet Archive.