Now I understand the need for this if people want to make modifications to the engine itself, but if I want to use the engine as is and just program games with it, do I need to do all this?
I figured I needed to build the Engine because a UE4 programming tutorial said "I assume you have already downloaded the engine source from GitHub and compiled it in VS2013", nobody says why, nobody clearly states whether or not this is required to make a game in C++ using Unreal Engine 4.
Can anyone help?
You don't need to build the the engine / editor yourself. There are several iterations of the engine (current is 4.4), since they released it earlier this year (4.0), are you sure that you used the same one as in the tutorial? You can select the version you want to use in the launcher. The only source you have to build are your own classes, you want to add to the project.
If you use the monthly subscription option, you are given access to the private GitHub repository and must compile the editor before you can use it. The wiki has an excellent walkthrough of the current process.
It's getting easier - the upcoming 4.6 release has a setup script that does everything for you in one step - but subscribers don't get prepackaged binaries yet.
It is my understanding that a custom license may give you access to pre-built binaries.
Is that possible duplicate of your original post on stackoverflow?
But I want to give to you the same answer here:
No you dont need the whole engine. There is a difference between the code which builds the editor and the code which builds your game. If you only want to program your game you should create a new "code project" and modify the code you're getting after creating the new project.
