absolute state of unreal 2026

I guess they just had the State Of Unreal at Unrealfest, and as predicted, it was a real fuckfest full of dogshit. Unrealfest is usually a fun event, but by all accounts the vibes at this one were not great, which is what you get when your opening keynote is about the war you’re declaring on creativity and how your event’s most passionate attendees will be first against the wall. What they’ve done – incorporating GenAI, deprecating Blueprint and pushing Verse – is what you would do if your mission was to sabotage Epic’s business as completely as possible while causing as much collateral damage as possible. It’s genuinely absurd, beyond belief, the product of AI psychosis and the regular-degular psychosis everyone saw Tim Sweeney’d started incubating at his Steam Dev Days keynote back in 2016.

This is existential threat level stuff for the engine, certainly for Unreal as a brand. It’s propelled Unreal into the Unity-a-few-years-ago realm of almost total uncertainty. People don’t know if it’s even safe to use it or train in it anymore. Here is the Actual State of Unreal as declared by me, someone saner than Tim Sweeney. Skip to the end for the facts on “should I still use it”.

So for a while it’s been generally pretty well-known that people inside Epic are suffering. There’s been thousands of unforced seemingly-random layoffs, and enough gullible higher-ups have taken leave of their senses that there’s now substantial pressure on employees to use “AI” in their work; even if they hate it, even if it’s slowing them down, even if it makes the work worse, even if it costs more money. This is cult stuff, obviously – nobody is even acting in their own self-interest here.

Every company using “AI” has split its workforce into two groups: those revealed as useless hacks, and those who suddenly want to kill themselves. Epic has a lot of the latter, and they’re scared to speak up, because Epic pays better and offers better health insurance than any other job you’ll ever get. Even so, people have started leaving, and that will continue. One of the plainest red flags is Sjoerd De Jong leaving after 12 years at Epic and over 20 years of being an Unreal expert known and respected by all. I don’t know him, but this seems like somebody who doesn’t leave unless things are really bad. If nothing changes, this will become irreversible. The best people will keep leaving and the worst people will remain and be hired, and past a point that’ll be it. It’s possible to get a company into an unsolvable state.

To really understand how badly they’ve lost the plot with Unreal, you have to understand what they had right for so many years, and you probably don’t. So here’s what it is: They started as a small video game company. They made Unreal for their own needs. They showed it off. People wanted to license it, and were willing to pay a lot of money. They realised there was better money sooner in licensing than game development, and made that their primary business, which meant getting as many clients as possible and building an engine that would serve the different (often conflicting) needs of multiple clients at once. They did this better than anyone would expect – by all accounts support from Epic for full licensees was bending-over-backwards excellent for a very long time.

It isn’t glazing them to say nobody else did it like this. The engine got better all the time because it was driven by the development of Epic’s own games and like a billion other massive games. It introduced new features and was very careful about disruption when deprecating old features. It was impressively dedicated to making tools that moved tasks off of programmer’s plates that fundamentally ought not to be programmer tasks at all (their material graph predates anyone else’s by like a decade), it empowered artists and designers. Blueprint ended up kicking off a million programming careers.

This all persisted once the engine was opened up to the public in 2014. Under the public license, you didn’t get UDN access or most of that great support, but you’d benefit indirectly; the changes made for licensees would still end up in the engine. Epic’s main business was still custom licensing, they knew where their bread was buttered.

Once Fortnite blew up, that bread was buttered elsewhere. Longstanding features started to receive less attention; the major at-a-glance indicator of how solid a newer feature was started to be “are they using it in Fortnite”. Things never got bad, but there was a vibe change. There used to be indie dev outreach, there isn’t anymore. There used to be community involvement in all sorts of things that there isn’t anymore. Every aspect of Unreal that involves a website started to get consistently worse – the docs, the forums, the marketplace, the Epic Store.

With more money than God, Sweeney started using the company to pursue various angles on monopoly at the expense of its sustainability, proving again and again that it takes more to succeed than throwing money at things. The Epic Games Store is emblematic of the level of incompetence on display here – with infinite resources, turning an existing userbase of millions of Fortnite players into EGS users should have been a slam dunk, but Epic devised a user experience so dismal that people would essentially pay to avoid it. UEFN is no better – the idea of a “metaverse” that is just “what if everyone’s game was inside our game” is absurd on its face, but when you discontinue your own flagship metaverse products at the drop of a hat, it’s insane to think anyone would get on board.

Now with the UE6 announcement, Epic’s committing to:

• Removing Blueprint, the only good visual programming system ever devised
  • Regardless of whether you personally are into it, Blueprint has been an absolutely colossal win for the industry. It’s kicked off countless careers, introduced countless people to programming, constituted the majority of code in countless games, and empowered countless people to contribute to game dev (and other industries) in ways they never could have otherwise. It opened so many doors for so many people, and Epic now want to weld them shut again.
• Removing Actor+Component, the system that has been the core of Unreal since its inception
  • This is literal decades of rock-solid code being removed in service of (I wish this was even dramatic to say) the whims of a madman. Without even getting into any technical arguments against it, this is plainly an insane thing to do.
• Replacing everything with Verse, a universally dreaded new language that everyone agrees is ridiculous
  • Verse is of interest to almost literally nobody; nobody on the planet has a problem that Verse is a solution to. Their own descriptions of it are mired in insane bullshit. Every version you hear about from year to year is almost unrecognisably different from the last. It’s clearly somebody’s vanity project, desperately trying to thrash itself into something that can be said to work at all.
• Pushing generative AI, a move so self-evidently stupid I can’t even dignify it by elaborating

UE6 represents a categorical rejection of everything positive that Unreal has stood for since UE1. It’s interested in disempowering users. It’s thoroughly disinterested in the needs of its licensees. It’s predicated on catastrophic misunderstandings of, and disregard for, creativity itself.

If this all goes ahead, it’s functionally the end for Unreal. Not in the sense, necessarily, that their new bullshit can’t work at all technically (although that is in doubt), but in the sense that it will have lost every advantage it has over any other environment. The company that does This Stuff can’t really be the company that does any of the stuff people like about Unreal. That good stuff will all just die on the vine. The best hope for the future of Unreal is that it all fails as quickly as possible – that the AI bubble pops and the failure of UEFN becomes undeniable before too much damage is done. There is time for a course correction, but it would have to be forced by Undeniable Realities, and these dudes are getting really good at denying reality.

In any case, though, here’s what I reckon:

someone asked:

What are my options now as a sane Unreal user in the face of this new bullshit?

• Stay on UE4 or UE5
  • None of this bullshit is coming in until some distance into UE6. We are realistically a few years out from any of this mattering.
  • Both of these engines are still extremely good and capable of shipping
  • Both are still supported by Epic for console purposes – they support the latest console SDKs
  • This is unlikely to change at any time in the next few years
    • Who at Epic is doing all these console SDK updates for ancient versions by the way??? What a shit job to have
• Upgrade to UE6 when it comes out, but stop updating before the bullshit hits
  • I would be hesitant to do this. The first releases of UE4 and UE5 weren’t particularly stable, and you can’t easily roll back versions of Unreal (it can sometimes be done but it’s a whole thing). Probably by the time it’s stable they’ve fucked it, if plans don’t change.
• Switch Engines
  • But there are no other good engines out there, in the ways that Unreal is good. You’d probably have a worse time? The big options are Unity (which had its own userpocalypse recently) and Godot, which you’d have to be very optimistic to see as mature enough to be a competitor here… but there’s not much else on the scene. If you have any ability to put pressure on a Source 2 or modern idTech release, you should do it. It’s ridiculous how few engines are licensable at all these days, far less publicly available. As I mentioned, s&box is a failure out the gate.
• Branch The Engine
  • It’d be a lot of work, but I’d be shocked if when this all happens there isn’t a community branch that doesn’t have these insane changes.
• Wait This Shit Out
  • These ideas – replacing all core systems and pivoting the whole thing around some bogus idea of a metaverse – aren’t sustainable, so wait and see what happens instead of what they think will happen?

someone asked:

I just spent ages learning Blueprint, did I waste my time? I just started, should I stop?

Probably not! All this shit is still here. You can still make a game on UE4 if you want. In 5 years you’ll still be able to make a game on UE5. Hell, you could do one on UE3. You’ll still be able to get a job in this shit. Plus, Blueprint is just an incredible way to learn programming. I don’t think there’s any better way. I’ll probably still be recommending it for this in 20 years, just like I still recommend Left 4 Dead 1 mapping as a way to get good at level design. There are just optimal environments for certain things.

Personally, my bet is a lot of the worst of this is going to die on its arse before UE6’s anticipated release. It remains to be seen how resilient the pushers of this nonsense are in their belligerence, and they’ve already put out a useless “clarification” statement on Twitter that suggests they’ve at least noticed that everybody hates this. I’m glad they announced it at a physical event, so that people could make their displeasure known in person, and I really hope they did.

But I’m also thinking about how people are still shipping full commercial games on old engines like Doom and Doom 3 and Quake, sometimes a UE3 title drops, all that stuff. We get nice new goodies with every Unreal release, we get technological advances that to my mind are genuinely really consequentially positive in their implications, but at the same time there really was nothing wrong with what we had in UE4 ten years ago. We’re spoiled. We can just stop here if we want. There’s no leverage to drag us into anyone’s busted idea of a future. Fuck it! We ball.