Epic Games has announced that it will unify its video game creation services Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor for Fortnite into a new platform that it will refer to as Unreal Engine 6, and that will be the basis for creating a metaverse with interoperable content, both for Fortnite and for other games like Minecraft and Roblox.
As part of its annual event Unreal Fest Seattle 2024, the video game company recently announced a series of new features regarding its Epic Games Store application store, in which it plans to add up to 50 third-party games during the fourth quarter of this year.
It also announced news for developers, with a new program that offers a reduction in the royalty rate, as long as games created with Unreal Engine are published in its store and, additionally, on other platforms.
Following this line, during the event, the company also shared its progress on an economic level, when it detailed that, Currently, it is in a “financially solid” point.thanks to their efforts to carry out a reduction in the company’s spending.
Specifically, while last year they spent around a billion dollars more than they earned per year, now they only spend “a little more” than they earn annually, as explained by the CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, in an interview with The Verge.
This spending control is completed with “very solid” financing and a series of future investments that, as Sweeney has described, are being carried out “with great discretion.” All of this, puts Epic in a “perfect position” to carry out its plans “for the rest of this decade,” the manager has clarified.
These future plans include new features for its high-end video game development engine, Ureal Engine, as well as for its Fortnite game design and creation service with simpler tools, Unreal Editor for Fortnite, which will be unified under the new Unreal Engine 6 platform.
Specifically, as Sweeney explained, The company intends to create a new version of Unreal Engine that encompasses all the functions and tools of both services. In this way, developers will be able to combine “all the power” of the high-end game engine with “the ease of use” that Unreal Editor offers for Fortnite.
“This will take several years. And, when that process is complete, it will be Unreal Engine 6,” Sweeney stated, while explaining that it is an initiative designed for developers to create a single application that can later be implemented “as an independent game in any platform”.
That is, with Unreal Engine 6, Epic plans to facilitate the interoperability of content between video games. In this way, developers will be able to create a new game in Fortnite and then bring it to other titles that “choose to use this technological base.”
This idea of interoperability seeks a metaverse approach to video games. Thus, an example of these plans is Epic’s collaboration with Disney, whose proposal was announced in February of this year to build “a persistent, open and interoperable ecosystem from Fortnite.”
According to Sweeney, Unreal Engine 6 will be “the technological foundation that will make this possible for everyone,” both for professional developers and independent game developers or creators of Fortnite.
Metaverse with Fab
However, in addition to Unreal Engine 6, the metaverse approach to video games will also be driven by Epic Games’ new content marketplace, Fab, which the developer initially introduced at last year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), and will reach mid of this month of October.
Fab is a content marketplace that will replace the current platforms Unreal Engine, Sketchfab, ArtStation and Quixel.comunifying them under a single brand. In this way, content creators can “discover, share, buy and sell digital resources” from all platforms in the same service.
Under this framework, it is a unified platform that will allow you to store and sell video game assets that can be used in Fortnite or other games, for example, Minecraft or Roblox, as specified by Sweeney. However, The ultimate goal is for Fab to offer “a logical asset that has different file formats that work in different contexts.”. That is, creating elements that serve different video games at the same time.
As Sweeney has exemplified, with this idea, developers could use Unreal Engine 6 to create decoration elements for video game spaces, such as forest components, that other users can purchase in Fab, to later use them in both optimized games. for Unreal Engine, such as Unity, Roblox and Minecraft.
“Having a continuous movement of content from one place to another will be one of the critical things that will make the metaverse work without duplication,” the company’s CEO explained in this regard.
Sweeney has also pointed out that, although at the moment they have not contacted more companies, apart from Disney, to promote their idea of the interoperable metaverse, they will do so “over time.” Likewise, he has pointed out that this idea of interoperability will benefit all video game companies, since, by having an “interoperable economy, it will increase the confidence of players” in the spending of purchasing digital goods, since they will be goods that “they will work everywhere they go.”