Oct. 7 (Portaltic/EP) –
Epic Games has announced that will unify its video game creation services Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor for Fortnite on a new platform that will be referred to as Unreal Engine 6, and that will be the basis for creating a metaverse with interoperable content, both for Fortnite, as well as for other games like Minecraft and Roblox.
As part of its annual event UnrealFest Seattle 2024, The video game company recently announced a series of new features regarding its application store Epic Games Storein which he plans add up to 50 third party games during the fourth quarter of this year.
He also announced news for developers, with a new program offering a reduction in royalty rateas long as the games created with Unreal Engine are published in your 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 sound” pointthanks to their efforts to carry out a reduction in the company’s spending.
Specifically, while the Last year they spent around a billion dollars more than they earned per year, now they only spend “a little more” of what 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 a “very solid” financing“and a series of future investments which, as Sweeney has described, are being carried out “with great discretion”. All this makes Epic be in a “perfect position” to carry out his 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 platform Unreal Engine 6.
Specifically, as Sweeney explained, the company aims 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,” said Sweeney, while explaining that it is an initiative designed so that developers create a single application that can later be implemented “as a standalone game on any platform.”
That is, with Unreal Engine 6, Epic proposes 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 for video games. Thus, an example of these plans is the Epic collaboration with Disney, whose proposal was announced in February of this year to build “a persistent, open and interoperable ecosystem from Fortnite.”
As Sweeney has stated in this regard, Unreal Engine 6 will be “the technological foundation that will make that possible for everyone,” for both professional developers and independent game developers or Fortnite creators.
METAVERSE WITH FAB
However, in addition to Unreal Engine 6, the metaverse approach to video games will also be powered by Epic Games’ new content marketplace, Fab, that the developer initially presented in the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last year, and will arrive in the middle of this month of October.
Fab is a content market 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 a single 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 gamesfor 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 for create elements of decoration for video game spaces, such as forest components, that other users can purchase at Fab, for later Use them in games optimized 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,” explained the company’s CEO.
Sweeney has also pointed out that, although At the moment they have not contacted any more companies, Apart from Disney, to promote their idea of the interoperable metaverse, they will do it “over time.” Likewise, he has pointed out that this idea of Interoperability will benefit all companies of video games, since, by having an “interoperable economy, will increase the confidence of players” in spending on purchasing digital goods, since they will be goods that ““They will work everywhere they go.”
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