Curious if this means Epic is just continuing their buying of all the tools necessary for artists and game developers, or if this signals their metaverse ambitions?
It’s easy to imagine Epic giving devs the ability to export their projects to Sketchfab via an improved HTML5/WebGL pipeline. Sketchfab currently only supports 3D models in viewer mode, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to extend this so any scene/project from UE4 could be exported to the web.
It makes sense with their acquisition of Artstation, but I’m wondering if it might also be tied to some web support for the engine, since HTML5 is no longer supported.
I wish Epic was publicly traded and I could buy some shares.
If Tim wants to retire or something I hope they do have a plan to avoid some kind of takeover by someone like Tencent, since I would definitely have concerns about how they would manage it.
Can’t think any better logical explanation behind all these acquisitions.
Unreal became available to all and then free because of the good vision of Tim. I am concerned what will happen after Tim retires. Hope he sets things for the future too so that nothing will happen will happen here like at ID tech after founder John Carmack left.
John Carmack had promised that ID tech 5 (doom engine) and future versions will also be open sourced like 1-4, as it is the vision of the company. But once he left company they stopped licensing the engine to other companies and also the tradition of open sourcing previous version of the engine. (1)
Nah, not likely.
Sketchfab is all about art, it’s in the title.
Epic has been focused on streaming and lightweight viewers of UE4 scenes; they have shown no interest in HTML5 as a platform other than what I just mentioned.
They have removed support for HTML5 from 4.24+ and even removed 32bit support from UE5 (making it incompatible with HTML5 for at least a year or until wasm64 is a thing).
Our studio however is working on extended HTML5 support and has 4.25, 4.26 and 4.27 support with UE5 incoming.