Future of UE4 on Android?

[anonymous_user_a8c3f8a9]

@Stormwiz;136501

I have no doughs that Epic will overcome all these technicalities for mobile and surpass other engines in this field, just as they have done for the high end market.

@tegleg;136729

“Will it target high end only?”
seems like the answer would be yes.

Thank you for your input. That sums pretty much up what I learned from the forum so far. The available information on Android support is very confusing and it’s impossible to see if UE4 will be able to handle the (mobile) mass market. Which would be an absolute necessity (not just) for any Indy developer to have a chance at getting profitable.

Some say yes, some say no. And the postings from officials on this topic don’t help.

for a well funded team planning to spend years developing the next big thing ue4 is the way to go, by the time the game is ready to go mobile technology will have moved and many people will be able to run it. unless of course Epic stay true to form and pile on the ‘features’ so even the latest and greatest phones will struggle.

I agree and that’s what I fear. For an Indy, UE4 and the pricing of course, is very tempting, to say the least. But the time investment to master it and then create professional games with it, is still essential. As tempting as it may be, I just can not effort this investment if UE4 turns out to be not competitive in the mass market at the end - and maybe even never wanted to be.

However, coming from AAA MMORPG development, times have changed a lot. While in the past, the PC player hardware improved every year, it is now actually declining in the last years. More and more people just want to play casually, and don’t care to buy a graphics card at all anymore. So while at the high end GPUs still improve every year, the group of low end players with onboard GPU increases significantly. Quite some new MMORPGs, which were in development for years and always planned to support the latest technology at release, underestimated this and are in trouble now, not because they would be bad games but simply because they lose too many casual players right away, because of the hardware requirements.

While it is probable that GPUs on Android devices will improve, there is still a very good chance that the mass market may just look for even cheaper devices in the future and not for better ones for the same price as their old one. So from my point of view, I expect low end support to stay as important as it is today for the mobile market at least. These players don’t expect high end graphics, but they expect a playable game.

for anything less than that, ue4 is absolutely out of the question.

That’s my impression too. At least for now. I would still risk it - just for the fun of working with UE4 - if there would be some more information from the developers on what is planned for the future. (If that would include low end support, that is)