How long will Unreal Engine 4 Last?

Unreal Engine 4 came out in 2014 that’s 5 years ago and the version were now in 4.23 but Unreal Engine 4 does not support Xbox 360 Wii PS3 Wii U

What is the question?

Those products are all discontinued. Why would the engine support them?

Initial Release dates

Xbox 360 : 2005
Wii : 2006
PS3 : 2006
Wii U : 2012

That hardware could probably not even run the engine, nevermind architectural differences.

Hey what about 486 support and Amiga? the retro market is well and alive these days.

Until someone decides it’s time for a reboot.
Maybe when raytrace hardware and stuff like that become the new standard even for consoles and all the existing OpenGL/DrX code must be thrown away.

The engine is more modular than UE3. Giant chunks of the engine are being swapped out and replaced (Niagara, Sequencer, Chaos, etc), when that’s no longer practical, I’m sure we’ll see an UE5. But it currently looks like UE4 will outlast the next generation of consoles (Xbox 2, PS5).

There could be many more new APIs in the works under NDA for a future UE5 that we won’t know anything about. They might change the name to UE5 when anything secret being worked on will be ready to be announced. Until then it seems obvious that the UE4 versions will keep appearing with all new APIs and so on. We will see if UE4 will still exist at version 4.30 , 4.35 , 4.40 or even higher.

I want zx support!

We are at 4.23 now so when we hit 4.99 I guess we move into UE5, That will probably happen in January.

So you’re not a business expert then. No problem.

The answer is simple: As long as the economic benefit of staying with the current version outweighs the projected benefit of creating a new engine.

-Some new technology will have to come out for it to be worth it
-The current marketplace work will have to be transferable to the new engine or Epic will have to convince their customers that the new engine is more than a cash grab made to make everyone buy all the same plugins/content over again. If they don’t they could collapse their market share overnight.

Could be anywhere between 3-15 years. But I’ll tell you this, if it’s 3 years I’ll take a real hard look at Unity.

Sorry but how many new versions of Unity have been released in the last few years ?
Yes backward compatibility of .uasset has been overall better than that on UE4 projects but still new versions of Unity needed assets to be updated and some sellers dropped support for older versions anyway.
So if and when Epic Games will release a UE5 the backward compatibility with UE4 assets on the marketplace probably won’t be much worse than the actual need to update to each new UE4 version.

this aged like milk

Indeed. Unity at this point has nothing to offer me that would deter me from upgrading to UE5 though.

ha unity, what a noob engine I used to clown on all visual scripting systems before I started UE4 and there’s a reason it takes longer to learn blueprints than to learn C#. after around 3 months of every day learning at least 5 hours a day on tutorials, only in the past week have I even been able to begin my first game, which is complete trash by the way.