Long term support proposal for Unreal Engine 4.22.X

This makes sense on the surface, but when you take into account bug fixes, marketplace releases, tutorials, then it becomes a way different story and it’s the reason I decided I had to make this topic. It’s laughable excuse to me that it would fracture the engine to much to have a long term support version, the only real issue is that
[FONT=trebuchet ms]Epic Games needs to hire more staff members!
^ Last edited by Pine722; 05-17-2019, 08:11 PM. Date here for reference purposes I have a strong feeling I’ll need to be referring to having said this in future discussions over the coming years. More or less I’m “calling” it if you will. You know, counting the chickens after they’ve long been hatched, definitely not before.

I know you didn’t mention this darthviper so the following is not directed at you but I’m just going to make the following a general statement.

A lot of us are not Triple A studios who have been professionally trained/educated so it’s very tiresome dealing with some of the expectations that most of us are Triple A professionals who can easily handle constant engine upgrades etc and if not then tough luck sort of deal. Unreal Engine went with a free open source model and has a marketplace now, but the support didn’t catch up in all this time, I assume the support is the same it has always been for Triple AAAs who are paying for it but not enough people have looked beyond that to see, oh we have all these new non Triple A customers/users or solo indie devs who aren’t getting the support they need to utilize our tools. There may well be one indie dev out there who is satisfied in this regard but that doesn’t mean it’s the general consensus by far. Even if Triple A naysayers end up finding this topic I’m pretty confident that there are enough people out there who really want and would benefit from a long term support version if they had the option for it.

Also the fact that Unity has longterm support doesn’t mean it’s a better option for indies because it lacks a lot of other things such as quality marketplace content, a proficient visual scripting system, and more. Unity is lagging behind Unreal Engine in many ways otherwise it’d obviously be a better choice for indies & non Triple A because of its long term support.

As an example I’ve helped guide a few asset creators on certain topics & have encountered assumptions from some about things like ‘oh your modelers/level designers etc can help take care of this or that’, and I’m like ‘what modelers? What level designers? You do realize a lot of your customers don’t have many team members and may be doing everything or most things themselves.’ Basically the triple A only mentality. It’s still going on in the marketplace as well, you have some creators who expect you to have teams of people to fix or assist in setting up products that should have been ready to go from the start, like UVs, collisions, demo scenes, folder hierarchies, bug fixes etc. There are some prominent youtubers in the game dev scene that have openly discussed how Unreal Engine is currently not ideal when it comes to long term support.

Not to play the same tired card that has been played before, but if we take some actual facts that Epic Games is now worth "over 1 billion dollars", and has "the most successful game ever made", one MIGHT expect that it was enough money to hire more staff members to take care of certain things, and according to journalist articles, if they are at all accurate, it seems this is sorely needed because some people may actually be overworked at Epic Games, and I’m honestly not surprised that this could be the case, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Epic Games is severely understaffed for the amount of work they are trying to take on.

  • It’s almost a year and there still isn’t a current Wiki since it was taken down.
  • There also still is a severe lack of proper learning materials covering a wide range of topics that people need to make games.
  • I still have multiple questions that I’ve asked on the forums for help with that have gone unanswered or unsolved, you know there’s a problem when not even the community is able to help each other & I do fully believe it is because of the lack of proficient learning materials.
  • For example the resources for learning blueprints was posted in a sticky in 2014 and edited once in 2016, that seems awfully out of date to me, especially for an engine that changes versions 3-4 times a year. I doubt most Triple A professionals who are the few who have enough knowledge to help anyone, are going to spend their time on trying to help us on random forums topics.
  • There is still no official Linux version of the launcher.
  • We still are not allowed to change email addresses because of Fortnite.
  • It took over 5-6 months, yes 5-6 MONTHS for the staff to fix a bug effecting me being able to use the marketplace on the website itself, and that is after submitting multiple forms, and then even some months went by during that time in which I was not able to use the launcher’s marketplace either, I was not even allowed to download the free content during this time because it uses the marketplace system.

11-28-2018, 11:34 AM

12-03-2018, 07:05 PM

I’m **still **waiting…

01-12-2019, 12:09 AM

05-17-2019, 07:08 PM

And waiting…

And further:

You can see both of my marketplace bug topics here:

  1. https://forums.unrealengine.com/unre…ug-please-help

  2. https://forums.unrealengine.com/unre…ng-marketplace

12-03-2018, 06:51 PM

03-02-2019, 02:14 PM

04-04-2019, 08:14 PM

It still wasn’t fixed even some time after this, but I had stopped posting about it.

More examples of being understaffed involving other members of the community:

05-08-2019, 01:54 PM

05-11-2019, 11:31 PM

05-13-2019, 12:24 AM

**Whoever it was that finally managed to fix my account bless your soul and I really mean that, considering I know you are probably overworked to death. **We still wait for email changes though & many other things it seems.