What is Being Requested: Regular Development Updates
Would it be possible to get regularly scheduled updates throughout the year (perhaps quarterly) where there’s some sharing of retrospectives, progress, lessons/insights, and a bit of transparency and broaden the communication bandwidth? Updates spread across events like Unreal Fest or GDC are nice, but they’re high effort, sporadic, and generalized.
Why We Would Like This: Staying Informed
Developer updates, shedding light onto the process and progress (at least as much as is appropriate and possible), and regular updates/communication give a peak into what is going on behind the scenes, humanize interactions and relationships, and put timelines and delays into perspective.
How This Is Different: Low Friction and Personable
The Current Approach: High-Friction Public Event Driven
Talks at conferences, which are typically generalized and often times aimed towards an external-public facing audience, high-effort/cost in terms of resources and preparation, and have a whole host of dependencies and optics constraints that make them different than what’s being requested.
The Requested Approach: Low-Friction Acquired User Facing
A low production live stream, targeting the existing developer-user base of UEFN/Verse, which aims to help Epic inform and connect with those users, scheduled at a regular cadence that is neither too demanding to upkeep, nor too sparse to provide the intended value.
The Existing Production Pattern to Follow: New Template Demos
We get demos that are a couple people on a live stream occasionally, usually demoing a new project template that’s become available or the like, and that level of production would be perfect. Could be 1-2 hours, end of each quarter, speakers can hop into a call with a webcam and screen share if they need to, it really doesn’t need to be anything beyond a broadcast Zoom/Discord call as far as the production quality goes. The point would be keeping it low friction, and focused on communicating updates to the developer user base you’ve already acquired, rather than a high friction presentation at a big conference.
The Proposed Content Format: Bring the Trello Board to Life
We would like to hear from people on teams that are producing what we’re seeing updated and changed on the UEFN/Verse Trello board. If a team delivered a big update that quarter like SG or Physics, it would be great to hear from them talk about it. If there is a delay with a planned feature delivery date, hearing about the delay from a person working on it with some context about the challenges faced and insights/reflection is something we’d appreciate. Providing an opportunity for there to be a discussion, and for the developers of the platform to connect with the developers using the platform currently does not exist in a productive and meaningful way. Through this we can build in a new avenue to deliver information, understanding, and cohesion.
Additional Value Angle: Announcing Delays and Mitigating Negative Response
I just want to touch on the delays that happened in Q1 of this year, where there were 3-6 month delays across multiple release targets that were communicated primarily by Trello board updates a day before a patch. Having this type of regular quarterly update could have done a lot to mitigate the blow to us, and the blowback to the team when these delays happen. Its not the delay that here that was the problem, but the lack of communication surrounding it that caused the response.
The Risk of Not Doing This: How End of Q1 Updates Dunked On My Livelihood
Now I have heard the argument:
“There are repercussions if we provide an incorrect update ahead of time, so we’d rather just wait until we know assuredly before we share information.”
To which I say:
If the repercussions are worse than dumping a 3 to 6-month delay on users a day before the patch - I yield, but I have to imagine that some of the existing justification against facilitating updates fails to appropriately gauge the cost of inaccurate updates vs. no updates at all. This also doesn’t have to be black and white, and having a live stream format provides an opportunity to provide context, nuance, and details about the progress of an initiative in a way that can keep us aligned and informed without needing to make the delay official any further ahead of time than you did.
The outcome for me following your existing approach:
From the perspective of someone who develops on this platform for a living, there isn’t another scenario outside of the entire platform shutting down that I can think of that competes for “worst possible outcome”. I had 1 day heads up that Scene Graph release was delayed. After informing the client which immediately delayed the work, I had a short period before finding out I needed to source new work for the next 3 months.
Had there been quarterly updates where progress on the feature could have been communicated, I could have gauged the uncertainty over the delivery timeline from it, and this would have been an adequate enough for me to have known that this basket would potentially have the bottom fall out of it, and gotten my eggs out of it.
Instead I got to scrape my eggs off the floor…
So if the concern here is which one of these has a higher probability of a negative outcome for the user base, it’s very clearly choosing not to communicate at all. I understand that the consequences were not as dire for the entirety of the users, but can take their expressed sentiment on social media as a gauge for how they received the news. Forgive me if I’m overlooking anything, but I just don’t see any lens by which this was the correct approach for anyone involved.
In Closing:
Thank you for reading my post. I hope it serves as a constructive suggestion that provides valuable perspective from the developer-user base of the platform. I did my best to consider where this provides mutual value and communicate how and why this would be an impactful change to make. If someone does read this, I would appreciate knowing if this is something you are willing to consider and pilot, and if not justification as to why it’s not viable or will not be adopted would be appreciated. This all comes from a desire to stay informed, and understand.
Cheers,
-Lion