One of biggest reasons why Paragon failed was because moba players have potatoes, but Paragon required “real” graphic cards to run on.
Unfortunately the more you invest in “graphxxxx” the more production costs rise and the more your target player base shrinks.
On the other hand the less you invest in graphics the less market chance you have of “causing an impact” in terms of marketing.
Unreal 4 is right on the “sweet spot” of great graphics also capable of down-scaling to run on potatoes.
That working so well, for a game where Epic already made around $500KK in such a short period of time, that leaves almost no room to gauge interest on graphics for games made for the average gamer whilst said gamer cannot afford the hardware required to run said game;
Specially when major player base are regularly reporting crashes on Consoles due to graphics already consuming so much resources in Fortnite…
They are actually cutting corners to stop those crashes, not thinking about expanding the engine (unless you’re Disney with a demand lol).
So, from the PoV of engine manufactures that makes very little sense to invest a lot of effort on lighting when the landscape is something like that.
This leaves an open opportunity for competitors such as CryTech, Unity and Amazon to bite a few costumers here and there if they ever manage to reproduce someday the toolset we have for granted in Unreal Engine.
“Epic Mega Games” can now go ahead and rebrand again to “Epic Fortnite Corp.” xD