I wanted to provide some honest and pointed feedback about the Unreal Engine ecosystem. I following Unreal Engine for a while now, and tuned into the recent stream from Chicago. One of the things that I feel very disappointed Is never talked about or mentioned is the community and having a working forum for Unreal Engine users, and especially new indie developers.
The Unreal Engine forums were merged with the Fortnite ones, and now, They seem to be a chaotic mess mashed together into one, which doesn’t really make any sense. Sure, unreal Engine is a tool that is used to make experiences and levels and other stuff in Fortnite. But those are two completely separate things. For people who are using Unreal Engine for non Fortnite related tasks, It had been extremely disruptive to the ecosystem of the game engine to merge the forums together. In many ways, the community collapsed after that, and as a result now all we have are… Reddit, Which is extremely limited you can’t even post photos on their subreddit and isn’t a really good source to discuss things. The Unreal Engine Discord, which has its own benefits Of interacting there, but also its own drawbacks because it’s not really moderated properly and not really friendly to new developers or indie devs
I really feel like you should take a community focus to Unreal Engine, and stop pretending it doesn’t exist anymore. Fortnite is not the only thing that you have. Companies that only focus on one product, one solution, don’t tend to do very well in the long run. If you don’t cultivate entire ecosystem, It’s just going to shrivel up and people are going to go elsewhere like Unity or Godot