I wanted to provide some honest and pointed feedback about the Unreal Engine ecosystem. I’ve been 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
I wanted to say that, as an aspiring game designer, I really appreciate the direction UE is taking—focusing on both ease of use and increased power—which I plan to leverage in the future to create games with the smallest possible team. Thank you to the development team for giving me hope.
Found this post by mistake and I’m gonna lay my thoughts in here.
Just searching a bit on the forums, I get a mixture of Fortnite and Unreal Engine posts.
I thank Epic Games for everything they have done with Unreal Engine so far. Allowing me utilize such a fantastic and powerful Game Engine completely for free, truthfully boggled my mind in the beginning. How could they? But then, I started realizing that it’s a good thing and the way that they finance themselves seems perfectly fine.
I had other options when I first started developing but I don’t like the other options. I prefer UE. It has more features, it is more powerful and it is more complex. I also like the fact that I can go in and out of C++/Blueprints with it fairly easily and they complement each other really well.
Now, UE isn’t free of bugs and setbacks and I’ve had my fair share of them, though, that’s not the point of this reply anyways.
I do have to say, that, I don’t care about Fortnite, I don’t wanna play Fortnite, I don’t want to create things for Fortnite and I’m not interested in a merge between a game that I don’t care about and a Game Engine that I do.
You’re not gonna force me to create things for this game, and you’re not gonna force me to care about it.
Unreal Engine 6 promises more implementation with the ‘Fortnite Environment’. I don’t care and I don’t want that. This latest Unreal Engine version (5.8), might be my last one utilizing this Engine. Sadly.
I don’t agree with the direction that Epic is taking UE. It feels off.