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With the statements made by Unreal about their diehard focus on verse scripting, metaverse, AI, and removing blueprints, I fear they may be having a Unity Runtime Fee moment: Causing so much uncertainty to their userbase, that the userbase reconsiders hitching their ride in the long term.

This is because games are made over very long timespans. When you decide on your engine, you are looking 4 or 5 years into the future. So you have to consider: In 4 or 5 years, will this engine suddenly pull into a completely different direction and sink my game's development?

Essentially: Another company decides that LLMs and the metaverse are the future, and you are only allowed to build content with that in mind. Maybe that will work out, or maybe it won't. Will you willingly attach your long term project to the risk of someone else's gamble?

A few thoughts here since, well, one reason I was possibly part of the mass layoffs 2 months is that I had been screaming "fuck LLMs and fuck the metaverse" for 1 year straight internally 😅 1) As you say games are often made over several years, so we will still see many of them ship on UE5

(UE 5.9/10/whenever they decide to stop) and so games who might consider UE6 as their engine are still, like, 5 years away. A lot can happen in that time. 2) They won't remove Blueprints in UE6.0 but at some point they will "hide" them and you'll have to enable some "deprecated feature" or whatever

I am especially curious to hear what the studios think that recently moved over to Unreal