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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?

The problem there isn't in the features themselves, though they are related, but in trust. Trust that nothing funky is going to happen suddenly. And removing blueprints is definitely some surprise funk.

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

So in theory you'll probably be able to use UE6 a bit like UE5 but the question is how much shit you'll have to put up with, and how much Epic support will ignore you with BP issues and questions. Plus, all the metaverse stuff adds overhead that might affect performance of these "old" systems

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