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Epic Games Unveils Unreal Engine 6 and Unreal Engine 5.8 at Unreal Fest Chicago

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Unreal Engine 6: The Next Generation

Epic Games has announced the next generation of its game development engine, Unreal Engine 6. Building on UE5's AAA capabilities, the new engine introduces a game development pipeline built directly within Fortnite.

UE6 aims to enable developers to create games of any scale and deploy to multiple platforms, including Fortnite.

Key initiatives include:

  • Verse programming language: Moving the gameplay programming model to Verse, a transactional C++ language, to increase accessibility and support large-scale live experiences.
  • Open standards: Enabling portability and interoperability of content, code, and economies.
  • AI integration: Building development pipeline features such as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) with integrations for AI models like Claude and Gemini.

Epic targets an early access release by the end of 2027.

Unreal Engine 5.8 Now Available

Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available with several features now production-ready:

  • MegaLights
  • Audio Insights
  • Dataflow for Chaos Cloth
  • Live Link Hub
  • Iris
  • Movie Render Graph
  • Mesh Terrain (experimental)

Shader compilation has been optimized, reducing Fortnite's shader count by 68%. Lumen now supports 60 fps on Nintendo Switch 2 and PCs.

A new experimental MCP plugin connects AI models like Claude to UE projects. New media and entertainment workflows integrate diffusion models for image and video generation using 3D scene data.

UE 5.8 is the last planned major release for Unreal Engine, though Epic reserves the option for a 5.9.

Lore: Version Control System

Epic released a new open-source version control system called Lore, available for free.

Designed for high performance with both source code and binary assets, it is suitable for large datasets and teams.

Fortnite Developer Payouts

Epic Games has paid over $1 billion to developers using Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) since its launch.

Iteration times have been reduced by 40% on average. UEFN continues to converge with UE6.

Mobile playtime in developer-made games has more than doubled in the past year. A full Discover redesign is planned for later this year, including video, deeper personalization, and social signals.

UEFN will host The Simpsons IP as part of its official toolkit.

Epic Games Store Updates

The Epic Games Store now features over 6,000 games.

Player spend on third-party PC games reached a record $400 million in 2025, up 57%.

Epic is undertaking a complete rebuild of the Launcher and storefront backend for faster feature updates.

The store will be more closely connected to the Fortnite ecosystem, with over 30 collaborations planned for 2026 into 2027.