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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.

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?

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

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I’ve had the experience of platforms suddenly disappearing from under my feet, so am not unused to sudden shifts… Not a fan of the direction, but I figure there’s still window of many years here for using UE 5– and one *potential* bright spot for UE 6 overhaul is ECS foundation—that’s intriguing…

There is also a potential domino effect: E.g. NFTs and blockchain actually made customers stay away from those products, making them financially unviable. That then caused trust to fall for developers to not use that technology anymore. In the end the customer decides.