Epic Games formally announced Unreal Engine 6 (UE6) during its State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest Chicago. The next generation of the game development engine aims to expand AAA capabilities with a new pipeline built within Fortnite, enabling developers to create games for various platforms and ecosystems.
UE6 is slated for an early access release by the end of 2027. Its development will focus on three key initiatives. First, the gameplay programming model will transition to Verse, which Epic states transactionalizes C++ for increased accessibility and to support persistent, large-scale live experiences with numerous contributors. Second, content, code, and economies are intended to become portable and interoperable across different games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards, facilitating broader developer collaboration. Third, the engine will incorporate development pipeline features, such as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) with integrations for AI models like Claude and Gemini, designed to enhance creativity and productivity by automating manual tasks.
Unreal Engine 5.8 Now Available
Alongside the UE6 announcement, Unreal Engine 5.8 has been released, with many features now marked as Production Ready. These include MegaLights, Audio Insights, Dataflow for Chaos Cloth, Live Link Hub, Iris, and Movie Render Graph. A new experimental system called Mesh Terrain allows for the creation of complex 3D landscapes without the limitations of heightfields. Epic also reported significant optimizations in shader compilation, which reduced Fortnite’s shader count by 68% through improved deduplication.
Lumen in UE 5.8 now offers lightweight dynamic global illumination capable of supporting 60 frames per second on platforms like the Nintendo Switch 2 and PCs. The update also enhances worldbuilding capabilities and makes character and animation workflows more interactive. Furthermore, UE 5.8 introduces an experimental MCP plugin, enabling direct connection of AI models such as Claude and Gemini to Unreal Engine projects, allowing them to operate as collaborators within specific engine workflows.
New media and entertainment workflows within UE 5.8 provide artists with greater control over image and video generation. By integrating diffusion models, the engine can use depth passes, normal maps, and camera data from 3D scenes as conditioning inputs alongside text prompts. This allows for the creation of styled frames that respect camera framing, extraction of segmented objects into reusable 3D assets, and rendering of full video sequences with model-guided diffusion directly within the engine.
Fortnite Developer Payouts and Lore System
Epic Games revealed that over $1 billion has been paid out to developers through Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) since its launch. The company also noted that iteration times for UEFN projects have been reduced by an average of 40%. UEFN’s convergence with UE6 is being laid, with systems like Scene Graph offering developers more control and core engine functionalities becoming Verse-scriptable components.
The company highlighted increased mobile playtime in developer-made games, which has more than doubled in the past year following Fortnite’s return to Google Play and the App Store. Recent changes to Fortnite’s Discover section have also led to newly published islands reaching players and impressions at nearly double the previous rate, with further redesigns planned for later in the year. Upcoming UEFN content will include a collaboration with The Simpsons, following a successful Star Wars event that attracted nearly eight million players.
In addition to engine updates, Epic announced the release of Lore, a new, free, open-source version control system. Designed for high performance and scalability, Lore handles both source code and large binary assets, aiming to provide practical collaborative workflows for game development, media production, and other content-rich projects.
Epic Games Store Updates
The Epic Games Store now hosts over 6,000 games from more than 3,000 partners. Player spending on third-party PC games saw a 57% increase in 2025, reaching an all-time record of $400 million. Epic is working on improving discovery, community features, and platform performance, including a complete rebuild of the Launcher and storefront backend to enable faster feature releases. The store is also integrating more closely with the Fortnite ecosystem, offering in-game Fortnite cosmetics for specific partner content purchases on the Epic Games Store, with over 30 such collaborations planned for 2026 and 2027.
Mitchell Landsberg is the senior reporter for News Raise and focuses on Technology. Mitchell regularly writes about social media platforms and how influencers, industry and general people use them to communicate and make money.
