More than half of all announced games for next-gen gaming consoles are being developed using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine suite of developer tools, Epic VP of engineering Nick Penwarden said in an interview with The edge.
Though that’s a small improvement from CEO Tim Sweeney’s previous figure of 48 percent shared in April at the launch of Unreal Engine 5, both numbers show the growing popularity of Unreal Engine for developing PS5 and Xbox Series X/S games. And it’s perhaps not too surprising that the numbers are rising, given that both the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are now two years old and much easier to buy.
Penwarden did not specify how many developers use which versions of Unreal Engine, but noted that he was “pleasantly surprised” by the number of studios that have brought games from UE4 to UE5. “When we started building Unreal Engine 5, it was really important to us to have backward compatibility to bring in games from UE4, so it was great to see developers embrace that,” said Penwarden.
A major studio has already made a major commitment to UE5
Epic comes out on Tuesday Unreal engine 5.1, which includes a number of improvements to help developers create great-looking games that run at 60fps on PCs and next-gen consoles. Going forward, Epic’s goal is to release “multiple” point releases for Unreal Engine per year, Penwarden said, with a goal of three by 2023.