Epic Games recently released an important message that will affect the whole game industry, and the next generation of fictional engines, UE6, is expected to be born in only about two and a half years, at a point around 2028, earlier than the long-awaited schedule.
This information was referred to by Executive Director Epic Games Tim Sweeney in a live speech, who, according to a live report by Japanese media 4Gamer, said that Epic was working to integrate the advantages of UE5 ‘ s core technology with the Fortnite (including UEFN) ecosystem and to bring it together as an engine for the next generation within the next 30 months.
“In the next two-and-a-half years, the best part of UE5 will be integrated with the Fortnite ecosystem, which will give birth to Unreal Engineering 6.
The current market-wide UE5 has brought with it a number of landmark technologies, but many of the 3As have in fact seen the emergence of BUGs, such as the Carton, and the instability of their performance, which has led some developers to argue that Epic should first refine the UE5 and then talk about new generation engines.
So Sweeney, while the UE6 has not yet been fully exposed, released “time only two and a half years” in advance and immediately triggered community discussion.
The view was expressed that the UE6 direction might be linked to the depth of UEFN, bringing its mature cross-platform, creative and operational tools back to the main engine. Sweeney, however, did not explain the specifics of “integration” and therefore the outside world is still watching.
It is also worth noting that even if UE6 were to appear in 2028, it might be a few more years before most large games would actually be developed with UE6. In the case of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, even when introduced in 2024, the development uses UE4, which shows that large-scale specialized transfer engines have a fairly high threshold.
In addition to UE6, Sweeney shared Epic’s overall ecological development this year:
Epic Online Services
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Epic accounts over 900 million;
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The number of good friends connected to players is over 6 billion;
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In 2026, the project pushed Epic Social Overlay to all platforms so that PCs, mainframes, mobile phones can access social functions at low cost and quickly.
Epic Games Store
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The EGS version of the Action Platform accumulated 53 million installed and is expected to reach 7 million by the end of the year;
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Since the opening of the shop, cumulative returns of $2.1 billion have been made to developers (approximately $6.4.19 billion);
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New policy: 100 per cent of the $1 million received before each game is returned to the developers, and even 100 per cent of the income is retained in full if they adopt their own payment system.
Fortnite and UEFN Creator Economy
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Third-party creator content accumulated 11.2 billion hours of play hours;
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260,000 players have been born to create games;
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The creators shared a total of $720 million (about $22 billion) in the same amount.
Sweeney concluded by re-emphasizing the vision Epic is driving: overcoming the boundaries between games and games. Future players will be able to move across different worlds and carry their own props and roles in a unified virtual universe.
As a technical basis for this idea, Epic is developing:
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Verse: A unified language that is easier to learn than C#;
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Scene Graph: Making content control more visible;
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UE6: A subgenerational engine that integrates the above technologies with existing tools.
Epic plans to integrate these technologies over the next two and a half years, and as a result, UE6 will be on the ground faster than traditional generations and will be one of the major turning points in the game industry after the outbreak.