LogInThe preview versions of UE6 might arrive within the next 2-3 years.
Tim Sweeney, the Founder and CEO of Epic Games, the developer behind Unreal Engine and Fortnite, has recently joined the Lex Fridman Podcast for an extensive four-and-a-half-hour interview, breaking down the game development industry and offering what might be one of the most detailed overviews of Unreal Engine 5 and its features to date.
Among the more than two dozen topics he explored, Sweeney also addressed something Epic rarely talks about, but something thousands of game developers are undoubtedly eager to hear more on – Unreal Engine 6, a brand-new version of the company’s flagship engine, which the CEO previously described as "UE5 + Verse + rough deployment parity into Fortnite and into standalone products + metaverse economy + standards."
Emphasizing once again that Verse, Epic's programming language introduced back in 2023, will be a core component of Unreal Engine 6, Sweeney explained that the team has spent the past year and a half steadily enhancing it within Unreal Editor for Fortnite, adding new features while ensuring each update remains backward compatible.
That said, Sweeney acknowledged that the current version of Verse in UEFN still falls short of expectations for developers and studios building full-scale projects in Unreal Engine 5, which itself continues to receive regular updates and grow more powerful each year. The company's long-term goal, he said, is to eventually merge these two "threads of development" – UE5 for traditional developers and UE5 for Fortnite creators – into a single entity, and the name of this entity, as you may have already guessed, is Unreal Engine 6.
"The aim for UE6 is to bring the best of both worlds together," Sweeney stated. "Much easier gameplay programming for the Fortnite community and for licensees, more scalability to large-scale simulations of all sorts, greater ease of use, meaning it will be easier to hire programmers who are familiar with and experienced with the thing, but also ensure that every game developer has the full deployment capabilities so they can build a game once and ship it anywhere.
The ultimate version of this enables a game developer to build a game of any sort, either or simultaneously both ship it into Fortnite as a Fortnite island that players can go into, bring their Fortnite items and cosmetics, and interoperate properly, or ship as a standalone game, or both. And if they ship as a standalone game, they shouldn't be missing out on the open economy either, because in this time frame, we'll have opened up the Fortnite item economy to third-party developers."
According to Sweeney, Unreal Engine 6 is still a few years away, with the first preview versions potentially arriving sometime within the next 2-3 years. However, there are currently no concrete dates or release windows that Epic can share.
Besides UE6, he also discussed video games in the 80s and 90s, the origin story of Epic Games, Unreal Engine and its tools, Fortnite, movies, realistic digital humans, EGS, the Epic vs. Apple legal battle, and the future of gaming. We highly encourage you to watch the full episode 467 of the Lex Fridman Podcast attached above or by clicking this link.
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