Epic Games today unveiled Unreal Engine 5, the newest iteration of its game engine that's used by game developers for many high-profile games. A demo video running on a developer version of the PS5 hardware shows what Unreal Engine 5 is capable of.
Unreal Engine 5 focuses on photorealism that's on par with movie CG and real life, and it will be released in 2021. Unreal Engine 5 will support current-generation consoles, next-generation consoles, PCs, Macs, iOS, and Android.
Epic Games detailed two new core technologies that will be coming in Unreal Engine 5, including Nanite virtualized geometry for importing film-quality source art directly into Unreal Engine as virtualized textures and Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination system designed to react to scene and light changes, which will allow for more realistic shadows and rendering of moving light sources.
Unreal Engine 5 has been designed to make it easy for development teams of all sizes to take advantage of content libraries and tools to create games with unprecedented levels of detail and interactivity.
In addition to Unreal Engine 5, Epic today announced a change to how its royalties work. Developers are now able to keep all royalties for the first $1 million in sales generated, and then it will take five percent of sales after that. Previously, Epic collected royalties on all games after the first $3000 in sales.
Epic is also launching Epic Online Services, an online multi-platform game management system that was originally created for Fortnite. Epic Online Services provides developers with tools for cross-platform matchmaking and account management.
