Honestly? After abandon of the entire Unreal game series I’m no longer so optimistic about Unreal brand. The biggest topic about Unreal for me are jokes about renaming it to Fortnite Engine or so.

The concept of this series was a preview of the engine features. Abandoning it is like hearing a news about Coca-Cola worker drinking Pepsi. Sure, it doesn’t really change anything, but it looks terrible and “a free game or two” would not erase the terrible aftertaste which feels all the Unreal game series fans.

After “Redefining Game Development” companies expect that people would not pirate their products. How could people get those games if they would not download it from torrents then? Even when my old discs were damaged instead of downloading the game files from torrents, which was really ok in case like that, I still bough the Anthology edition. Even if this release had 0 support for Linux and I need to spend time on fetching Linux patches it was still better than literally nothing.

9 games removed from all shops because … policy change or maybe focus on other games? What’s the problem with at least allowing community to get a legal copy of their products?

Currently the Unreal term is the most known in community from torrent sites and groups that after all those years are still working on patches for old Unreal series. The community bring Unreal game series to 2024 by creating a 4k textures, so no matter what AI or whatever else they would add to Unreal Engine it would not change anything to the series that has been abandoned.

The problem is not even that what games were abandoned, but the fact they was. Unreal game series have strong enough community to survive this, but now who would buy a new Unreal Engine-based game if after one decision and without any explanation it could be abandoned at literally any time? Because companies teaches their communities that they could add a DRM that would slow down the gameplay or they would just abandon the game the pirate sites could be even stronger because it’s at least easier if it’s not the only way to get some product. So now after understanding such facts how the engine is seen? What features could be added to overpower such a giant weakness?

For sure I understand the fact of “company rules”, so I’m not blaming the developers, but at the end it does not matter who’s fault. There is only one fact that the whole community either abandoned or partially/fully moved to pirate sites.

At the end of last year I was in need to buy a new PC and I was wondering if after signing a new contract I should do another big withdraw and buy some fresh games. Well … at least now it’s clear that I will not buy, but for some reason it does not looks like a good point. I wonder if in a long-term future Unreal game series would be known at most from internet archives.

https://www.oldunreal.com