Joe's State of Unreal 2026

If you've been tracking gamedev news over the last few days, you might have heard that the Unreal Engine's next version will be leaning fully into dead trends such as the "metaverse" and some kind of zombie version of NFT-style shared game items. It's also going to discard Blueprints, the visual scripting system which made Unreal so dominant in gamedev over the majority of my career. Tim Sweeney seems to have fully lost the plot. These issues are summarized much more completely by Joe Wintergreen, an expert Unreal user who has published his own tools for the platform. Joe's overview of the recent announcements has both the white-hot anger of someone who's built their career on this stuff... and the clarity of someone who's built their career on this stuff. This is existential threat level stuff for the engine, certainly for Unreal as a brand. It’s propelled Unreal into the Unity-a-few-years-ago realm of almost total uncertainty. People don’t know if it’s even safe to use it or train…