Tim Sweeney and his team announced several things at Epic Games’ Unreal Fest (Sweeney’s speech will be covered separately later today).

Developers have access to Unreal Engine 5.5 Preview 1, with the big new feature being an experimental feature called MegaLights. It allows you to create moving, dynamic and lifelike spatial shadows by lighting volumetric fog. The demo ran in real time on PlayStation 5, with an area in the scene illuminated by 1000 light sources casting shadows. Rendering has also been improved in Unreal Engine 5.5, with Nanite’s ability to render skeletal meshes faster, and Path Tracer has been made production-ready. We’ve seen this in several films, including Piece by Piece, the animated biography of Pharrell Williams using the Epic Games engine.

Also announced was the Fab Publishing Portal, which will be a mix of the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab Store, ArtStation Marketplace, and Quixel.com, allowing developers to buy and sell assets in one place, with an 88/12% revenue split (developers get 88%). The portal has been partially open since September 17, but Epic Games plans to have it fully open by mid-October.

Unreal Engine royalties can be saved if the game is released on the Epic Games Store earlier or at the same time as other platforms. This will reduce the royalty rate from 5% to 3.5% (the Unreal Engine terms of service state that Epic should pay 5% of international gross revenue in royalties) starting January 1st if the revenue is more than $1 million, but if it’s a game running on the company’s engine, this amount has been waived entirely.

So Epic Games is trying to get the attention of developers, but their situation is not so good either, because Alan Wake II was not bad last year, but Remedy Entertainment broke up with Epic Games Publishing…

Source: WCCFTech