Event
June 17, 2026
State of Unreal 2026: Top news from the show
State of Unreal drew more than 2,000 developers in person and hundreds of thousands online—here's a roundup of all the news.
The road to Unreal Engine 6
Unreal Engine 6 is in development, and it will bring together the AAA game development capabilities we’ve built in UE5 and expand them with a next-generation game development pipeline we've been building live in Fortnite. The aim is to enable developers to create games of any scale and scope once and deploy to traditional platforms, Fortnite, or their own live and potentially multi-product ecosystems. Ultimately, we’re developing UE6 with three major initiatives:
- We’re moving the gameplay programming model to Verse, which transactionalizes C++, for increased accessibility of development and so that we can build persistent, large-scale, live experiences with thousands of contributors.
- We’re enabling content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards, to enable developer collaboration on much greater scales than ever before.
- We’re building development pipeline features—such as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) with integrations for Claude, Gemini, and others—as creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than on time-consuming manual tasks.
We’ll continue to improve the core functionality of the engine in areas including rendering, development iteration times, team workflows, and mobile hardware support, capabilities, and optimizations. We'll have more to say on each of these topics over time.
We’re targeting an Early Access release at the end of 2027—you can learn more about the timeline and vision in our Unreal Engine 6 blog post.
We’re targeting an Early Access release at the end of 2027—you can learn more about the timeline and vision in our Unreal Engine 6 blog post.
Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available
This release focuses on improving performance and maturing core features.
Lumen now features lightweight dynamic global illumination to support 60 fps on Nintendo Switch 2 and PCs. And we've continued to expand worldbuilding capabilities and make character and animation workflows more interactive and intuitive. Check out the new Zebra character sample, MetaHuman Devkit, and MetaHuman Animator Markerless Motion Capture plugin to get started.
Many features are now Production Ready in UE 5.8, including MegaLights, Audio Insights, Dataflow for Chaos Cloth, Live Link Hub, Iris, and Movie Render Graph.
Additionally, this release provides a first look at a new Experimental feature: Mesh Terrain, a brand-new system for authoring complex 3D landscapes in any kind of environment without the limitations of heightfields.
Many features are now Production Ready in UE 5.8, including MegaLights, Audio Insights, Dataflow for Chaos Cloth, Live Link Hub, Iris, and Movie Render Graph.
Additionally, this release provides a first look at a new Experimental feature: Mesh Terrain, a brand-new system for authoring complex 3D landscapes in any kind of environment without the limitations of heightfields.
We’ve optimized shader compilation and improved deduplication to eliminate redundant work—this helped cut Fortnite’s shader count by 68%. Plus, enhanced PSO pre-caching streamlines fallback rendering and simplifies tuning, debugging, and profiling.
As we work toward UE6, this is the last planned major release for Unreal Engine 5, but we’re reserving the option to release a 5.9, if needed. Learn more about 5.8 in our blog post.
As we work toward UE6, this is the last planned major release for Unreal Engine 5, but we’re reserving the option to release a 5.9, if needed. Learn more about 5.8 in our blog post.
New Model Context Protocol (MCP) server support in Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine 5.8 introduces a new Experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin which enables developers to connect models like Claude directly to UE projects. Rather than acting as assistants that simply copy and paste, these models can become active collaborators that understand and operate within specific Unreal Engine workflows.
The interface is open, and so is the choice of model: build with Claude, Gemini, or whichever models best fit your needs.
Novel media and entertainment workflows leveraging image and diffusion models
We also showed media and entertainment workflows that give artists far greater creative control over image and video generation than traditional text-prompt tools.
Bringing diffusion models into Unreal Engine opens up the ability to use depth passes, normal maps, and camera data from 3D scenes as conditioning inputs alongside text prompts. The results are styled frames that respect camera framing and scene layout, extract and mesh segmented objects into reusable 3D assets, and render full video sequences with model-guided diffusion—all from within the engine.
We plan to release the tools powering these new capabilities early next year.
Lore: Next-generation version control for all
Lore is an open source next-generation version control system that’s available today and free to use.
Unlike other version control solutions that optimize for source code or binary assets, Lore delivers high performance, reliability, and practical collaborative workflows for both, empowering developers and artists to work seamlessly together.
Built for unprecedented scalability, Lore is designed to handle massive datasets, distributed repositories, and teams of any size. It is particularly well-suited for projects that combine code with large binary assets for game development, media production, and other content-rich work.
Over $1 billion paid out to Fortnite developers
Fortnite continues to grow as an ecosystem, with over $1 billion paid out to developers since the launch of UEFN. This year, we cut iteration times by an average of 40% and continued to lay the framework for UEFN’s convergence with UE6. Scene Graph is giving developers more control, with core engine systems like animation, itemization, and gameplay abilities landing as Verse-scriptable components. With Fortnite back on Google Play and the App Store worldwide, and new UI and input controls, mobile playtime in developer-made games has more than doubled in the past year.
The recent changes to Discover have resulted in newly published islands reaching 100 players and 10,000 impressions at nearly double the previous rate. We've also reduced spam and duplicative content, organized islands into clear genres, and personalized every aspect of the surface. Later this year, we're going further with a full Discover redesign: video throughout, deeper personalization across every row, social signals such as like percentage on tiles, and Discover replacing the lobby as the first thing players see when they open Fortnite.
The Simpsons is coming to UEFN
Fortnite continues to be the best place for fans to play and experience the IP they love. In May, Star Wars games landed in Fortnite and drove record engagement—within the first 72 hours of launch, nearly eight million players jumped into custom Star Wars islands. The next major IP on the way to developers is The Simpsons.Last fall, more than 80 million people played the Fortnite | Simpsons season for over 750 million hours! Later this year, the official toolkit will be available to Fortnite developers through the IP program, complete with iconic characters and locations from Springfield.
Updates coming to the Epic Games Store
The Epic Games Store now features more than 6,000 games from over 3,000 partners, and in 2025, player spending on third-party PC games grew 57%, reaching an all-time record of $400 million.
We highlighted our goals for better performance, improved discovery, deeper community features, and a platform that partners can confidently build on for years to come. We're undertaking a complete rebuild of the Launcher and storefront backend, enabling the store to ship new player-facing features faster and more frequently.
We're also connecting the Epic Games Store more closely with the Fortnite ecosystem. Now when players purchase specific partner content on the Epic Games Store, they are granted cosmetics from that game’s IP to use in Fortnite. Look out for over 30 collaborations planned for 2026, continuing into 2027.
Highlights from across the community
Today, many of our partners showcased their impressive projects:
The Coalition revealed how they used MegaLights in Gears of War: E-Day to scale from a handful of light sources in some environments to hundreds or thousands—all casting dynamic shadows while maintaining 60 fps on Xbox Series X.
Neon Giant gave us insights into how their small team used Unreal Engine to create Port Desire, the densely constructed and populated cybergrunge city in NO LAW.
Riot Games shared how they switched from internal tech to UE5 across PC and mobile for strategy auto-battler Teamfight Tactics.
And UEFN developer Future Trash gave us the inside scoop on runaway hit Star Wars Droid Tycoon. We want to say a big thank you to these talented teams for sharing their expertise.
See you next year
That just about covers everything! We had a blast at the State of Unreal, and we can't wait to celebrate the community at Unreal Fest in Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo later this year.