Unreal Tournament 4 is no longer in development; resources moved to Fortnite and new Steam competitor

Epic Games have finally killed the new Unreal Tournament after the runaway success of their battle royale shooter Fortnite.

“Unreal Tournament remains available in the store but isn’t actively developed,” Epic’s Tim Sweeney said to Variety. It’s a shame, as even though development has slowed down on the project, UT4 was shaping up to be a true arena shooter.

Unreal Tournament was announced in 2014 as an ongoing project. In turn, the community would help Epic create the game through valuable input. After two years of development, the game would see four high-textured maps alongside numerous modes. It barely moved on from there.

The fan input that Epic asked for pleaded the developer to continue work on the game since it’s last proper update in 2017. It has barely been touched since.

Instead of spending resources on UT, Epic will move everything over to Fortnite and their new store. The Epic Store is an all-new storefront designed to take on Steam. Instead of the at-the-moment 30% cut taken by Valve for publishing a game on Steam, developers will only see 12% taken by the Epic Store – no matter what engine is used.

The Epic Store will launch soon with a specific hand-picked list of games for both PC and Mac.

Unreal Tournament will probably be kept alive by its fans, but then that’s the case with every other game in the series at the moment. Maybe we’ll see another Unreal game in the future; maybe Epic will leave it in the past.

Source: Variety