Epic Games hosted 'Unreal Fest Seoul 2026' for two days from today (the 20th) to the 21st at Westin Seoul Parnas. Unreal Fest is an annual event where Epic Games showcases the latest technology from its commercial engine 'Unreal Engine' and the Epic Ecosystem, sharing real-time 3D interactive production experiences across various industries.

Ahead of the official opening of the event, Park Sung-chul, Country Manager of Epic Games Korea, highlighted the rapidly changing conditions in the gaming industry. He noted that trend shifts are accelerating and development costs are rising, while the success rate of newly released games remains low. He added that the gaming industry is undergoing unprecedented upheaval, with large-scale games shifting toward social platforms and competition with other entertainment sectors intensifying. To address these changes, Epic Games is preparing Unreal Engine 6, stating, "We hope this resonates meaningfully with developers who are pondering how to evolve in response to changes in the game market."

Game Trends Shifting Toward Ecosystems, and Unreal Engine 6 Tailored to Match

Following him, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took the stage to highlight the achievements of Korean game companies. He emphasized that while the global games industry is undergoing upheaval due to rising production costs and success uncertainty, Korean developers are successfully expanding from mobile and PC to consoles. In particular, he praised the diversification of genres and styles, pointing to Shift Up's 'Stellar Blade: Blood Rain' and Nexon's 'Vindictus: Defying Fate', as well as 'Woochi the Wayfarer' and 'Project TAL' based on traditional Korean culture, and 'Cinder City' and 'Nakwon: Last Paradise' set in modern Korean urban environments targeting global users.

After highlighting these achievements, CEO Tim Sweeney pointed out the emerging trend of ecosystem-based games. Fortnite and Roblox, currently representative ecosystem games, record over 76 million and 400 million MAUs, respectively. Within these ecosystems, players share social experiences with friends and seamlessly transition across various game modes while playing.

The synergy between the Epic Games Store (EGS) and the Fortnite ecosystem was also revealed with specific figures. In 2025, EGS global player spending reached $1.16 billion, with overall MAU surpassing 120 million. In particular, player spending in the Korean market surged by more than 12 times year-over-year, jumping to third place globally in spending behind the United States and China.

CEO Tim Sweeney explained that crossover structures—where purchases within EGS for titles like 'Honkai: Star Rail' and 'Crimson Desert' lead to in-game outfit rewards in Fortnite—have driven a virtuous cycle of user acquisition. The Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) ecosystem has also surpassed $1 billion in cumulative payouts to third-party developers. Growth among indie studios is becoming tangible, with 'Steal of Rain Lord', created by a small 7-person development team, recording 4.5 million MAU and a peak concurrent user count of 1.1 million. Epic Games plans to continue expanding partnerships with global mega-IPs such as Disney, LEGO, and Squid Game.

CEO Tim Sweeney then addressed the philosophy behind the next-generation engine, 'Unreal Engine 6'. The core of Unreal Engine 6 is 'UE5 + UEFN'. The goal is to unify the AAA standalone game creation environment and Fortnite's live-service deployment environment into a single integrated editor.

Under the UE6 system, a single build will allow not only traditional store releases across PC, console, and mobile, but also immediate live deployment to Fortnite and other UE6-based virtual world ecosystems without additional downloads or installation processes. Furthermore, instead of building its own proprietary AI models, Epic Games adopted an open AI strategy that fully supports integration with various external AI models such as Claude, Codex, and Cursor via the open standard MCP (Model Context Protocol). MCP can be utilized starting today.

Unreal Engine 6 Early Access Coming Late 2027, Following Late 5.x Versions Focused on AI and Stabilization

Next, Senior Director Julien Marchand presented the current status, technical architecture, and upcoming changes of Unreal Engine. In the latest official release, Unreal Engine 5.8, 'MegaLights'—which processes thousands of dynamic shadow-casting lights at a fixed cost—reached full production readiness, while 'Lumen Lite' was added to support Nintendo Switch 2 and mobile environments. Based on these features, many developers can relieve light-related concerns. Additionally, runtime hitching was improved by reducing shader compilations by 68%, and 'Mesh Terrain', a 3D mesh-based non-destructive landscape system, was introduced, making optimization as well as world-building much easier.

With MCP introduced starting today, a live demonstration of a real-time AI workflow utilizing MCP servers was held on site. Controlling lighting, materials, Niagara particles, and UMG HUD interfaces from study rooms to entire cities in real time using natural language prompts and image inputs was showcased. All outputs are placed in the engine as manually editable actual meshes and PCG graphs rather than static generated images. In other words, rather than simply instantiating a model from a prompt, developers can actively edit and utilize the results as desired. He further explained that Unreal Engine 5.9 will advance AI functionality and mobile optimization even further.

Key points for Unreal Engine 6 to be applied after 5.9 include ▲ AI agent-driven engine API redesign, ▲ USD and glTF-based asset/code portability, and ▲ next-generation gameplay programming architecture. As the first step toward this transition, he first mentioned 'Lore', a version control and data storage system within the architecture.

Lore is a system designed for seamless version control in game development environments featuring large assets and binary data. As a content-addressed storage system that identifies data based on hashes contained within files rather than file storage locations, identical data chunks across an entire project are stored only once without duplication. Furthermore, it is designed to save local storage and bandwidth by selectively pulling only the data actually needed for a specific branch and revision without downloading an entire repository spanning hundreds of gigabytes. It also offers an infrastructure architecture accessible without bottlenecks, ranging from single-machine work to edge and regional cache servers. Having already been tested in UEFN as Unreal Revision Control, it was released as full open-source under the MIT license in June 2026.

Next introduced was 'Scene Graph', a next-generation framework based on entity-component principles rather than the traditional Actor and Component model. By treating all objects as units of data and logic similar to prefabs, it serves as a core technology that allows items, once created, to be immediately ported and reused across various game projects without fragmentation.

Another element prepared for this is 'Verse', a new programming language already utilized in UEFN. 'Verse' is used to write all gameplay logic outside the low-level engine core handled by C++, and every Verse function executes inside a transaction capable of rollback and re-execution. In other words, even if a code collision occurs within the world, the transaction is aborted so that the code operates as if it was never executed, maintaining gameplay flow.

He emphasized that leveraging Verse's characteristic where all code executes in transactional units, 'Distributed Software Transactional Memory (Distributed STM)' technology—which scales single-threaded code across multi-server data centers—will provide immense help when building massive worlds. If an object is required on another server, the runtime can rollback the transaction, migrate the object, and re-execute the transaction with the object in place. He added that because the runtime synchronizes and persists data across all running instances of the game, maintaining global map persistence and building ultra-large-scale concurrent environments becomes possible without designing complex separate backend databases.

Finally, Senior Director Marchand addressed developer concerns regarding the transition to Unreal Engine 6. First, he reiterated that Unreal Engine 6 represents the union of Unreal Engine 5 for standalone games and UEFN, which has battle-tested new programming models live. Meanwhile, to allow developers to adapt to these changes in advance, everything built so far has been made fully public on the GitHub Unreal Engine 6 mainstream branch. Additionally, ahead of Unreal Engine 6 Early Access, Epic plans to ship several products based on this tech stack first.

Early Access for Unreal Engine 6 is scheduled for late 2027, with the official full release planned approximately 12 months later.