Unreal Engine 6 is “a few years away” says CEO, previews could arrive in 2-3 years
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Epic Games president Tim Sweeney recently appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast for an in-depth four-and-a-half-hour interview, covering a wide range of topics across the game development industry. Among the many discussions, including the future of the Epic Games Launcher, Sweeney touched on the first details about the next version of Unreal Engine, UE6.
According to Sweeney, UE6 is still a few years away, but the goal is to release the first previews to developers within the next two to three years. He also revealed that the next major iteration of Unreal Engine will unify the various parallel development threads Epic is currently pursuing.
Multithreaded simulations on Unreal Engine 6
The Epic Games boss also admitted that one of the reasons the technology has been held back is due to the company’s decision to stick with single-threaded simulation. Sweeney said that the choice was originally made to simplify things, not only for Epic itself but also for all game developers. However, over time, it became an increasing limitation, which the company now plans to overcome with Unreal Engine 6 by finally fully embracing multithreading.
“We have these two different tendrils of progress. There’s Unreal Engine 5 for game developers, and there’s Unreal Engine 5 targeting the Fortnite community. And there’s different bits of development that are only in one area that aren’t applied to both. Not all the Unreal Engine 5 features are actually available in Fortnite, because some of them we haven’t figured out or haven’t gotten to the point where we can deploy them to all seven platforms in a platform-independent way.
The place where all of these different threads of development come together is Unreal Engine 6. And it’s a few years away. We don’t have an exact timeframe, but we could be seeing preview versions of it perhaps two to three years from now. We’re making continuous progress towards it.”
Tim Sweeney on the Lex Friedman Podcast
That said, based on what Sweeney shared, it seems Unreal Engine 6 will be more of an evolution of UE5 rather than a complete overhaul, or at least that is what we think. It will likely look better than current UE5 games, but the difference may not be as big as the leap we saw from UE3 to UE4 or from UE4 to UE5.
As a reminder, the first UE5 preview was released in early 2022, while the first games using the new technology did not arrive until mid-to-late 2023. So we may have to wait until late 2028 or 2029 to play the initial wave of Unreal Engine 6 games.
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