Epic Games

So,

you know, thinking about the time period of when Fortnite comes out, you know, Epic's still trying to find, like, their big hit that's going to keep them.

Oh, I pre-ordered Modern Moon.

Sorry to say.

Yeah, this should be the biggest story of the week, but it's just decided to be like the season finale of Games News this week for whatever reason.

Exophase, which lets players track their achievements across Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, EA, Blizzard and the Epic Games Store, suddenly added hundreds if not thousands of new games to its Steam section.

The vast majority of these new games are currently still in development, meaning their achievement list shouldn't be available yet.

Something appears to have happened, however! which is a lot of the site's track somehow achievements appear quite all the achievements from steam despite the fact it shouldn't be able to the newly added games include but it's not limited to kingdom hearts 4 persona 6 persona 4 revival final fantasy resonance fable gears award ed megaman jail override silent hill town falls strangers in heaven tomb raider legacy of atlantis star wars gladiator racer crazy taxi world tour castlevania belmont's curse clutch metro 2039 and piroc origins Well, some of the achievements lists are still work in progress.

Yeah, dude, there's a lot.

Surprisingly, right? Normally, once we get around Globals, the big question mark comes around like, hey, what are we going to do after Globals? This year, Epic decided suddenly, you know, it's about time we bring up that FNCS Solos track.

Last week's episode, we covered the fact that they even added on the Reload.

solo cups now again all of this being officially supported now by the competitive team over at epic which again is just so sick the last time we had a solos track was around the dream hack season so that was many years ago and it just seems like epic is finally waking up and giving the community what we deserve Well, with that being said, we want to talk about some of the news developing around the LAN.

This LAN is already starting to shape up to be a little bit different.

It's going to have a different feel than probably what we have been used to the last two years, at least, because in the last couple years, we have noticed Epic start to really lean in, really start to support the community streamers, right, that this scene has.

I'm talking most notably, as you guys would all know or should know and be very familiar with, Boop who covers most of the EU scene and leads the European kind of competitive scene on the scrim side and then Aussie Antics who obviously is the most notable most popular I should say maybe even YouTuber and live streamer that exists right now that covers Fortnite competitive content um well the news just came here Jacob this week I'm sure you saw it obviously that he won't be attending LAN because he has just life coming at him fast right now dude

Yeah, it's just one of those things to where you realize this stuff that's just much bigger than a video game that does go on.

And we have a really fantastic stack of resources we're pulling from to get there.

We are analyzing these great architectural postmortems on Epic's own Unreal Engine 5 sample project, Lyra.

Specifically the ones written by Harrison Fay over at UX is fine, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

You need that rapid feedback loop.

OK, so that brings us to Epic's flagship sample project Lyra, because when Unreal Engine 5.0 dropped, Lyra was released alongside it as this like shining beacon of modern development.

It was definitely pitched as the gold standard.

The game blends brawling action with adaptive intelligence, offering novel experiences each session and raising the bar for innovation in mobile gaming.

Next, let's zero in on shifting content strategies, with Epic Games continuing to expand its reach through an aggressive free games rotation.

This week, Epic is highlighting several heavy hitters using limited time free access to spark player engagement and drive traffic to their ecosystem.

This blueprint for user acquisition is being replicated across platforms as retention and community growth become vital for long-term success.

problem with something new.

The reason for wanting to bring this into this discussion is, look, Steam now is pretty much the de facto go-to marketplace for games, right? Now, yes, you've got Epic, you've got good old games.

Yeah.

sorry epic joke yeah you've got uh good old games etc um but steam obviously has become the the the most sort of the home for for a lot of gamers so i guess the question the question is for us has it You know, has it genuinely improved the gaming side on PC, or did it just get there, sort of, is it because it got there first? And also, I guess the other question is, if we were to look at any other industry, we would be calling this a monopoly and people would be complaining about it.

I'm sorry.

You were, you were what? I don't know.

You were doing what? Epic.

Epic.

But coming to gaming in particular, where some of the capabilities have been really strong has been with visualization and 3D generation.

And interestingly, especially for Epic, a lot and various other of their integrations, not just Astra potentially, the showcase for a lot of this was integrations with Unreal Engine.

And that's where a lot of these renderings were.

I mean, you can imagine use cases well beyond that.

And I think that's what I'd seen over the last week is demos of people trying to just use basic assets and trying to create something out of it, which maybe didn't work because, well, they're not creating these assets from scratch.

So if you have to build something that is fully functional, you have to, in the end, have your creative mind come to the fore and then add more to what the AI is already doing is the feel that I got from the examples out there.

Keshav, we should write a paper about this, literally this specific topic, because when we're speaking to investors, Epic investors, I'd say the number one or two question is, isn't AI going to crush Unreal Engine? And this is just an interesting illumination of the fact that it is not.

It is only going to augment.

It looks fantastic.

You know what the funniest thing is, though? In a couple of the group chats that I'm in, this is the first time that one of the fan projections of what this game could look like on Unreal Engine 5 actually turned out to be very close to the actual

remake

it looks absolutely fantastic and they've made it so much more detailed than the original Ocarina of Time they've fleshed out the city they've fleshed out the world they've added more to it it looks beautiful sounds beautiful, it's built from the ground up on the Nintendo Switch 2