CARY – The long-awaited Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) is set to launch on March 22nd, according to an announcement posted to Fortnite’s official Creative Twitter account.

Fortnite maker Epic Games originally planned to release the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) in December of last year, but the release was pushed to January, then pushed again to March.

Creators can use UEFN to design games and profit from them

With the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), creators can develop and publish games and experiences directly into Fortnite—and profit from them.

They won’t owe Epic Games any royalties until a game makes over $1M in gross revenue.

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Back in April, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told Fast Company that the vision for UEFN is to open up the full capabilities of Unreal Engine “so that anybody can build very high-quality game content and code . . . and deploy it into Fortnite without having to do a deal with us–it’s open to everybody.”

Sweeney said Epic is “building an economy” to “support creators actually building businesses around their work and making increasing amounts of profit from the commerce that arises from people playing their content.”

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What is an Unreal Engine?

Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games that enables developers to create games and experiences across multiple platforms. It’s also sometimes called the “Unreal Editor.”

The latest generation, Unreal Engine 5, was launched in April 2022. It’s available for PC, Mac, and other devices like Nintendo Switch and PlayStation.

Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN) is a PC application designed for creating, developing, and publishing games and experiences in Fortnite.

UEFN combines creation tools from Unreal Engine 5 and Fortnite Creative. (Fortnite Creative is what’s called a “sandbox game,” a game in Fortnite where players can build things and share them with small groups of players. Fortnite Creative was published by Epic Games in December 2018.)

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Unlike Unreal Engine 5, UEFN will only be available for PC (for now).

The March 22 release is expected to launch UEFN beta, which more capabilities could be added over time.

Meet Verse

Verse is a new open-source programming language developed by Epic Games for the metaverse. Verse enables web3 interactions like real-time updates and shared 3D environments.

According to the description of UEFN on the Epic Games marketplace, the UEFN will “expand the capabilities of the Verse API and framework.”

Simon Peyton Jones, Engineering Fellow at Epic Games, published a draft paper about Verse here. Jones also presented about Verse at the Haskell eXchange 2022 conference in December, and in his slides, he called Verse “open” and “extremely ambitious.”

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