This may be our most important and controversial article I have ever written for this company. Here goes nothing…

It may be no surprise to anyone at this point in time that Epic Games, a once highly respectable and humble company that has graced us with relics like the Unreal game franchise, has now fallen FAR from grace, abandoning their Unreal Way of doing things – removing most of their games catalog from digital storefronts, deprecating and/or removing community services for game devs and freelancers, and now eradicating the last direct remnant of the original Epic Games Forums (which was archived and hopefully still is). It seems no matter our efforts to preserve history, Epic Games is determined to eradicate it all from existence and the craziest part about this, is that believe it or not, there are still some who support this.

For a total of 16 years, I have been a supporter and user of the Unreal Engines, since UE3 as a modder for UT3, to the latest UE5 up until this year. I have tried my damndest to maintain optimism with Epic Games in hopes that they’d come around and return to being the once great and caring company they use to be: the business that always looked out for their customers, licensees, and community; A company that would never allow scammers, let alone crypto/NFT scammers get far in their community ruining the lives of game developers and demotivating us from doing what we love (or at least some of us now) – making video games. There was even a point where they use to even support and sponsor community-created works from any engine, from OldUnreal with UE1, to mods for UE2 and UE3 games even beyond their Make Something Unreal Contests, to fan-made projects with UE3 or UE4, like Renegade X. They did not necessarily even have to be original, if it was promising, Epic would shed some light to it and sponsor it.

Backstory

Ever since UE4, they have started shifting priorities away from this. At first, I was more understanding and accepting of it; surely they had good reason to prioritize with UE4, UE3 was already nearly a decade old when UE4 release under subscription after all, and my only problem is that Epic still neglected to fix the progress-threatening bugs in UE3/UDK before moving on – and even when they finally did update UDK with their final update, and only after we had to make some noise about this on their then-new UE4 forums, they STILL forgot! However frustrating it was, this would be the least of our problems. In the next few years, Fortnite Battle Royale would release and blow up, raining millions in revenue as players endlessly swarmed in to play the game. Epic Games practically became a “God-tier” company in the industry, so much that the success of FBR would further play an essential role to cement their Unreal Engine franchise as the most popular go-to engine in the industry, expanding well beyond just video games, and a few other creative industries like animation and filming, but now automotive, construction, more priority on educational than before, medical, and I think also defense. In fact, Unreal Engine 4 was considered one of the BEST engines in the entire gaming industry, short of very few exceptions like CryEngine V and Unigine 2.

However, as their seemingly ever-infinite fame would shower them whole, Epic Games began to neglect and forget who they once were – Great Epic MegaGames – even when they abandoned the MegaGames half of their company name and settled for Epic Games in 1998, the spirit they created prior and since the first Unreal game still retained for very long until recently. Money (and especially Fortnite money) was the ruler, and they’d emphasize this more as they gradually deprecate and eradicate all of their other projects to consolidate on FBR and the more modern installments of the Unreal Engines.

The Games

Paragon

The first to drop dead. It was a very promising Free-to-Play MOBA game and addictively fun.

Fortnite

Hard to believe now, but contrary to what this project is now known as, it use to be a cooperative construction shooter subtitled “Save The World“. The “Battle Royale” competitive multiplayer expansion that the game would instead become famous for would soon overshadow and ultimately replace the original base game.

Unreal Tournament

So MUCH potential and promise. An ever-dedicated community just dying to support it themselves endlessly, even exceeding Epic’s own interest to work on it. We have been locked out of the repository for years with radio silence as to why from Epic Games, until they finally decided to spill the beans in December 2018 and wanted to call it a wrap on UT4’s community-reliant, open-source development. We hardly had a chance to show them truly just how far this game can shine, and now we may never have that chance.

The Tech

Unreal Engine 3 / Unreal Development Kit

The longest and most prolific of the Unreal Engines pre-UE4. Much like id Software and their id Tech 3 engine for Generation 6 of gaming (especially PC gaming), UE3 would be responsible for the VAST majority of video games throughout Generation 7 of gaming, only unlike iT3, it would also be one of the first game engines to serve as a multiplatform for other creativities industries such as filming and animation, and even become beneficial to education and it’s subsequent edutainment sub-industry.

Most importantly, along with Unity, an indie-friendly version of UE3, know as the Unreal Development Kit would become a critical engine of importance and value for independent game developers, mostly working straight from the bedroom or basement (or both in my case), especially during the Indie Market Boom of 2009, and the subsequent Indie Explosion of the early 2010s. UDK’s release in November 2009 would also mark the very first time I began my career as an indie game developer, leaving the modding scene from prior. Many things hit home to me with this engine – it’s pros and cons; it’s unique learning curve; it’s once very caring and supportive community, including the just as kind and loving Epic Games staff and moderators, like Stacey “Flak” Conley and Alexander “UnrealAlexander” Pascal.

The release of UE4 would mark the beginning of the end for UDK, and when it’s transition from pay-to-use subscription to free-to-use would consequently mark the discontinuation and official end of UDK support. By unofficial channels and URL tricks, we were still able to download UDK for years to come, until this month and year – May 2023, whence Epic Games, FAR a shell of their former selves, would completely eradicate the now-old UDK Forums, and all of it’s downloads and history along with it, including all of the user tutorials and gems once-downloadable to help in UDK game development. Amanda Schaede of Epic Games has created a new version of UDK Forums and it seems only the latest threads have been ported so far, but they merely help matters. Unless Epic Games is willing to send the UDK community the forum data to us to protect, recover, and preserve or old data – including some of my own history, Most of the important data is presumably forever lost.

The Services

(This is mostly relevant to game developers.)

Unreal Wiki

This was a dormant, yet fairly reliable wiki encyclopedia of Unreal Engine series knowledge. Wanted to find how classes or their hierarchies worked and how they compare to each engines? Perhaps you’d want to find the differences between UE1’s Pawn class, UE2’s Pawn classes, or UE3’s Pawn classes? How about the functions and features of these classes that you wish to understand it’s purpose and or value? Or if nothing else, you may wish to read on the licensing of the Unreal Engines or variants like UE2 Runtime and the UE2 engine variants (2.0, 2.X, and 2.5). This wiki was useful for all of that! While I personally prefer diving through the scripts of the engines in Unreal Editor (or in UE3’s case, using Visual Studio Code).

Well technically it is still “up” (though I fear those days are numbered considering what happened to UDK Forums), however no one can access some pages or edit and update the page. It is mostly a broken archive now of which it’s site formatting is not even working properly anymore.

Answer Hub

Formerly a place to post questions and seek answers from community and staff alike. Now it has been consolidated into Unreal Engine Forums, sometimes absorbed into a complicated mess of its own.

Scams Reports & Tips

[NOTE: This is a large one, and most important to game developers, or at least myself if no one else. Feel free to skip to “THE LEGACY“ if you are not a game dev. If you are a freelancer, read it through to the end, this info may help you.]

The most important thread for any freelancer seeking to make an honest living from game development, first created by Michael Philips, a fellow UDK veteran and a seasoned Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas modder, whom like myself was fed up with the scammers that were riddling the Unreal Engine community looking to prey on particularly new game dev talent or new game dev projects with ample funding and/or resources. You were once able to post your report of the scammer and the incident on the thread to warn others of said scammer and help them protect themselves against them accordingly. It was working VERY well for years until UE4 and what would ultimately become Epic Game’s “unofficial” (news flash: they’re lying; it is OFFICIAL without a doubt) embarrassment of a Discord community, Unreal Slackers became a thing.

Slackers use to be a far cry from what it is now; a once wonderful community from it’s name-sake service Slack, until 2016 where it moved to Discord operating to this very day. Even then, it was still the best and the community was tenable – FAR better than Game Dev League, which was just completely a nightmare from hell (to put it nicely) and it’s moderators did not help matters (especially that abusive joke Kalishir, who has ZERO understanding about law).

Overtime, this did not last for long however, as in 2019, it would slowly turn into another problem of its own, particularly when it comes to freelancer security. On one hand, some users would simply not even care enough (or sometimes never at all) to respect victims of scams and their efforts to warn others of those scammers. First, their excuse is usually “you don’t have solid hard proof! It’s just he/she/they said!”. Even when you present proof, they now want to make more excuses, sometimes stupid ones like “those screen captures could be edited and photoshopped!”, even if and when that evidence was captured using an online screen-capture software. For my own evidence, I always avoid using Print-Screen to capture evidence. Instead Gyazo is my most reliable tool for this instead. It has never failed me to this day for my needs, and I doubt it ever will. It became clear these same critics of Unreal Slackers are not truly interested in listening to the cries of justice from those who have been scammed. At best, they pretend to care, and at least they would even linked the SRT thread on occasions, but little more – if anything, they’d probably just do so to shut us up and redirect us there.

One another hand, there are other users who might take it a step further to demoralize freelancers with defeatist platitudes and remarks against our common duty to protect ourselves against scammers (or any crooks that are a danger to freelance) and warn others of their dangers, seldom disrespecting those who post on the Scams, Reports, & Tips thread, or grossly (and deliberately) underestimate the numbers of valid reports in effort to discredit the SRT thread, ignoring or disregarding the screenshotted evidence that also existed in some of these reports.

I won’t deny that some reports were bogus; some of the ones that don’t even feature screenshots for starters – with two particularly leading to a feud between two parties. SRT was far from perfect and I do think there could have been some more enforcement especially in the late 2010s – something even Epic themselves could have fixed easily but barely tried besides banning those two clowns who stirred up the family feud with no evidence on either side. however there were still plenty more that did have screenshots and they were more than just “3 proper reports”. Even a few bad reports do not discredit a forums thread of justice, particularly accounting for 4 of my own reports which had substantial evidence on all of them.

What particularly infuriated me, is that one of these users in the Slackers server would further disrespect me by insinuating that “no one will want to work with me and/or [person I argued] with“, followed by another user making a non-infuriating (but just rather annoying) statement boasting of the server member count (as if that makes a damn difference to begin with besides flexing muscles).

All I am going to say to that: If anyone does not “want to work with me” for simply defending myself and standing my ground from cowards who are quick enough to dismiss my misfortune and even try to brand me a “drama queen/king” for simply speaking out on them, then they were NEVER worth working with to begin. In fact, I’d wager quite the contrary – they are truly the people whom NO ONE should ever worth with, NOT myself. The cowards who pull that old “I dun’t wanna work wiva’ snitch!” argument are the same types of creeps who probably have no problem playing accomplice or accessory to scammers and other criminals in business crimes. Such defeatist nay-sayers only add to our lackluster freelance security problem; they are naught but snakes and ought to have no place in the freelance scene either! By all means, DO NOT EVEN ASSOCIATE WITH ME. I want NOTHING to do with you either.

Ultimately none of this mattered at the end, because on December 21, 2021, the SRT thread would be ultimately abolished by Epic Games. The last bastion of security for freelancers working with Unreal Engine was gone. This is when my respect for Epic downgraded so much to the point that I started addressing them as Ugly Epic. With everything else prior considered, this was one of the few things left to care about and they took it away, with NO failsafe for it besides a few copy pasta of Mike Philips original advice on a new thread vaguely warning the dangers of scammers; nothing more. Worst of all, Epic did all of this without prior warning, during holiday season, and behind our backs.

The overwhelming outrage and distress this brought combined with the fact, that I was recently scammed by the blokes from Monkey Empire (formerly Crypto Monkey Empire) with nowhere to truly report the injustice despite both Slackers and Epic claiming to just contact them personally – which I did, only to amount to nothing besides “It is not our responsibility and out of our scope.”, and in Epic’s case, even with Skye Eden (the very employee who told me to report to him about it) – radio silence, convinced me to take matters into my own hands and create this service instead:

Crooked Registry Board

A new means of justice and security for freelancers in the gaming industry, to warn against not only scammers like the two people responsible for operations at Monkey Empire, but any other criminals or crooks who actively pose a tremendous threat to your ability to make an honest living, especially for instance, when that person actively seek to swat you out of malice, by manipulating clients you signed a document with, lying to her own college campus that you are actively trying to travel to her home state and college to personally mess with them, or when all else fails, try to hack your social media in desperate hopes to salvage your personal data for malicious intent – All of which thankfully failed to materialized against my life.

I also created the CRB as a special means to properly verify reports submitted to the server, and if proven valid, I greenlight and sponsor them on a special channel for verified reports. This is to filter the frivolous reports that some users made back when the SRT thread existed. For good measure to ensure the rules or laws are not violated, we prohibit any extreme means like doxxing (ie. posting someones SSN or address) on the server. You can still post their national location and city (ie. Worcester, MA, USA) as it is necessary to know where the crook is located and gives and idea of what kind of person they are – a US American in this case. We only allow information that will not put anyone in unnecessary harm (which is against Discord TOS anyway) and any submitted reports that do will consequently be removed. Granted and admittingly, I could not care less what the opposing parties do outside of CRB; if they want to play a final game of deathmatch IRL and kill each other somewhere in a fight club in Mexico, just keep it away from CRB. We are not responsible for any of that. We are not the Internet Police. All we want is to help those who are being defrauded and are losing hope in making an honest living doing what they love – making video games.

Problem is even with this into account, I am unsure if Ugly Epic will even allow me to make a thread to present this solution. So far, their shady (and despicable) moderators have been stifling my right to free speech on their forums, and I strongly suspect a known victim-shamer of scammers and the SRT thread (before its destruction) is at the forefront, probably was or maybe even still is actively spying on me to ensure neither the truth gets out or CRB gets far on Unreal Engine Forums because I was quick to call him out on his extremely disgusting actions on SRT when it was still around. They already tried to subjugate my post that was meant to help another user with scammer prevention for freelance work.

Regardless, I have vowed that until I can make freelance a safer place again, I shall NEVER return to the freelance scene again. I do not want to return to such a nightmare, only to suffer again, and again, and again, and again, be out of luck, rinse, repeat, and suffer miserably again, while the crooks sadistically laugh and comedize my suffering.

The Legacy

Operation: Seppuku

During December 2022, Ugly Epic did the absolutely unthinkable:

They erased the ENTIRE Unreal game franchise.

When I thought things could not get anymore worse than they already are, it finally did… A major fraction of my entire childhood was wiped clean from the official plane of existence. Short of pre-owning them prior to this decision, the only other means to obtain these games now is piracy. New modders may be in trouble if they want to access Unreal legitimately. The only possibility of a comeback is Unreal Tournament 3 X, which is said will be using Ugly Epic’s omnipotent EOS (Epic Online Services). I know not about whoever you are that is reading this, but I personally would not hold my breath for what may likely amount to a neutered GaaS trap of a game. UT3 had a GaaS but it was at least still offline-friendly, meaning it was accessible offline. Now UT3X may be a GaaS that strictly requires online play, and since they are not making a new store page and instead replacing regular UT3’s page, I can already sense dystopia coming for this game (much like what happened to this other game franchise). I am already writing it off.

From this point on, my respect for Epic Games has now downgraded further to Evil Epic. There is no other conclusion. What kind of company would be insane enough to destroy their sacred and most important franchise? The same signature game franchise that build this company and popularized their signature engine franchise? Why would they go in their way to commit what is essentially worse than your typical career suicide – a career seppuku? Regardless my hatred for them has reached heights of which I never thought would be possible, and apparently hundreds of thousands if not millions thought the same.

Giving the Community the Finger

Some important modding communities like OldUnreal were already being neglected by Evil Epic prior to now; with almost all of it’s developers still receiving radio silence from Epic Games, and the possibly the only exception, Anthrax receiving bare communication.

Now matters have worsened for game devs, particularly veterans of Unreal Engine 3 and/or Unreal Development Kit, when this month, we saw the erasure of the 1st UDK Forums. All history was officially wiped clean from existence.

On May 5th, 2023, Amanda Schaede of Epic Games announced it’s shutdown early this month in May. Together with many other veterans of the UDK as well as UE3, we have tried to make our last-ditch effort to reach out to Epic Games and convince them to send us the archive of the forums to preserve and rescue all of it’s vital history and knowledge that is again – now ‘officially’ lost forever. We are nearing the end of this month, and they have YET to responded AT ALL to our requests, via private messages on the forums, Discord DMs, or email.

Although some of us are still trying relentlessly, I have personally decided to tread a different path. I have finally given up any hopes of Old Great Epic returning. The Epic we knew and love is not just gone, it is dead. Tencent marked them; Fortnite BR mortally wounded them; UE5 finished them off. Nothing we can do can truly rescue them. Our gaming industry has changed in the span of a decade (2-3 for some of us). We are doomed to this timeline, whether we like it or not. Epic is no longer interested in returning to the light side.

So What Now?

I think it time for us to move on. Leave what use to be Epic Games behind, and just abandon the abomination that is now Evil Epic. If we really want to send a strong message to them in the way they will best communicate, we need to do it the hard and brutal way. This is what we must do:

• Abandon all of its newer games, services, and the engines – even UE5
• Find a new game engine that can either compete or be very sufficient for our needs. UE5’s special integrated DX12 raytracing and infinite polygon tech may be unique now, but it matters barely right now. Most computers lack IR for Lumen to work properly (if at all), let alone DX12 graphics cards to work well with Nanite, the specs to run UE5 are still quite demanding, and it turns out gamers do not care too much for this (yet).
• Seek other game engines that are more community-friendly, royalty-free, and preferably open-source.

What about Néotl Empire?

As for us, we have decided to do what many developers may presume “the unthinkable” as well. From this day forth, we will begin the process to convert ALL of our projects using any of the Unreal Engines into non-commercial ones or switch engines.

• ALL games using UE currently on storefronts will become FREE.
• ALL games using UE we have currently in development that meets or exceeds 50% of progress will also be released for FREE.
• ALL games using UE we have currently in development that exceeds below 50% of progress will be restarted using a different engine. The engine we select will depend on the project type, platforms, and the scope.
• ANY new games we have planned on lineup but not yet started will be using a different engine.

We are MOVING FAR AWAY from Unreal Engine and abandoning Epic Games. We are moving on to greener pastures.

We are DONE with Evil Epic.

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