Unreal Tournament is one of those constants you simply expect from Epic at some point while they tool around with their engines. Epic’s longstanding mantra that you should not expect Unreal Engine to be done until they ship a game on it was usually said hand-in-hand with their multiplayer shooter Unreal Tournament being shown. With Unreal Engine 4, Epic announced a new Unreal Tournament game in 2014, but has more or less kept quiet during the game’s beta period. Now the developer confirms that the one-time standard-bearing shooter is no longer in active development.
In an interview with Variety, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed the game isn’t being worked on.
“Unreal Tournament remains available in the store but isn’t actively developed,” Sweeney told Variety. “We’ve recently worked with GOG on making classic Epic Games titles available and we’re planning to bring more of them to the store in their original glory.”
This isn’t a galloping shock to fans, considering that the last official update for the game was mid-2017. As Fortnite ramps up, other Epic projects like Paragon and Unreal Tournament have fallen to the wayside, which makes all the business sense in the world. It just means that other projects don’t have the resources they need to continue.
That said, Unreal Tournament has always been a bit of an odd duck within Epic itself. The game’s announcement puzzled fans as Epic described the game as “community-driven,” wanting the playerbase to step up by creating and selling mods for the title. In some ways, it was a prototype of the company’s new forays into digital distribution and a flag for the Unreal Asset Store to march under.
[Source: Variety]
