Epic Games has detailed some of the features in its next generation Unreal Engine – Unreal Engine 6 – and one of the ideas it’s testing is the ability for players to move their Fortnite skins into other Unreal Engine games, and for other Unreal Engine games to put their skins into Fortnite.
Development team lead Marcus Wassmer revealed this during Epic’s latest State of Play broadcast. In a transcript shared on Epic Games’ website, he said, “Content and code should be portable across games and engines. Our goal is to give the games industry a whole new way to grow our ecosystems with cross-promotion, portable player value, and to really lean into all of the positive-sum dynamics that Metcalfe’s Law predicts for connecting experiences and social graphs together.” Whatever that means.
“Fortnite cosmetics will be our first real proof point of portability. We will start by moving the base system to an open UE6 module. This means you’ll have the option to use a player’s entitled Fortnite outfits in your own games, and you’ll get the tools to build outfits for your own games that work inside Fortnite.”
Fortnite handily provides Epic with a large and popular testbed to try and prove the system works. “We see this as the first step toward building a shared economy for smart assets: functional assets with logic and functionality that work across games, to recognise players’ time and spending in a better way,” Wassmer added.
“In the end, this isn’t really a Fortnite story. It’s about proving that such a mature, complex system can work at scale – and that every game that works with these systems will immediately benefit from them.”
Unreal Engine 6 is still a long way off. Early access testing is scheduled to begin at the end of 2027-“ish” – there was a heavy emphasis on the “ish” – with a full release happening 12 to 18 months thereafter. Key features include built-in generative AI large language model integration – something Epic has just this minute rolled out for Unreal Engine update 5.8 – as well as support for having many more players in games. At one point, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney referenced games theoretically being capable of supporting thousands, if not hundreds of thousands and even millions of players.
A priority focus also seems to be on Unreal Engine 6 making games work across multiple platforms without developers having to redo work or significantly alter it. This seemed to take precedent over flashy new graphical features.
“UE6 is going to change a lot about how games are made,” Wassmer concluded. “It will not change the thing that matters most, which is that the people in this industry – the game developers, the filmmakers, our Unreal Engine family – are the ones who make anything actually happen.”
