…in being the industry’s vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers.
Look, at least a little bit of that is true, but fuck right off.
At least it’s a good severance package. They owe their employees at least that much.
Unreal was the defacto engine for large scale games long before Fortnite.
It was pretty popular, but there was way more competition in the PS2/PS3 era, and some studios still made their own engine.
Especially the ID Tech engine. It was neck and neck with Unreal for popularity before Bethesda bought them and they stopped selling it to third parties.
The partial death of the ID Tech engine was what cemented Unreal as the leader
There weren’t all that many more off-the-shelf engines back then, and as that eroded, it all quite visibly gave way to Unreal. Making your own engine during the 7th gen (over 13 years ago now) was very clearly a way to avoid paying Epic for Unreal, because there already wasn’t much competition at that time.