It is arguable, with all due respect to Jazz Jackrabbit, that Unreal—and specifically, Unreal Tournament—is the game that put Epic Games on the map. Sequels followed in 2003, 2004, and 2007 (confusingly called Unreal Tournament 3), and in 2014 a new UT was announced. Don't feel bad if you've forgotten about that (or just hadn't heard), though, because it's been a couple of years since the last time we checked in—when, ironically, we declared that "it's time to pay attention to the new Unreal Tournament."
Since then, Epic's attention has been drawn elsewhere, mainly to a game you may have heard of called Fortnite. Originally released in mid-2017 as a third-person survival-shooter, Fortnite became a mega-sensation a few months later when the Unreal Tournament team started experimenting with a Fortnite-based battle royale mode; fans went nuts, Epic went all-in, and Unreal updates quietly tailed off. Speculation about the future of UT floated now and then on the Unreal Tournament subreddit in thread like, for instance, FORTNITE KILLED UT4, but Epic hasn't said anything about it one way or the other until today, when it confirmed with Variety that development has been halted.
"Unreal Tournament remains available in the store but isn’t [being] actively developed," Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told the site. "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."
Fortnite is clearly Epic's big thing right now, but it's not the only thing: Today it announced plans for the Epic Store, a Steam-rivaling digital storefront that will take a smaller percentage of revenues from developers and give users a free game every two weeks through all of 2019. Between that and Fortnite, Epic is probably going to have its hands full at least until Half-Life 3 comes out, meaning that if you're lucky—and that's a big if—you might see the Unreal Tournament wheels start turning again sometime after that.
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