Thoughts on the UE5 announcement and demo today. A thread.
tl;dr version. Holy shit, that looks great. Where is all that content going to come from if you aren't EA or Ubisoft and can afford to make it, though?
Also, that first $1m free is a very very sweet deal.

So lets talk about this demo. It looks great. It really does. Smooth, motion blur, tons of visual impact. Much like the movie thing they did a few years back.
But. And here's the thing. Epic has people working for it that know the engine inside and out.

If they run into issues with creating content, they have the engine team right there to ask questions about, and fix things if they aren't right or there is a better way to do it.

Everyone else does not.

Epic also will be throwing a LOT of money at content for a demo like this; they want to show their engine in the best possible light, and by god, it shows. It looks outstanding. It really does. Next generation, for once, is the right nomenclature.

The lack of LOD requirement -because it's done in engine - is really nice too. That helps a bit with content creation, but it's not the biggest cost.
It's generating all that really high density content in the first place. That cost is not going away and it's only going to go up.

The demo that Epic did a few years ago actually ended up being significantly more expensive for content creation, per second of footage generated, than traditional VFX pipelines do.
I don't doubt this is the same.

The reality is that while this demo really does demonstrate what the engine is capable of, the number of groups who are actually going to be able to get that out of it can be counted without taking your shoes and socks off...

... because the cost of content generation and the cost of experience time to learn HOW to generate that content without bringing your framerate down to 12fps is going to be pretty high. This is where Epic has the jump on everyone else because they've already got that second part

As with most demos, this looks really great but the reality is that most devs/movie groups aren't going to be able to hit that fidelity. They'll get way better than what they can right now, for sure, but this doesn't suddenly signal the end of doing post rendering for movies.

What this demo really does is indicate what the top end can do, with a lot of time and money spent. And that's significant, since realtime in movies is where the money is already going, for sure.

Your average indie though, is not going to suddenly change their Unity based plans

The second part of the announcement - the $1m income free from royalty - now that's a really awesome thing. Epic does not need to do this; not with them already only taking 12% instead of 30% on their store. They've already made major concessions to devs, so this is really gravy.

Back dating it to Jan of 2020 is also a really nice and generous move.

For this alone, I'd be very inclined to grant some major good will to Epic.

The bottom line is though, the future looks very bright indeed, if you can afford to produce the content that can exercise what this next generation of the engine is capable of.

And Epic is trying very hard to get your business financially, and that's a really nice deal too.

So yeah. Well done Epic. Very impressive. I tip my hat in your direction, all the people who worked on this.

Awesome job everyone.