Essentially supporting PS4 and Xbox One was the reason
Nah, if they actually got it into production as they started to make teasers for it, they'd likely get some version of it working for PS4 and Xbox One. The first teaser for it was released on 2013, but development only started on 2016. I'd scratch it to poor management more than anything. Sony managed to keep releasing pretty impressive games on the PS4.
It also comes to mind that the versions on PS5 and XSX weren't even the "next gen" versions proper, they were the ones for the previous consoles that just happened to run better on newer hardware. The proper next gen update only came months later.
I've worked with Unreal Engine 4 since 2014. I was a part of games that got the engine early. I adopted Unreal 5 last year when it was reasonable to do so. It's honestly one of, if not the most powerful game engine out there. It has its own set of issues of course. A lot of people use its features without regard to their proper usage or pitfalls of using them. It's also not an engine that caters to small indie developers. Every engine has its flaws. That said I've constantly watched as large indies to AAA studios switch to unreal over my career. It's probably the best engine out there for those studios. It's good to see major studios dropping their clearly buggy engines and being able to put out better products.
That all said, boy that 5% to Epic is making them a lot of money. I'm really hoping in a few years that Godot Engine will really start to compete but even talking with one of the major engine contributors: "godot lacks people who know what they're doing." I also see this in a lot of engine issues and poor architecture choices. It's disappointing to see someone so close to the project confirm. Unreal needs a strong competitor though, something ideally open sourced.
Yeah I am hoping they overhaul or embrace a new engine because that is what apparently killed mutliplayer for Cyberpunk. I dream of playing as trauma team and extracting patients.
They're moving to Unreal Engine 5.
UE5 is nowhere near ready if Aveum is anything to go by. Let's hope UE5 gets way better or it will spell disaster for a lot of companies.
I'm not big on the homogenising into unreal 5 but if it works well for them I'm all for it.
Gaming