After doubling down on Fortnite's ongoing development earlier this year, Epic head Tim Sweeney has now confirmed that the game is no longer being actively developed at the company.
Epic Games is no longer actively developing Unreal Tournament, the most recent game in its long-running first-person shooter franchise of the same name and a project that the company was developing as an open-source venture that welcomed community contributions.
Shelving Unreal Tournament for the time being isn’t exactly a sudden and unexpected decision on Epic’s part; the game hasn’t received an official update since mid-2017 and, as recently as this September, a member of the community team said that development had been put on a temporary hold as the team doubled down on the sudden success of Fortnite’s battle royale mode.
While the project hasn't been outright canceled, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney explained to Variety that, while the free game is currently still available to download, the game itself is no longer being actively developed on Epic’s end.
Since the game’s inception, the 2014 reboot of Unreal Tournament was an unusual project. While in development, the game itself was a community-driven endeavor and had “a very small team and essentially zero budget,” according to senior designer Jim Brown in a 2015 GDC talk on the game’s unique development. The in-development game was made available on GitHub from its earliest days which allowed community members to both play pre-release builds and contribute content to the project.
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