As you all know, Unity has recently been going through waves of controversy over its decision to retroactively increase the fees we, as developers, will have to pay to use its services.

This is unheard of in the games industry, and it motivated us to start digging into Unreal Engine…

What we found is that Unreal Engine 5.3 is absolutely incredible.

Visually stunning, incredibly scalable, with super-responsive multiplayer gameplay… this is everything we always wanted Infinity Realms to be.

After doing extensive research, we realized that the future of Infinity Realms is Unreal. Unreal Engine 5.3, to be specific.

With all of this being said -- we've got a plan.

Leveling-Up in Unity

We're not just dumping the current Unity version. It’s so close to being a reliable, rewarding experience, and it already provides a small taste of the grand vision.

So, through the end of the year, our focus is to flesh out the gameplay for the Unity version of Infinity Realms:

• Stability improvements and fixes
• Adding in-game utility to all existing NFTs
• Volumetric lighting and fog
• In-game NFT drops (both free and premium)
• 2 new classes (Gunner and Aether Mage)
• Alchemy (healing/status effects) and Cooking (buffs)
• Revamped player housing and building system, including Infinichron generation (utility will be in the Unreal version, but you can start stacking and it will all transfer)
• Finishing Chimera and opening it to non-Govern0rs
• Exciting partnerships, providing in-game utility to external projects

We believe this is all achievable before the end of the year, or shortly thereafter.

This will give us all a more pleasurable experience with multiple game loops to enjoy, along with rewarding earning opportunities for NFTs that will be usable in both the current Unity version, and the upcoming Unreal game. 

We will maintain the Unity version of Infinity Realms, and provide fresh content in the form of new NFTs, quests, events, and other surprises.

However, once the above features are added, the majority of our development will be focused on building the new and vastly improved Unreal version of Infinity Realms.

Only once the new Unreal version is feature-comparable with the Unity version will we begin to sunset the Unity game.

From there, we will all be unified in the Unreal experience, and we will continue building it out and scaling it endlessly in the way we have all envisioned.

Launching on Unreal

As we began investigating our options with Unreal, we realized that we will be able to build something vastly more scalable, optimized, beautiful, and engaging than we could have ever hoped to achieve with our current framework and Unity.

Some of our code for our more optimized systems can transfer, and a lot of our game design and formulas can absolutely transfer. Our NFTs will of course transfer and have full (and often improved) utility.

Because we'll be starting off with such a streamlined and optimized platform, along with a more powerful engine, we'll not only be able to build a better game – we’ll be able to build it far more efficiently and effectively.

Currently, the majority of our development time is spent fighting an uphill battle against the inner workings of the framework we are using in Unity.

Though we have made massive strides, we don’t foresee an end to this battle.

What’s worse, it will only become more of a problem as we scale up our player base.

Building in Unreal, on the other hand, and freed from our existing framework...our eventual concurrent users (CCU) will be theoretically limitless.

Our limitations will only be determined by our server hardware/architecture, as it should be. We foresee thousands upon thousands of players simultaneously playing this next evolution of Infinity Realms without issue.

This is the beginning of something truly great, and we’re thrilled to have you here as we evolve.

Why We Don’t Trust Unity

In the past couple of months, Unity has proven to be a risk to build a business around.

Their initial proposed monetization changes were something you just can't calculate for.

If carried through, it would have created a system where many devs would have to be cautious, or even concerned, about success. Especially free-to-play projects.

Unity did step back from many of these proposed changes due to the overwhelming outrage of their developer community… but in our minds, the damage is already done in a few critical ways.

To us, it’s clear that if/when Unity gets desperate, or are not pleasing their shareholders, they will try to extract whatever revenue they can from projects building on their engine.

Even going so far as to retroactively change TOS, and lock devs out if they don't accept new changes.

They also just purchased a $4.4b adware platform last year, which we are sure they will be finding more and more ways to incentivize devs to use.

Something we at Infinity Realms want nothing to do with.

While Unity only has its developer base to extract revenue from, Epic has so much more going for it than Unreal Engine alone.

Unreal Engine makes up a tiny fraction of their revenue, with their bread and butter being Fortnite and other AAA titles, along with the Epic Games store.

Simply put, this is a company we feel much safer tying our future to.

Not to mention, their 5% revenue share after $1,000,000 revenue is baked into the EULA -- if they ever decide to try and  pull what Unity has tried to pull (on multiple occasions), anything we already have built will be safe.

We don't sign the new terms, and still have access to the version of the engine we are building on.

The future of Infinity Realms is Unreal.

Ad Infinitum!