Amid Unity Pricing Controversy, Is Epic Games Eying 'Unreal Engine' Integration for Apple's Vision Pro?

The VR blog Nifty Sparks made an interesting discovery: In a strategic move that could reshape the gaming industry, Epic Games, the creator of the widely-used Unreal Engine, is reportedly considering native integration with Apple's forthcoming Vision Pro.

The mixed-reality headset, slated for a 2024 release, could greatly benefit from this integration, but the timing of this development is particularly noteworthy, as it comes amidst ongoing legal disputes between Apple and Epic Games and a recent controversy surrounding changes to Unity's pricing structure.

Victor Lerp, Unreal Engine XR Product Specialist at Epic Games, has indicated that the company is actively exploring native support for Apple Vision Pro.
In Unreal Engine's developer forums, Lerp turned up in a thread titled "Support for Apple Vision Pro in Unreal ??" Someone had posted "Please tell me there is support coming?" and in June Lerp had first responded "We don't have any information to share at the moment, but stay tuned for the future."

But four days ago, Lerp returned to the thread with an update. "Internally we're exploring native Unreal Engine support for Apple Vision Pro, but it's too early for us to share details on the extent of support or timeline. We have access to the public SDK's like everyone else, and there's nothing fundamentally stopping us, or you, from developing support, or shipping Apple Vision Pro applications with Unreal Engine."

The VR blog notes that this follows Unreal Engine 5.2's native support for Apple Silicon Macs. And "meanwhile, Unity's recent pricing changes have led some developers to consider alternatives like UE and Godot."

Thanks to Slashdot reader NiftySparks for sharing the article.

I Don't Care

[zenlessyank]

I'm just here for the free game every Thursday.

Re: I Don't Care

[saloomy]

It must be a false story. How is Epic who is a bitter Apple Rival over payment structures able to get their hands on a Vision Pro prior to public availability? Surely you would need a few to develop such native support.

Re:

[slashdot_commentator]

How is Epic who is a bitter Apple Rival over payment structures able to get their hands on a Vision Pro prior to public availability?

Because successful business CEOs don't think like American voters. Its not about being on team Apple or team Epic. Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy is pretty much dead. Sure, if no one is looking and they can corner that small market segment effortlessly, they may do the "lazy" thing. But EEE doesn't work in a business legal environment where your keiretsu gets dismantled when it can be demonstrated its "anti-competitive".

Businesses exist from offering a product or service that maximiz

Re:

[teg]

Apple's presence in the "gaming" market is a joke.

In 2019, Apple made more money on gaming than Xbox, Sony, Activision, and Nintendo - combined [ign.com]. I don't know the current numbers, but I'm guessing Apple's presence is not a joke now either.

Re: I Don't Care

[tiananmen tank man]

The public SDK is free for anyone to download.

Re:

[Narcocide]

I think you're right that it could just be wild speculation. Of the current competitors in this space, only really Unity and Unreal Engine are taken seriously. It would be simple to guess that after the Unity price-hiking fiasco yesterday eliminated their primary advantage over Unreal Engine that anyone working in the space would consider using Unreal Engine at this point a no-brainer.

Re:

[sg_oneill]

For 3D absolutely.

For 2D, not really. Epic does have the Paper2D stuff, but its considered a bit of a half-cooked afterthought (Although I wouldnt be surprised if Epic are throwing money into fixing that right now) , hence the Godot interest (its not a particularly compelling engine in 3D but its got a great 2D toolkit and importantly, its Open source [and the kind of Open source in a way thats friendly to proprietary projects].

With that said, I doubt anyone is making 2D content for VR headsets

Re:

[SoftwareArtist]

Lots of developers have access to it. Apple has a program [apple.com] for getting it in the hands of developers so they can start creating software for it. Epic is a major developer that already supports other Apple platforms. They're also an important player in the VR space. Of course Apple wants them supporting Unreal Engine on it. Just because the companies are involved in a lawsuit about their app stores, that doesn't mean they stop working together on other things that are important to both of them.

Re:

[NoMoreACs]

It must be a false story. How is Epic who is a bitter Apple Rival over payment structures able to get their hands on a Vision Pro prior to public availability?
Surely you would need a few to develop such native support.

IIRC, Epic had 2 Developer Accounts. One was for Epic Games, and the other was specifically for Unreal Engine.

When Epic Games started violating Apple's TOS for the App Store over IAP for Fortnite, Apple Suspended Epic Games' Developer Account; but (again, IIRC) the Court ruled that Apple could not do the same with Unreal's Dev. Account; because it was sufficiently different in focus and its business model from Epic Games, and had not violated Apple's TOS.

So, as long as Unreal stayed on the straight and narr

Re:

[sg_oneill]

I dont think these big companies take lawsuits particularly personally, its just part of how business is done. Its conflict resolution for suits.

Neither of the Tims (Sweeny of Epic or Cook of Apple) are stupid men, they know how important the others software is to their business and with the Fortnite payment suit all but done and dusted, theres little reason to keep up the rivalry. UE was largely a bit player in the mobile game space, its a big powerful beast better suited to desktop games (although thats c

OpenXR

[backslashdot]

What about OpenXR? Why get locked-in into Apple again? How many times do they need to get burned by Apple? Stand their ground and make Apple be more open.

Re: OpenXR

[beelsebob]

Presumably, because Apple appears (yet again) to be the only ones who have though it through and produced something with a good user experience.

Re:

[thegarbz]

So the Vision Pro will be released with no clipboard, no functionally beyond a calculator and a note taking app, and will close programs and go back using a gesture that is the most difficult to achieve using your dominant hand? Is that the "thought it through" that you're talking about fanboi?

Many of us don't choose Android over iOS because it's more open, but rather because Apple didn't thought it through, they "thought different".

Vision Pro must be considered a prototype...

[XaXXon]

...not a product.

Between the price and the limited ability to produce them at all, it's not a real product and not something likely to be supported long term. It's more like the touchbar... they'll push it hard ... hard... hard... gone.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

The two aren't really comparable. The Touchbar was a weird, sucky "feature" that came into being mainly because Apple forced themselves into a corner with their constant disparagement of touch screens. Touch does have a few worthwhile use cases, as Apple figured out... but, even more than most companies, they really have a hard time admitting when they're wrong. Even worse, it was Jobs who was so anti-touch... and going against Jobs' decrees in the Apple-verse is about as anathema as disagreeing with Trump

Re:

[drinkypoo]

The touch bar was a great idea but you couldn't do much with it as a user and they didn't bother to keep it going so nobody wanted to do anything with it as a developer. Classic Apple.

I mean what we really want is keyboards with reprogrammable keycaps, but do we trust Apple to give it to us what with the butterfly debacle? HahAHAHa no.