There’s been an unnervingly silent purge over the past several months. It’s been subtle, and I can’t imagine it wasn’t timed in such a way as to ensure bigger titles rolling out would soon dominate the news cycle. Epic Games, for really poorly justified reasons, is erasing their Unreal games from the face of the internet. That now includes Unreal Tournament 3, which was rebranded as Unreal Tournament 3 X for a little while, before in June 2023 getting reverted back to its original name with no way of buying it.
Then there was 2014's Unreal Tournament, which was supposed to be a collaboration between the community and Epic to revitalize their franchise for the modern era. Things were actually looking pretty good, with people’s maps being integrated with a “developer pass” to give a final polish so that community contributions could be up to AAA standards. There were also several new tweaks added to the formula to make Unreal Tournament more accessible to players who hadn’t grown up on arena shooters of this caliber.
It’s as anti-Call of Duty as you can get for a multiplayer shooter. Skill-based movement, no loadouts, no XP grinds, and all-arena action. Sadly, it never set the multiplayer gaming world on fire, but do you know what did? Fortnite Battle Royale. What was supposed to just be a gimmick experiment for Epic turned into one of the biggest games on the planet, and with its success went support for anything other than the underlying engine of Unreal Tournament.
Unlike Paragon and Fortnite’s Save The World campaign, Unreal Tournament was spared the icy hand of either cancelation or being locked behind a paywall without updates. Instead, Epic just, well, stopped doing anything, effectively leaving the game purely in the community’s hands. To be fair, the community did just that, with developer Timiimit crafting the Unreal Tournament 4 Unofficial Update, which served initially as a way to fix up your game and enhance functionality.
Now the UT4UU update is going to be the only way for anyone to be able to play the game, because in late 2022, Epic quietly announced that they were not only pulling the plug entirely on the latest game, but every Unreal game ever made for PC. As of this writing, the only Unreal game you can still legally acquire from a storefront (other than third-party key sellers) is Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict for Xbox. To be fair, UC2 is a great game, but it’s also a spin-off with wildly divergent mechanics exclusive to a single console platform.
Epic’s said this is because they’re updating their master servers, which will disable multiplayer functionality in their legacy titles (never mind that by this point, no one is buying Unreal Gold for the multiplayer, especially since it was sold predominantly as a single-player game to begin with). It’s an excellent game, for the record, not to mention one of the first FPS titles with a woman of color as the protagonist, decades before the likes of Deathloop. Some of the finest single-player level design of the 90s is going to be buried because of multiplayer server updates… that sounds wrong, doesn’t it?
Numerous developers have disabled their multiplayer servers without having to nuke their games from existence. Unreal even had DRM-free copies of every game except for Unreal Tournament 3 for sale on GOG, which like the Steam versions, have been delisted. These games don’t need a server to be enjoyed offline. Sure, Unreal 2 was a trainwreck of poor decisions, but even that mess of a sequel should exist for the morbidly curious to try out. It’s not like Epic is hurting for money or has to pay a license fee. They outright own these games.
It’s entirely Epic's choice to act like this is some insurmountable issue. No one is demanding the delisting of Unreal games - the current community has officially managed to put together a replacement master server so that they can keep playing with one another. Except Epic disabled the ability to acquire the free to play 2014 iteration on the Epic Game Store, so now if anyone wants to join the community, they’ll have to go to extremely unnecessary lengths to play a game that wasn’t even monetized.
Yes, Epic is apparently going to leave Unreal Tournament 3 playable on Steam, and make it free to own (though as of this day, it's still delisted), but it isn’t exactly a popular entry in the series for either its single-player or multiplayer. The fact the community has gone through such a rapid response to try and salvage a game that they love is heartening, but also speaks to how weirdly anti-preservationist Epic is being here.
Normally I’m grateful for the work Epic’s put into making game development easier and more affordable with the latest iterations of the Unreal Engine, but this behavior doesn’t track with that. It’s unnecessarily hostile to their community and is depriving future players of a foundational game series.
Let's also not forget Unreal wasn’t just made by Epic - Digital Extremes, the creators of Warframe, co-developed the majority of the Unreal titles. I doubt they're pleased to have some of their first works ever tossed in a bin by a company they helped turn into a success story long before they themselves hit major success. The engine itself is the basis for countless classics, and the modding scene helped pave the way for many developers. Do we really need to throw all that away just because some multiplayer servers are being deactivated?
No, no we don’t. That’s the answer, in case Tim Sweeney needs this laid bare.