Sometimes job listings can tell you a lot about the future direction of a company, and new job listings for Unreal Engine indicate that the game engine will be moving to the cloud in the future. This comes just weeks after Epic Games announced MetaHumans a cloud powered tool for creating life-like human models, and their first major cloud based application.
The news of UE’s future cloud development come via a pair of job listings for their Edenborough team, form from their acquisition of Cloudgine in 2018. The first position is the senior most position, looking for a Technical Director with the following responsibility:
As a Technical Director focused on Unreal Engine running in the cloud, you will be responsible for architectural guidance and supervising execution to make UE more efficient in the cloud, add cloud-based collaboration to our UE based products and help ship the next generation of tools like the recently announced MetaHuman Creator.
Although perhaps the more telling job position in the Engine Programmer position, from the same office:
As an engine programmer in Unreal Cloud Services, you will work on the UE codebase to optimize performance on cloud hardware, integrate cloud technologies like pixel streaming and help teams building UE-based apps so they fully support running inside a cloud infrastructure.
Unreal Engine running in the cloud doesn’t appear to be something happening soon, as both job positions mention the need to grow a development team as well as working in a start-up type environment. You can learn more about the future of Unreal Engine in the video below.