Earlier this year, Epic Games surprised many people when they announced that anyone could download and use their latest game graphics engine, Unreal Engine 4, for just $19 a month to make free and commercial projects. While Epic's lead programmer Tim Sweeney already indicated back in April that it would be a while before Unreal Engine 4 would work with Windows Phone and Windows RT devices, a new update from Sweeney indicates we may have an even longer wait that we first thought.
We contacted Sweeney over the weekend and asked him if there had been any progress made on getting Unreal Engine 4 to work on Windows Phone, or if we might have to wait until Windows 10, the next version of the OS, to see that support on smartphones. Sweeney replied:
"It hasn't been a priority compared to iOS/Android so far. Waiting to see where new Microsoft management goes with the platform."
In other words, we don't expect to see Unreal Engine 4 games for Windows Phone 8.1 and that Epic Games looks like it will wait to see if Microsoft will be able to pull off their "One Windows" vision for Windows 10. We already know that Unreal Engine 4 works with DirectX 12, which will be released alongside Windows 10. Hopefully, that will mean that smartphones, along with tablets, laptops and desktops, will be able to run games with Epic's graphics engine if they have Windows 10 as its OS.
