One benefit of all that Fortnite money is they got to double down on Unreal 5 and create an internal team whose only point is to prove concepts; Unreal is probably still more well-known than Unity but Unity has a much, much larger market share because it's so much better suited for small teams and small games.


https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-inside-the-matrix-awakens-previewing-the-future-of-gaming-graphics


This is the really eye-opening part, though the whole thing is worth a read:


"But what the team are looking to emphasise is how dynamic this system is and the opportunities this gives to developers. The Matrix Awakens was created by a relatively small team with around 20 to 30 people handling the assets and around 50 to 70 staff members in the team as a whole. Towards the end of the project, the project Slack channel increased to around 200 members as further personnel - such as marketing - entered the conversation. However, the process of creating the demo itself has led to significant optimisation to the point where if the project was rebooted from scratch, it could be achieved much more quickly.

Jerome Platteux explains: "Now, we will be so much faster, we're building the track when we are on the train itself - and sometimes we're building the train at the same time." Michal Valient adds that, "We're building the train... and the train's on fire.""


So there's a lot of caveats in there about things they did almost intentionally just to prove it was running on your console, like frame drops between camera jump cuts, or not working too hard on the physics engine's damage model for cars so it would feel less like a finished product.


But yea, this is playable on home consoles which is pretty wild for a tech demo, you almost never see a company that confident in their engine that they let the general public fuck around with it. The other demo I posted above is also playable behind closed doors for devs looking to license Unreal 5, but Epic's done working on them


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