Epic Web Shops 🛒, Unity exploit 🔒, Unreal geometry 🧱, Godot Terrain3D 🏔️
Monetization & Security 🛡️
Epic Web Shops: Keep 100% of Your First $1M in Game Sales
Epic Games has launched Epic Web Shops, a direct-to-consumer storefront for selling in-game consumables on PC and, later this year, within the Epic Games Store mobile app. Developers keep 100% of the first $1 million in net revenue per title before switching to an 88/12 split, and purchases earn Epic Rewards. Web Shops support out-of-app purchases and appear on product pages, with Idle Champions as the first live example. Web3 games are excluded.
Unity Issues Critical Patch: CVE-2025-59489 Hits Games Since 2017
A critical Unity runtime flaw (CVE-2025-59489) affects games and apps built with Unity 2017.1 and later across Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Unity has released editor patches (2019+) and a binary patcher for shipped builds back to 2017.1, while anti-cheat/tamper-protected titles must be rebuilt. Platform mitigations from Google, Microsoft, Valve, and Meta are live, and there’s no evidence of exploitation yet. Developers are urged to patch, rebuild if needed, and republish promptly.
Unreal Engine Spotlight 🔷
ZibraGDS Brings Massive Real-Time Geometry to Unreal
Zibra AI unveiled ZibraGDS, an experimental Unreal Engine plugin for true real-time playback of massive geometry sequences. It claims faster, more memory-efficient performance than UE’s Geometry Cache and supports destruction, cloth, liquid, and soft bodies. Alembic import is available now (USD coming), with closed alpha sign-ups open. Plus, ZibraVDB is now free for creators earning under $100k, enabling OpenVDB compression and sharing.
Shipping Avowed on UE5: Lumen, Nanite, VSM, and RT in Practice
Obsidian’s Matthew Campbell breaks down how Avowed leverages UE5’s Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, and ray tracing—and where they needed custom tweaks—to hit performance and quality targets. The talk dives into GPU bottlenecks, platform-specific strategies for Xbox Series S/X versus PC, and the real trade-offs behind feature adoption. Expect candid successes, failures, and pain points that translate into practical optimization takeaways for your own UE5 projects.
Creation & Workflow 🧰
Michael Vaughan Teases Cloth/Sim Zone Setup and Tool Drops
Michael Vaughan is teasing a new cloth-meets-“simulation zone” workflow with ultra-satisfying results—and promises to share the full setup soon. He’s also showing off slick lace simulations and more eye-candy demos. If you want similar results, some of his custom modifiers are on Gumroad, and he’s behind handy eyelash and brow generators. Follow for updates, breakdowns, and tool releases.
Unifying Art and Code in UE5: Perforce P4 Workflows That Scale
Learn how to connect artist tools and Unreal Editor into a single, reliable pipeline using Perforce P4. This Unreal Fest session shares practical workflows for managing 3D/2D assets, music, voiceovers, and Blueprints in one cohesive project. Get actionable tips to reduce merge pain, keep assets in sync, and help teams collaborate faster.
Engine Updates 🚀
Terrain3D 1.1 Brings 7-LOD Displacement to Godot
Terrain3D’s upcoming 1.1 update adds camera-proximity displacement with up to seven LODs, turning flat textures into massive, real-time editable terrains in Godot. The feature supports Mobile, Web, and Compatibility renderers and is compatible with Godot 4.4.1. The PR by Xtarsia, showcased by creator Cory Petkovsek, is live now. A November release is expected.
CryEngine Community Edition 1.0: New Shaders, Fixes, and Editor Themes
A grassroots team has shipped CryEngine Community Edition 1.0, a patch-based upgrade for CryEngine 5.7 LTS under the MIT license. It adds full-screen post-processing shaders, a comic-book sample shader, vibrance/sharpening controls, enhanced rain, and Sandbox Editor .qss theming. Key fixes include DX12 shadow freezes, glass normals, and decal angle fading. You’ll need to fetch CryEngine 5.7 source and apply the patch yourself; links and a video overview are provided.