Epic Games held quite an interesting stream today hosted by Geoff Keighley and featuring some of the creators of the Unreal Engine. During said stream, the very first tech demo for the Unreal Engine 5 was revealed via PS5 footage, while afterwards the developers spoke at length about what’s to come for the new engine. Towards the end of the stream, it was also revealed that Epic Games is expanding its Epic Online Services to all PC and console platforms to be used by developers for free, with Android and iOS support coming soon.

Epic Online Services is an interesting term, but what does it mean? Essentially, these services enable developers to launch and manage games with the same toolkit Epic Games uses for its own titles, not unlike what Steam does with its Steamworks SDK. Here’s a breakdown of the expanded services developers can look forward to, courtesy of Epic Games:

• Game Services deliver lobbies, matchmaking, peer-to-peer connectivity, player data storage, achievements and stats, leaderboards, game analytics, and player ticketing. More features are coming later, including voice chat. You can use these services together with your own account system, with platform account systems, or choose to use Epic Games accounts.
• Epic Account Services support cross-platform accounts, login, friends, and presence, and are interoperable with console account systems. Reach an audience of over 350 million players with 2.2 billion friend connections on over half a billion devices across seven platforms.

Those interested in testing out the Epic Online Services for themselves can download the SDK right here.

Thoughts on today’s stream? What do you think about the Unreal Engine 5 news? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!