Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a digest on gamedev tech news and articles from the week before.
Many releases this week, just when I'm getting back to writing this newsletter.
Let's get the metaphorical ball rolling.
State of Unreal 2026 just happened with plenty of updates, both in the present in the form of Unreal Engine 5.8 and how the future of Unreal Engine is going to look like.
If you are easily impressionable by pretty presentations like me, it's well worth to check the 3min video on the Unreal Engine 5.8 new features. A quick summary of features:
And of course, many other features I'm not highlighting here. Worth noting that "UE 5.8 is the last planned major Unreal Engine 5 release on our roadmap as we ramp up work on UE6", so we can expect major changes moving forward.
State of Unreal 2026 also had a bit of a preview on the major changes that will happen on UE6. Some of the biggest changes might be a collateral from a big game engine merge: UE6 is Unreal Engine + Unreal Engine for Fortnite, the Unreal Engine version for Fortnite content. This also means the scripting language Verse will take the spotlight as the main tool for scripting a game, and in the farther future even supersede Blueprints.
This much is a small preview among other small bits of info we have, but there are still a long way to go: Unreal Engine 6 Early Access preview is planned to happen only at the end of 2027.
We don't have a yearly State of Godot event (yet), but that doesn't mean we can't have a new Godot release with a flashy new features page. Among new nodes and many QoL editor features, this release is also marked by the official Godot Asset store, the new home for Godot plugins and assets which, like Unity and Unreal, will allow developers to sell their own assets, and is planned to replace the Asset Library in the future. It's still on Beta (so only free assets are available), but you can check the Asset Store roadmap here.
As a bonus from the article, here is a nice quote from Thaddeus Crews (Godot's Release Manager) that highlights how Godot grew over time:
"It’s been over 3 years since 4.0 dropped, and we’re arguably as far removed from that now as 4.0 is from 3.x. It’s only gotten easier to publish a title with the engine, as evidenced by Steam currently listing over 700 new Godot games published in 2026 so far; we’re not even halfway through the year, and we’re already over halfway to 2025’s 1,200+ total. This is to say nothing of itch.io, which receives over 1,000 new Godot games every week"
Another release for Bevy, another great blog post with the new features in detail. The post already highlights the most important features, so I recommend taking a quick look - but the most impactful feature for developers seems to be Bevy Scene Notation or BSN, the new way to define Bevy scenes in code or resources. From the blog post:
"If you were ever bothered by the verbosity and complexity of spawning complex collections of entities in Bevy, you will probably enjoy what BSN has to offer. BSN can be used to spawn anything in the ECS. This benefits all scenarios, but it is worth calling out explicitly that this makes Bevy UI code significantly easier to read and write."
(I know, everyone is being overwhelmed by AI related news. I'll try to filter some here only when it's relevant for gamedev, or when I think it's an actually good article).
Henrique here.
Writing this newsletter is quite an undertaking, because there are many articles I have to read everyday so I can filter what goes into the next week newsletter and what goes not. I tried many ways to filter the amount of articles, but FOMO is real, so there is always a huge pile of "to-read" links (I'm still practicing my information diet). I don't use LLM's to summarize stuff for me because I feel there is still something precious about having a human trying to communicate with other (hopefully) real humans, so I try my best in reading and writing everything. It's biased, but the bias from a human being is easier to understand than the bias of a data center company.
Anyway, I felt I should write something here, since this is the first newsletter I'm writing in quite a while. The reason I stopped writing for so long is boring: I found a job that needed quite a lot of attention. The reason I'm resuming it now is even more boring: I lost the job (gamedev layoff and such). But I'm fine, safe, and hopefully you are too.
Never stopped maintaining this website, but I'll start spending more energy on it. So see you next week :)
If you have any suggestions, send me feedback at my Mastodon or Bluesky account! And if you want to add a new game engine to the website, consider suggesting a new Game Engine.