IMO the most important thing to work on for gamedev technology and services is how to reduce the cost of making games without needing to sacrifice production value. I can’t speak for Epic’s entire strategy but that is my personal drive.

… general lack of fidelity and immersion in indie, giant teams that lose the sense of shared vision, long term crunch, shift away from stand alone products and single player to multiplayer and GaaS where the people are the content because actual content is too expensive.

What can we do about it? Obviously make the tools easier and faster. But perhaps bigger than that, stop remaking things from scratch! Reuse or share! That implies a shared style to art assets which means photoreal (just like film).

It also implies the fidelity of those assets are “future proof” or at least can span generations before they need to be replaced or updated. That means autoscaling and tech like Nanite. It means PBR and converging on a shared reality of how light behaves.

Stylization will be desired like in film but can be achieved in many ways. Look at @LAIKAStudios films! They’re photos so technically photoreal. We’re passing the threshold now where stylization is cheaper than photoreal because it requires everything made from scratch.

There is also obviously all the cases where the setting or characters are fantasy. Film has this too of course but constrained shots allow a million cheats we can’t do. This area feels to me the most challenging. It crosses creation tools, acquisition, rendering, and simulation.