Why Epic Games is collaborating with Collective and the IPA to educate brands about Unreal Engine

By Alexander Lee

Epic Games has teamed up with digital agency Collective and the United Kingdom’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) to give brands and agencies the knowledge and skills necessary to produce digital assets in Unreal Engine, a prevalent and burgeoning 3D creation tool. The first step of the collaboration is an in-person Unreal Engine workshop to be held at the IPA’s London headquarters on June 28, 2022.

With virtual activity on the rise, Epic Games has evolved from a game developer into a bona fide media owner. The company’s Unreal Engine is used to construct virtual environments and assets for use in non-gaming sectors such as fashion, fitness and the automotive industry. In addition to offering up its popular game Fortnite as a source of ad inventory, Epic controls the tool used to design the majority of virtual goods.

And as the use of Unreal continues to expand outside gaming, it is becoming increasingly imperative for brands to have thorough in-house knowledge of how it works — and to maintain a working relationship with Epic.

Epic Games created Unreal Engine in 1998 to serve as the game engine for Unreal, Epic’s seminal first-person shooter title, but it has since given its blessing to the aforementioned alternative uses of the tool. The company continually introduces new features to Unreal and offers “MegaGrants” — financial grants ranging from $5,000 to $500,000 in value — to designers who experiment with it in innovative ways.

“From what I can see, they are working hard to build a large community over a really wide spread, everything from architecture to games to movies,” said Emiel Sleegers, a freelance Unreal designer who has contracted for brands such as Team Liquid and computer hardware manufacturer Micro-Star International. “I have been in this industry since Unreal was not that big yet, so I have seen it grow over the years — and it’s exponential.”

The collaboration was facilitated by IPA president Julian Douglas, who gave a speech in January signaling the organization’s intention to embrace metaverse technologies. When Collective, an agency with considerable experience organizing virtual events, heard that the IPA was in talks with Epic Games, founding partner Stephen Barnes immediately reached out to see how his company could get involved.

“Between us, we have a really interesting sort of collective,” said Rachel Stones, an Epic Games business development manager based out of the company’s Innovation Lab in London. “[Douglas] comes from advertising; he’s the president of the IPA. Stephen and his team are using our tools to create really bespoke entry points for brands. And, obviously, we’re here to understand how people want to use it, what their challenges are, and then to try and play back to them what’s on offer in our ecosystem.”

With non-gaming companies stepping up their use of Unreal Engine, the purpose of the upcoming IPA workshop — which is currently fully booked and has a waitlist — is at least partially to convince brands of the value …read more

Source:: Digiday