A friend and I forked UE4 a while back and stripped all of the bloat to try and get it running well on a shit-tier Chromebook. We only stripped it down to 30 mb, but the end result (physics + terrain) ran way smoother than any Unity game I've played on that ToasterBook.

Plot twist: people stop writing casual games in Unity and switch to Unreal to target low-end hardware.

Needless to say: as someone who spent my teens and early 20s working on multiplayer web games, I'm incredibly excited for this.

The problem is the editor, it still needs too much RAM when Unity doesn't, and that makes people drop it. Whether UE reduced the bloat indies would move instantly.

Oh please. Any gaming laptop can run the ue5 editor.

Yeah, I guess Epic expects indies to have plenty of resources. They can keep waiting for mass adoption of UE.

If I were an indie game dev, I'd rather pay for hardware resources than Unity license fees. It's $2K/year even if you're not making money yet. There is a free version but it's heavily limited (no physics, no VR).

Unity is free, can publish for free, it includes physics.

Unity is not free if you're part of a team that has made $100k in the last 12 months. Including funds raised.

Unreal is free, per project, until that specific project has earned over $1M in revenues.

Epic probably does expect the indie devs to have laptops, yes.