The Theia team attended GDC 2025 in San Francisco, where Epic Games ran sessions covering Unreal Engine 5.5 workflows, UEFN development practices, and the broader Fortnite creator ecosystem.
A few things that stood out:
Epic Account Services hit 850 million players. That's the cross-platform identity system underpinning Fortnite, Rocket League, and third-party titles. For enterprise projects that use Epic's infrastructure for user authentication or multi-user sessions, this is relevant scale.
UEFN sessions covered AAA development patterns. Epic presented on custom UIs, persistent data, testing workflows, and mobile optimization for UEFN islands. The gap between "traditional" UE5 development and UEFN development is narrowing, which matters for studios like us that work in both.
Digital twins and enterprise use cases had their own track. GDC has historically been a games-only event. Enterprise sessions are a newer addition and the attendance has been growing year over year.
We use GDC to stay current on where Epic's tooling is heading and to connect with other studios in the Service Partner network. The roadmap discussions are useful for planning client projects 6-12 months out.