The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

I always wonder why companies do stupid things—like this.

At the very least, put it in read-only maintenance mode, with a big disclaimer at the top saying so.

But to just destroy information, information about your own product, is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

It had been in read-only maintenance mode for quite a while. Then they just took the whole thing down with no warning. The wayback machine copy unfortunately seems to be missing a lot of articles.

Since I started using Ogre3D I always had a hard time settling down to feature rich engines like unreal or unity.

I don't know how often, giving beginners access to a space shuttle, will it lead to a successful project that can compete with non-indie game developers.

There is also a fine line between an indie team of developers who can benefit from those tools, and experienced game developers who would not need them.

It seems unreal and unity are just very capable, but cheap, tools that are well-marketed towards students and beginners. The problem is, once those developers learned to use those tools, they are still unable to develop a game without those tools, which is a huge win for unity and unreal.

Generally I tend to believe unreal and unity only enable developers to make games that will never be able to compete with more established and skilled game developers. I think it's a pretty sad situation, because initially I really believe indie games were able to compete with those big studios, but they're not, and I think unity and unreal are responsible for this. It seems the whole FOSS mantra/paradigm/philosophy has a lot of trouble penetrating the field of game development, maybe because games are heavily monetized towards consumers, unlike other softwares. It bothers me.

What engines are you suggesting make it easier to create those games that compete? My experience is that UE4 and Unity are both enabling of indie developers to make very high quality games. The only real limitations are how much effort you put into the art. UE4, while hard to code for, is still orders of magnitude less work than coding all the rendering, animation, and hardware logic from scratch. There are of course other engines, but they are either devoid of the features you need to compete with AAA titles, or have severe performance limitations.

The thing that seems super strange to me is that they don't seem to have warned people they would do this, the first comment is

> This isn't very helpful, Amanda! I know that the wiki wasn't optimal, but there were many wiki pages developers like me had bookmarked for years beacuse they contained comprehensive and easy information, which is now missing. Why not just keep the wiki read-only online? Just to retain the old pages? I'm pretty lost right now without some of these articles and I don't understand why the only option you had was to completely disable it. Please think about opening it up again just for read. I don't care about the maintenance mode, but the wiki was an important learning point, which is now gone.

If you don't want to support the wiki that's fine, you don't owe anyone hosting, but if you're going to dump it, atleast give someone the opportunity to scrape the site and host it themselves.