Unreal Engine 4.27 has been released with support for OpenXR, which is a timely change for Oculus developers as Facebook is embracing the OpenXR standard. Unreal Engine 5, which was released in May, also includes support for OpenXR, but Epic Games does not recommend using it for any use cases other than experimental features and advises developers to continue using Unreal Engine 4 for mainstream content development. Unreal Engine 4.27 is the first version to include production-ready OpenXR functionality, as Epic Games is still optimizing and iterating Unreal Engine 4 while Unreal Engine 5 is not yet complete.
OpenXR is a royalty-free standard that aims to standardize communication between XR hardware and software, allowing developers to develop high-performance VR applications that support multiple platforms. Major VR vendors such as Oculus, Valve, HTC, Microsoft, Unity, and Unreal all provide full or partial support for OpenXR. The release of Unreal Engine 4.27 with OpenXR support comes at the right time, as Oculus has announced its full transition to OpenXR, and both Unity and Unreal, the two major game engines, have not provided production-ready OpenXR support.
Oculus still offers a $5 million revenue share waiver plan for Unreal Engine 4 developers, meaning that until 2025, they will not have to pay revenue share fees for the first $5 million revenue obtained from the Oculus Store, potentially saving up to $250,000 in fees.
For more information on the XR features and optimizations in Unreal Engine 4.27, please refer to the related articles and the official release notes.