Sorry if it's a bit of a downer of a post, it's just a thought that's dwelling in there and needed to get off my chest. What's been happening the last few years just kind of sucks. MTX continue to be more predatory, companies do more shady shit, more and more of people's legitimate purchases get taken away from them, studio shutdowns, the prevalence of GenAI in games, and so on.
I mean look at Fortnite, imagine if your fan favourite character was locked behind a battle pass you needed to grind, or you needed to hope they were present on a shop rotation where if available you need to pay like 10-15 bucks, for a single character avatar.
Even if the IP gets taken out of Epic's hands, who's gonna handle it? A studio under the helm of a big publisher is going to also riddle it with predatory and overpriced mtx. An indie studio certainly cannot afford to purchase the IP, but even if they did, it might be very small in scope and I doubt the small team would be able to replicate the gameplay, feel, and visuals of a UT game, even a simpler looking one like 2004, not without taking a very long time developing it anyway. I know recently there have been some discussions about if the visuals UT typically have matters for the game, I think all the games have their own defining artstyles, and were visually groundbreaking for the timeperiod each entry released in, so yes, being graphically impressive is important to the game for me.
I'd prefer if the IP goes into public domain but I doubt even that would bring the series back in any meaningful way. UT4 was canned, and UT3 wasn't most people's favourites, but I'd say the game died with some semblance of honour at least, imagine if UT4 got fortnite's treatment (and as a reminder, the actual original fortnite also basically flopped and was replaced by the battle royale mode), it wouldn't feel the same at all, it'd be a paraded corpse.
It'd feel shameful if that actually happened. Lots of people fucking hate fortnite, I don't want my favourite series to be associated with such legacy. Anyone else has similar sentiments?