As of today, Epic Games has killed the master servers for all Unreal games, which means that they can't be played online any longer, at least not officially. In case of the abandoned pre-alpha of Unreal Tournament in Unreal Engine 4 you can't even start the game anymore, at least not officially. On top of all of this, the games were all pulled from the digital stores, like Steam or gog. You can still play them if you have purchased them before, but you won't be able to purchase them any longer.
The Unreal series has been one of my favorites, next to Zelda and Metroid, so it's sad to see this happening, though it was inevitable. It's even astonishing for how long they've kept up the support, where the original Unreal will be getting 25 years old in May. Meanwhile Nintendo is already closing the eShop on Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, where it's only a matter of time until you won't be able to play online with these last-gen systems...
Plus, with PC games it's much easier to keep them alive from the fan-side, where there are already community patches and alternative master servers to work with. Rest assured that there are still passionate people out there who are willing to keep such games alive. And it would be a shame if this wasn't the case, because there exists a ton of fantastic custom content for most Unreal games.
When I play one of the multiplayer Unreal games again, it's usually against bots just for fun, which means that the missing master servers don't really affect me personally. And luckily, I never really got into the pre-alpha of the latest Unreal Tournament, where this won't be a big loss for me either.
It's more saddening that "Unreal" is now first and foremost the name of an engine, though a very good one, while the Unreal series has sunken into insignificance. It's simply not a cash cow like Fortnite, where all developers who had been working on the new Unreal Tournament were removed from the project about six years ago and nothing has happened with the series ever since, except for some weapon skins in Warframe. I suppose this is how F-Zero fans must feel like.
It speaks for itself that I'm actually a bit excited about the announcement of Unreal Tournament 3 X, which will be a free-to-play version of Unreal Tournament 3, using Epic's new online infrastructure. Maybe this will breathe some life into the title, where people might give this a chance again or for the first time. I'd be happy to join in.
Unreal Tournament 3 is usually viewed as the weakest entry in the series, but I personally thought that it had the best weapon balance and felt like a good compromise between the classic Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 in terms of gameplay. And Greed is my absolute favorite game type in any Arena Shooter, where it's simply the most fun approach to the Capture the Flag formula. Only the art direction and story of UT3 were quite terrible, because it was heavily influenced by Gears of War, following its success. It just wasn't the best fit.
The Unreal Engine 5 looks quite amazing, though, where getting something in the Unreal universe made with this engine would be quite the dream for me, but a pipe dream at that. I will be happy with anything at this point, even if it's just a new version of Unreal Tournament 3.
Update: The decision might not be a purely financial one, but it probably has something to do with Epic's FTC settlement. This is about children's privacy concerns, where they need to make sure that children can't just play a game with an age rating not suitable for them uncensored and unfiltered. This explains why they are at least willing to bring back Unreal Tournament 3 under their new account system, but it probably was too much effort to implement this for all their older games.
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