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Riot ports Teamfight Tactics to Unreal mid-flight on a 30M MAU live game

Summary
TFT migrates from Riot's proprietary Hextech engine to Unreal, announced at Unreal Fest Chicago June 17
Migration has been underway since 2024 with no pause to set, event, or content cadence
May 2026 MAU exceeded 30M, making this one of the largest live-game engine swaps attempted
"Rebuilding a live game on a new engine while it's still running is not something most games choose to do"
— Gina Hope, Senior Director of Engineering, Riot Games
01

Original authors ported their own code to preserve gameplay fidelity

Senior principal software engineer Cameron Royal rewrote his original board-movement algorithms into Unreal
Same dev team that built TFT in 2019 is executing the migration, reducing interpretation risk
Extended beta beyond the standard two weeks signals Riot is buying runway to catch transition bugs
"Moving things on the board uses the exact same code algorithm in Unreal as it did in Hextech, because he wrote that original code"
— Gina Hope, Senior Director of Engineering, Riot Games
02

Valorant and 2XKO teams subsidized TFT's Unreal learning curve

Valorant and 2XKO Unreal veterans were loaned to TFT as active knowledge transfer, not just advisors
Epic Pro Support via Developer Portal became the first-line triage channel for TFT engineers
The two-layer model (internal veterans plus Epic vendor support) is replicable for studios lacking in-house Unreal depth
"The collaboration across Riot was crucial to our success, full stop"
— David Capretto, Senior Manager for Game Production, TFT
03

Mandatory Unreal training for the entire team, EP included

Every TFT staffer including the executive producer built a working game in Unreal before migration shipped
Closes the bus-factor risk on a live-ops team with no margin for single points of failure
Eliminates the proprietary-stack hiring penalty: new engineers now onboard into a standard commercial engine
"Every single person on TFT did the Unreal training, all the way up through our EP"
— Gina Hope, Senior Director of Engineering, Riot Games
04

Set 18 launch is the commercial validation event

Invited-player beta opens July 14 as the first real-world load test of the Unreal build
Public launch August 11 with Set 18 "Enchanted Wilds" - first Riot live-service set to ship on Unreal
A redesigned lobby ships alongside the migration, bundling technical proof with player-facing upgrades
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