Inside Riot Games’ decision to move development of Teamfight Tactics to Unreal Engine

Teamfight Tactics is about to get Unreal. During the State of Unreal keynote talk at Unreal Fest in Chicago today, June 17, Riot Games senior director of engineering Gina Hope took the stage to announce that Riot’s popular auto-battler title Teamfight Tactics would be making the transition to Unreal Engine from Riot Games’ proprietary Hextech game engine with its upcoming new set, Enchanted Wilds. With over 300 million players, this makes Teamfight Tactics one of the largest games to ever transition to Unreal from another engine, with Hope saying onstage that the move had been underway since shortly after she joined Riot Games to work on Teamfight Tactics in 2024. “Rebuilding a live game on a new engine while it’s still running is not something most games choose to do; it’s years of work across engineering, art, design, and production, and that gets even harder when your game is still shipping new sets, events, and everything to players on a regular cadence,” Hope said during the State of Unreal keynote. “But that’s what we decided to do.” Teamfight Tactics’ transition to Unreal Engine was a company-wide effort, with Riot senior manager for game production of TFT David Capretto, who helped lead the transition to Unreal, crediting stakeholders across the company’s different games and departments for contributing labor and advice to the move. “The collaboration across Riot was crucial to our success, full stop — like the people on R&D in Valorant being willing to give us their time and energy to help us work through things as our TFT developers learned to work in Unreal was absolutely helpful,” Capretto said in an interview with GamesBeat at Unreal Fest. “I think one of the keys to pulling this off, quite frankly, is just that all of Riot sort of wrapped their arms around us to help us make this happen.” Since launching in 2019 amid a flurry of hype surrounding the then-nascent auto-battler genre, Teamfight Tactics has become the predominant game in the genre, with a monthly active player count in May 2026 that exceeded 30 million, according to a Reddit comment by a Riot Games staffer last week. The development team handling TFT’s transition to Unreal Engine is the same development team that built TFT in the early days, led by veteran Riot Games employees like senior principal software engineer Cameron Royal. “Moving things on the board uses the exact same code algorithm in Unreal as it did in Hextech, because he wrote that original code and he brought that over — so we were incredibly thoughtful about how things worked and how they needed to still work in the new engine,” Hope said in an interview with GamesBeat at Unreal Fest. “There are hopefully some surprise and delight things too, like the new lobby, which I think looks really cool. So, there will be a couple of things that will be a little bit different.” In addition to tapping into the expertise of internal Unreal Engine experts from the Valorant and 2XKO development teams, the Teamfight Tactics dev team worked closely with Epic Games to ensure that the transition to Unreal went smoothly. The collaboration started out as a simple exchange of information and grew over the course of the development process, with TFT developers now able to regularly submit support tickets to the Epic Pro Support service within Epic Games’ Developer Portal, which Capretto described as “the first line of triage for a lot of our devs.” “We are taking this so seriously, to the point where we wanted to make sure everybody had a foundation on Unreal, so every single person on TFT did the Unreal training, all the way up through our EP,” Hope said. “Everybody has created blueprints and built a game inside of Unreal, so we all deeply understand how it works, because we do want to get it right.” Riot Games has confirmed that Teamfight Tactics’ transition to Unreal Engine will take place alongside the game’s next set release, which is slated for August 11. Beginning on July 4, select invited players will be able to test out the updated version of TFT inside Riot’s public beta environment, with the company extending the game’s beta testing period beyond its usual two-week window to ensure that it can stamp out any lingering bugs. “Game development is hard; transitioning engines is also very hard. We’re doing a little bit of both, so I can’t walk out of here without giving credit to all of the people who are making this happen, both within TFT and outside of TFT within Riot,” Capretto said. “This really is something that takes a village.” The post Inside Riot Games’ decision to move development of Teamfight Tactics to Unreal Engine appeared first on GamesBeat.

Jun 18, 2026 - 02:35

Inside Riot Games’ decision to move development of Teamfight Tactics to Unreal Engine

Teamfight Tactics is about to get Unreal.

During the State of Unreal keynote talk at Unreal Fest in Chicago today, June 17, Riot Games senior director of engineering Gina Hope took the stage to announce that Riot’s popular auto-battler title Teamfight Tactics would be making the transition to Unreal Engine from Riot Games’ proprietary Hextech game engine with its upcoming new set, Enchanted Wilds. With over 300 million players, this makes Teamfight Tactics one of the largest games to ever transition to Unreal from another engine, with Hope saying onstage that the move had been underway since shortly after she joined Riot Games to work on Teamfight Tactics in 2024.

“Rebuilding a live game on a new engine while it’s still running is not something most games choose to do; it’s years of work across engineering, art, design, and production, and that gets even harder when your game is still shipping new sets, events, and everything to players on a regular cadence,” Hope said during the State of Unreal keynote. “But that’s what we decided to do.”

Teamfight Tactics’ transition to Unreal Engine was a company-wide effort, with Riot senior manager for game production of TFT David Capretto, who helped lead the transition to Unreal, crediting stakeholders across the company’s different games and departments for contributing labor and advice to the move.

“The collaboration across Riot was crucial to our success, full stop — like the people on R&D in Valorant being willing to give us their time and energy to help us work through things as our TFT developers learned to work in Unreal was absolutely helpful,” Capretto said in an interview with GamesBeat at Unreal Fest. “I think one of the keys to pulling this off, quite frankly, is just that all of Riot sort of wrapped their arms around us to help us make this happen.”

Since launching in 2019 amid a flurry of hype surrounding the then-nascent auto-battler genre, Teamfight Tactics has become the predominant game in the genre, with a monthly active player count in May 2026 that exceeded 30 million, according to a Reddit comment by a Riot Games staffer last week. The development team handling TFT’s transition to Unreal Engine is the same development team that built TFT in the early days, led by veteran Riot Games employees like senior principal software engineer Cameron Royal.

“Moving things on the board uses the exact same code algorithm in Unreal as it did in Hextech, because he wrote that original code and he brought that over — so we were incredibly thoughtful about how things worked and how they needed to still work in the new engine,” Hope said in an interview with GamesBeat at Unreal Fest. “There are hopefully some surprise and delight things too, like the new lobby, which I think looks really cool. So, there will be a couple of things that will be a little bit different.”

In addition to tapping into the expertise of internal Unreal Engine experts from the Valorant and 2XKO development teams, the Teamfight Tactics dev team worked closely with Epic Games to ensure that the transition to Unreal went smoothly. The collaboration started out as a simple exchange of information and grew over the course of the development process, with TFT developers now able to regularly submit support tickets to the Epic Pro Support service within Epic Games’ Developer Portal, which Capretto described as “the first line of triage for a lot of our devs.”

“We are taking this so seriously, to the point where we wanted to make sure everybody had a foundation on Unreal, so every single person on TFT did the Unreal training, all the way up through our EP,” Hope said. “Everybody has created blueprints and built a game inside of Unreal, so we all deeply understand how it works, because we do want to get it right.”

Riot Games has confirmed that Teamfight Tactics’ transition to Unreal Engine will take place alongside the game’s next set release, which is slated for August 11. Beginning on July 4, select invited players will be able to test out the updated version of TFT inside Riot’s public beta environment, with the company extending the game’s beta testing period beyond its usual two-week window to ensure that it can stamp out any lingering bugs.

“Game development is hard; transitioning engines is also very hard. We’re doing a little bit of both, so I can’t walk out of here without giving credit to all of the people who are making this happen, both within TFT and outside of TFT within Riot,” Capretto said. “This really is something that takes a village.”

The post Inside Riot Games’ decision to move development of Teamfight Tactics to Unreal Engine appeared first on GamesBeat.

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