Your very weird hate for Git notwithstanding, I think Lore is very interesting. I’ve been in software development professionally for 30 years. I’ve used CVS, SVN, Perforce, ClearCase, and Git for version control. And not only have I used them, but I have taught development teams how to use them, how to implement branching strategy, and the pros and cons of different tools.
For those interested, a quick history of open source version control tools: SVN was created to fix a number of issues developers had with CVS. Git was developed to solve many issues that developers had with SVN. Git made the decision to not diff binary files, but store entire files. At the time, this made sense. Especially as use of interpreted languages were on the rise. The DotCom Bubble had burst and web development was in demand. As web development grew, Git became the de-facto solution for most professional software development.
Perforce and ClearCase were the two enterprise solutions for version control. They were proprietary, powerful , and VERY, VERY expensive. They cost tens of thousands of dollars, plus thousands of dollars per year per person (aka per seat) to use. They came with really good support for that cost, but were often too expensive for all but the most successful software companies.
I spent some time reading the Lore docs. Then I did a little digging on their GitHub repo and the people committing to it. Then read up on its history. It combines a lot of good ideas with open source, and does diffs on binary files - which for video games is HUGE. Practically, what it means is you update a 3D model, and when you check the changes in, instead of pushing the entire new model up, it just pushes up the changes to the model - which is a much smaller amount of data.
Lore was developed by Epic in Switzerland. Which is interesting, inasmuch as all their cloud and infrastructure tooling is done there. They use it primarily for Fortnite’s editor, which is developed at their headquarters in Cary, NC, USA. They plan to be using it company-wide by the time Unreal 6 is released.
Some Epic Games Info
Imagine Lore as the technology in Jurassic Park. The scientists made this cool new thing that was quite pure. They sequenced genomes, learned how to edit them and cloned dinosaurs. The research was funded by a private investor, who thought a dinosaur theme park would be cool. It was the height of hubris, and book after book, movie after movie, the dinosaurs kill the little people who work there and just come to the parks to experience what was created.
Lore is open source, with the MIT license which is notoriously pretty permissive. Tell people where you got the software and you can do anything you want with it. That’s pretty cool. It seems very beneficent. It seems like a big video game company is being cool and giving back. And maybe it is. But Epic Games is not a publicly traded company. It is a privately owned company. It is owned by Tim Sweeny who is the founder and CEO.
This is where it gets interesting. Tim Sweeny rules Epic with an iron fist. If you are a favored employee, then you love working there. But if you are not, it is a meat grinder that treats employees as cogs in a machine and spits them out after working them to burnout. Sweeny is notoriously capricious and vindictive inside the company, especially at the high levels. But unless you happen to know people in the company, or work there, you will never hear about it. And they do a lot of work to stay out of the news. They use NDAs liberally, give to the communities they are in, and work hard to create a positive appearance to the outside world. The company is good at it. And it’s not an “evil corporation”. It’s mostly just a bunch of people who love games making games.
An Instructive Dungeons & Dragons History Lesson
Now a history lesson about Dungeons and Dragons. When the 3rd edition of D&D came out, they published the Open Gaming Licenses at the end of their books. It said that anyone could publish a D&D adventure, add-on book, etc. for FREE. The idea was to get more people playing by making more content available for the game. It worked really, really well. Wizards of the Coast had bought D&D 6 years earlier (1997), and then Hasboro bought Wizards 2 years later (1999), and they were trying to reduce costs.
They also took the magazine publications Dungeon (which published adventures) and Dragon (which posted alternate rules, new classes, lore, stories, etc) and outsourced them to a small publishing company called Paizo. Over time, the subscription numbers for these magazines weren’t enough, and Wizards cancelled them, pulled them in-house and made them digital-only. Paizo turned to the OGL and started publishing their own books in their own setting called Pathfinder.
Hasboro/Wizards of the Coast published 4th Edition D&D, and tried to make the rules more computer-game friendly. They lost a huge amount of the pen-and-paper market share to Pathfinder, who instead just improved on the 3.5 ruleset. And no one wanted to make 4th edition D&D video games. People new to D&D loved the system. It was intuitive and easy to use for new players. But most people hated it.
So D&D 5th Edition came out. Hasboro came out with a new version of the OGL license that said the old OGL was invalid, and put a pricing model in similar to what Unity tried. Like with Unity, the backlash was severe. And since 2023, D&D has lost most people’s trust. They lost their dominance in the industry, and their plans for video game money fell apart. (They had made similar blunders with Magic The Gathering the previous year.)
I tell you all this to show you that in the name of money-grubbing, Hasboro did this despite them knowing it was a going to create a lot of hate. They got too big for their britches, and took their two biggest money-makers (MtG and D&D) and ruined them both economically. But if they had not been primarily making money off those two things, they probably would have ignored the public outcry.
Should You Trust Epic?
Hell no.
Yes, they put the MIT license on it. But it’s a centralized system. If Epic (read: Tim Sweeny) decide at some point that it is not economically feasible to keep hosting your code there are many bad things they can do: shut the servers down, take your code (the MIT license covers the system, not their storage of your game), changes the rules and make you pay to get your code… The list goes on. There is also nothing stopping them from training their LLMs on the code you store in their system. Epic already has built-in MCP integration.
When Microsoft bought GitHub, they had to make certain legal guarantees before the foundation would sell to them. Epic is starting from scratch. They have been building an ecosystem for years. You don’t have to pay for using Unreal if you only publish on the Epic store. Despite their fights with Apple and Google, they want their own closed ecosystem to compete with Google Play, Apple Store, the EA App, and Steam. I suspect this is really just another tool to do so.
Should You Use the Tool?
Absolutely.
But only if you are going to protect yourself. And by that, I mean hosting your own Lore server. For game companies, this is an awesome tool that could have a lot of benefits.
For the solo dev or dev team with a handful of people, this tool may not be worth it the trouble. Especially if you do not have an art or sound department. If your binary files aren’t changing, this tool doesn’t provide a whole lot over Git. If they are, this tool definitely seems like a win.
Just keep in mind that at any time, Epic can decide to change the license on future versions after it has people hooked. It would be completely legal to release v1.0 as closed source.
