Some thing to consider:
With the Unity engine drama over big shareholder companies owning game engines, and your history with what happened with WB and MERP..
Links:
( Pcgamer.com )
Have you considered moving from Epic's Unreal Engine 4 to an open world engine like Open3d?. Open3d is a Free and Open Source (FOSS) fork of CryEngine which Amazon bought into Lumberyard, and then sold to the Linux Foundation after Amazon's attempt at anti-competitively tying the engine to AWS failed.
( En.wikipedia.org )
( Open3d.org )
Remember that the original CryEngine is what the photorealistic medieval Kingdom Come Deliverance RPG used in 2018, and the improved Lumberyard is what Amazon's recent open world MMO New World uses. The engine is eminently capable of AAA open world games.
Kingdom Come Deliverance on older Cry Engine, released on PC, consoles, even Nintendo Switch:
( Youtube.com )
The heavily modded RTX videos with latest GPUs you see for these types of games look almost like a real life video:
( Youtube.com )
( Youtube.com )
Open3d is cross-platform on PC, supporting Mac and Linux.
Open3d is under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. So you don't have to share back engine changes you make for your game, if you don't want to. You can do what ever you want, although if you make massive amount of sales you may want to hire or support engine coders, or give back engine changes. Your project can be fully or partially closed source. It's also free, which would be a useful thing for a volunteer indie team establishing itself. As a bonus, you retain full control of the source code, forever.
There's no company holding anything over you with a FOSS engine, which you might appreciate after the fiasco with WB and MERP. The downside is that CryEngine/Lumberyard/Open3d tools might be a bit less user friendly?? than Unreal Engine, although it is free and will give more budget later.
===
Aside:
If anything can be learned from the behaviour of big companies owned by stock exchange or private investors, whether it's WB or Unity, is that it's the people in the game industry that lose in the long run.
If you look at Bethesda even, there's the latest fiasco with Starfield, which is rated at only 38% positive in the last month on Steam. With paid mods incoming. But Bethesda made 750 million in 24 hours after launch of Fallout 4, not counting pre-orders.
( Forbes.com )
That's enough to make Fallout 4, and make a 600+ million game, let alone Starfield.
Skyrim made 1 billion in 30 days waaay back in 2011.
( Tweaktown.com )
Can you imagine how much Bethesda made over the years, with no other competition for the Fallouts and Skyrims?
Yet Bethesda leave Fallout and Skyrim a buggy mess with bad mod tools, animations, voice acting, story lines. In fact Fallout 76 was full of bugs that weren't fixed from the previous game. Guess where the money went? Stock holders. This is money from players that would have funded creators to push open world genres forward through engines and content. In the long run gaming loses.
Just some info you may want to consider. Good Luck:)
nyrs
joined
This member has provided no bio about themself...