State of Play: Real-Time Engines 2026 (Unity • Unreal • Godot)

After a long hiatus, Unity Developer Meetup is back, joining forces with AWE Nite Queensland for a discussion on the state of Game Engines in the industry in 2026.

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Join us on Friday 27 March for a straight, practical panel discussion on the current reality of real-time engines. Hosted by Seb Fehr, Studio Director at Actuator Digital, the panel will explore what teams are shipping, performance and platform constraints, toolchains and pipelines, ecosystem dependencies, and the trade-offs that drive engine choice. No vendor slides—just what’s working (and what isn’t).

After the panel, stick around to network with other developers, studios, training & simulation teams, tech artists, designers, and producers.

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Joining the panel are...

Daniel Stephens:
Head of Engineering at PlaySide Studios, Daniel is an experienced people, technical and development manager with extensive history in the interactive entertainment sector. Having authored and shipped multiple titles on a game engine of his own design, he adds a voice for the more technical road less travelled.

Blake Kammermann
Dr. Blake Kammermann works as a games educator, researcher, developer, and brIGDA Treasurer helping to support emerging developers and the QLD games community.

Patrick Chang
Having dipped in and out of the XR space for the last 7 years, Patrick has tried about everything there is to do on a headset and now is on the cutting edge with the Meta Horizon platform.

Nathan Hoad
Nathan is an award winning engineer/artist and managed to sneak into the games industry by releasing a bunch of popular Godot plugins and accidentally making a name for himself in the Godot community.

Josh Sanderson
Josh is a video game programmer with over 15 years of experience in the field, and has worked on many award-winning and million-selling titles for companies and for himself, in many engines including custom C++, Unity and currently Unreal.

For those who can’t join us in person, a livestream will be available.

AWE Nite Queensland is organised in partnership with Immerse Australia, Actuator Digital, and Queensland XR Hub.

Schedule (approx):
4:30pm - Networking / Set-up
5:00pm - Panel Begin
6:30pm - Approximate end of presentation / with pizza and drinks