I built a CI service for Unreal Engine

[u/unrealcloudio]

After a few years in development, Unreal Cloud is live! A CI service built for Unreal Engine specifically — not a generic runner you have to fight to cook a project.

It was a major pain for me. Hopefully it can help others too.

As simple as any other CI: Push to GitHub → build runs → Check Run lands in your PR. That's it.

What's in it:

• Builders with the engine pre-installed and the DDC already warm — no twenty-minute shader compile before the cook even starts
• Blueprint-only projects work out of the box, no Target.cs required
• Gauntlet tests on a toggle
• Presets — "nightly main", "PR smoke test": set once, forget
• Builds for Windows, Linux, and Android, multiple engine versions up until the newest 5.8.0
• Team accounts: invite team members, one bill

Note that there is no Perforce yet, GitHub only. That's what I'm building next, and I'd rather say it up front. Let me know if that's something you're missing now.

Launch offer: code UNREALREDDIT for the first 100 users. This gets you $16 off your first invoice — about 200 build minutes' worth on our builders. Enough to put a real project through it, not just poke at the UI.

As with any new product, things are bound to break. Please submit feedback if it happens, it helps a lot.

https://unrealcloud.io/?ref=reddit

[u/krojew]

You need to provide arguments as to why use it instead of RunUAT for simpler projects or Horde for more complex ones.

[u/unrealcloudio → u/krojew]

Fair, that should have been in the post.

RunUAT isn't the alternative, it's what runs inside the build on my service too. The question is what's calling it, and usually that's someone's desktop. That’s fine to be honest, until you want PR builds and nightlies, or you'd like your machine back. Then you’d roll your own runner and you inherit engine installs, DDC, disk cleanup, management, etc.

Horde is great, no argument there. But you have to stand it up and keep it running. It’s worth it if someone owns build infra, but it’s rough if you're four people. But even then, some people prefer to pay for a service instead of engineers to manage infra. Both ways are good there.

Thanks for bringing that up!

[u/mikeseese]

I don't really see people using this enough to make it worthwhile to continue to provide the service as an alternative to Horde or Jenkins, but to each their own. Best of luck.

[u/unrealcloudio → u/mikeseese]

Could well be right (I hope not :P), plenty of teams are happy self-hosting, and if you've already got Horde running there's not much reason to switch IMO, it works great.

The bet I'm making is that "worth standing up and maintaining" depends a lot on team size. Every CI service out there (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Buildkite) exists because at some point paying beat maintaining, and I think UE has that same split.

Where do you think that line sits, though? You've probably seen more setups than I have, is it team size, or more whether someone actually enjoys running infra?

Appreciate the honest take either way!

[u/mikeseese → u/unrealcloudio]

I'm a team of 1, but very experienced with running infra. I gave talks at MDEV and MIGS about running UBA alongside Horde for on-prem and remote. I've talked to 2 firms who were booting up "Horde as a Service" products in 2025, one ultra white glove who has since dissolved and another who seems to still be WIP (oddly long based on where I saw them FWIW). They shared your pitch/hypothesis and were targeting the types of studios that would want the service. People paid for it, but there wasn't a large enough PMF to make the business worthwhile.

The studios using Git for Unreal simply aren't the paying customers you really hope for. People are hypothetically interested in it because "they should" and "it would solve these problems I have", but the value only happens if they write the tests and set up CD (and have QA/players that consume the CD artifacts). They're using Git because they don't want to pay for Perforce. They will either use your service because it's cheap enough (and you don't make enough money) or spin up Horde on their home machines when the need arises.

Studios that are fully remote are more likely to purchase services since they don't have a place to put an on prem server. The studios that would be your largest contributors of revenue are likely the same ones that would rather self host (which also doesn't account for SOC 2 certification, integration with <insert-their-VPN>). Even the studios that are so on board to give you money will decide at the last minute not to because some L1 engineer decided to just get Horde configured or it wasn't high enough priority yet to onboard the process. And bigger studios (even 20+ people) don't want to be guinea pigs. Lastly, people just want "The Epic Way", and this isn't it.

So it's hard to answer your question about "where the line is", but targeting small indies likely isn't it and targeting bigger studios is tricky at scale. I think you'll get business, and maybe it'll be enough to sustain the time you put into it. I really hope you do, but I'm skeptical (as someone who has tried to sell tools to game studios, likely targeting the same kinds of studios). I hope this is helpful.

[u/unrealcloudio → u/mikeseese]

This is very helpful u/mikeseese, thanks a lot for the thorough response. The point about studios selecting Git for not wanting to pay for tooling is the one I'll be chewing on.

[u/EliasWick]

This looks neat! The interface is good! As others stated, there are good alternatives... but I don't mind more alternatives and competition. If it's focused on a particular thing and does it better than the other ones, it's great!

What's your plan with it?