What a load of crap. You and others are over analyzing something fully intended for game developers.
You have yet to see a single thing from a game studio using unreal 5 until this gdc talk, yet you claim amateur demos of ported unreal 4 projects are some how comparable? They talked about technology and this done to build on top of some ue5 features. You and many others are missing the point as usual.
You've commented on my posts on other threads and I assume read the parentheticals in what I wrote, so you know that I generally understand the real technical work underneath and what "the point" of the demo was supposed to be...
Problem is,
fuck "the point". They released a tech demo for gamers to see, and it was some rocks and a face and not a ton else. And they told those who tuned in that this was "first bits of...what’s possible with next-gen character creation" and "an early look at what’s possible with Unreal Engine 5 on Xbox Series X|S." (And then, they went to mainstream site IGN to try to explain things further, and instead of downplaying the situation as you are indicating they should have, they apparently said it was just the tip of the iceberg.)
Because, you know, this other GDC demo from earlier was also something fully intended for game developers too. Also, it was freaking awesome.
It wasn't for gamers, the only reason they finally released the presentation was because people demanded it because they were hoping to use it for warring (well, to be fair, some are legitimately into the behind the scenes stuff).
You're simply wrong that they released it just because people "demanded" it.
A, that's not how GDC presentations work that the speaker can just release it if there's a lot of demand. (People pay over $350 for those badges, and rights to rebroadcast presentations are only kept by the owners if it was agreed to ahead of time in the terms of the show, otherwise GDC has its own streaming service for making show content available afterwards, for a subscription price.) Epic Games had already gone about to retain the rights, and it release all of its GDC 2021 streaming presentation events, including the Alpha Point one they hosted and invited The Coalition to present at.
And B, this was promoted to the public (albeit on tech sites, if you want to call
The Coalition's Twitter page a tech site, but Microsoft and Coalition did nothing to tamp down expectations when it started to get buzz in the mainstream,) it was immediately announced by
Coalition's Studio TD that it would be made public after there was confusion that maybe it wouldn't be, and it was released on Xbox's main Youtube page (they have separate a
Microsoft Game Stack account for tech-oriented video releases) as well as given out to the media.
It's also dumb reading comments about how hobbyists have uploaded Nanite/Lumen tech demos that look "more impressive" or whatever since the preview build went public.
Like, okay? The Coalition made this demo as a way to explore functionality and pipeline changes.
They did the work for real. And they also had a number of backend goals with the project, including assessing for Microsoft and Epic how best to optimize UE5 and other tools for the future as these services come to viable use. The full talk reveals a lot about what this project was behind the scenes. (BTW, Colin Penty of Coalition takes a little poke at people impressed by the dabblers porting their UE4 projects and kitbashing some Quixel assets and calling it a "UE5 demo", that the scene is cool but the real work with UE5 is much, much more complicated.) Alpha Point was made to learn about and to build upon the future of UE5 on Xbox hardware, and looking kind of cool was pretty far down the line of points to meet in project goals.
True to all of that. A technical person may get what they needed out of seeing the Alpha Point reveal. A general person, however, will see a forest full of apples and one single, tiny, mostly-green little orange, and they're not going to hear the reasoning when somebody says it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.