Lore: Epic Games' new open source version control system

Epic Games has announced the release of Lore, a new free and open-source version control system (VCS) designed to efficiently manage both source code and large binary assets.
After years of internal use under the name Unreal Revision Control, primarily used in the development of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), Lore is now available under the MIT License, paving the way for community contributions.

The goal is to offer a solution capable of overcoming the limitations of the tools currently most used in video game development and digital content production.

Why was Lore created?

Those who develop video games, 3D applications, or multimedia content work with enormous amounts of data every day: textures, models, audio, video, and other binary files that can reach considerable sizes.

Today's most popular tools come with some tradeoffs:

• Git is the standard for source code, but managing binary files, even with Git LFS, can be slow and inefficient.

• Perforce (Helix Core) excels at managing large assets and large teams, but it's a proprietary solution with licensing costs and a heavy server dependency.

• Other systems struggle to find the right balance between performance, scalability, and ease of use for developers and artists.

Lore nasce proprio per cercare di colmare questo divario, offrendo un'esperienza ottimizzata per progetti "content-heavy", dove codice e asset hanno la stessa importanza.

Key Features

Binary-first

Lore treats any file as a stream of bytes, making no distinction between code and assets.

Thanks to content-addressed storage # with chunking and deduplication based on BLAKE3, when a small part of a multi-gigabyte file is modified, only the blocks that have actually changed are transferred.

Light working copies

The system uses a sparse and lazy architecture, allowing only the necessary files to be downloaded. Even large repositories remain fast and manageable.

Centralized but with the advantages of a distributed system

Lore maintains a central server to ensure security, access control and data integrity, but also allows:

• offline commits;

• free branching;

• Day-to-day operations with minimal network dependency.

Native multi-tenant

Each repository is completely isolated, a particularly attractive feature for large companies, publishers, and studios managing numerous projects.

Highly scalable

The architecture was designed to support very large datasets and teams of any size without compromising performance.

Developed in Rust

Lore is written in Rust, which ensures high performance, memory safety, and increased reliability.

Project status

At the time of release (June 2026), the project includes:

• core library;

• server;

• CLI;

• early SDKs.

Epic Games also announced:

• a full desktop client;

• an official Unreal Engine plugin expected in 2027.

The company confirmed that Lore will become the internal version control system for Unreal Engine 6 development as well

Who is it for?

Lore is particularly interesting for:

• game development studios;

• teams using Unreal Engine;

• film and animation productions;

• companies working with large amounts of digital assets;

• organizations looking for an open source alternative to Perforce.

Final Thoughts

Lore is not intended to replace Git in every context. Git continues to be the ideal choice for many traditional software projects.

However, when the repository contains large amounts of binary assets, Lore proposes an approach that combines high performance, scalability, and modern workflows.

Being open source, distributed under the MIT license, and supported directly by Epic Games, it could become one of the new reference points for the video game industry and, more generally, for all sectors that work with large digital content.

For more information, you can visit the official page here.