Epic's New Version Control System Is a Reminder That Your Tools Should Fit Your Work

What Epic Actually Announced

Epic Games, the company behind Unreal Engine and Fortnite, just announced Lore, a new version control system. For most people outside game development, version control sounds like plumbing: necessary, invisible, and not worth a headline. But this got a strong reaction on Hacker News for a reason, and it's worth unpacking why.

Game studios live with a specific kind of pain. Their repositories aren't a few thousand text files. They're millions of assets: textures, audio, 3D models, level data, and binaries that can each run into the gigabytes. The version control tools most software teams reach for were designed around source code and small text diffs. Push them into a game studio's reality and they start to creak.

Lore is Epic's answer to a problem they've been hitting at scale for years.

Why a Company Builds Its Own Infrastructure

There's a recurring pattern in technology. A company grows, its workflow gets more specific, and at some point the standard tools stop bending to fit. The team faces a fork:

• Keep forcing the existing tool to do something it was never designed for, paying a tax in workarounds and lost time.
• Build something purpose-fit for how the work actually happens.

Epic clearly decided the second path was worth it. That decision is rarely about ego or "not invented here." It's usually arithmetic. When thousands of people touch a system every day, even small amounts of friction multiply into real cost. At a certain scale, the build option stops looking expensive and starts looking obvious.

The question is never "can we build our own?" It's "does the friction we're paying justify the cost of building?"

Most businesses never reach that threshold, and they shouldn't pretend they have. But the principle behind Epic's move applies far below their scale.

The Lesson for Everyone Else

You don't need to be Epic to feel the gap between your tools and your work. I see it constantly with the businesses I work with:

• A team running their entire operation through a spreadsheet that three people understand and nobody trusts.
• A sales process held together by manual copy-paste between five SaaS tools that don't talk to each other.
• A support queue where someone spends two hours a day doing work a well-built automation could handle in seconds.

None of these are "build your own version control" problems. They're smaller, and that's the point. The friction is real, it's measurable, and it compounds. The same logic Epic applied to Lore applies here: at some point, the cost of living with broken tooling exceeds the cost of fixing it properly.

The trick is knowing where that line sits for your business, not Epic's.

How I Think About Build vs. Adapt

After 22 years of building products and systems, I've learned that the build-versus-buy decision comes down to a few honest questions:

• How specific is your workflow? If you do something the way every other company does it, an off-the-shelf tool will almost always win. The more unusual your process, the weaker that tool's fit becomes.
• How much friction are you actually paying? Put a number on it. Hours per week, error rates, deals lost. Vague frustration isn't a business case; measured cost is.
• Is this a core capability or a side function? Epic builds version control because shipping games is their core. You probably shouldn't build your own version control. But the automation that runs your specific customer pipeline? That might be exactly where custom work pays off.
• What happens if you do nothing? Sometimes the answer is "nothing serious," and that's a perfectly good reason to leave it alone.

The goal isn't to build everything. It's to be deliberate about the few things where a custom fit changes the economics of how you operate.

Where AI Changes the Math

Here's what's different now compared to even a few years ago. The cost side of that build-versus-buy equation has dropped. AI agents and modern automation tooling mean that custom systems which used to require a team and a year can now be built in a fraction of the time and budget.

That shifts the threshold. Plenty of problems that were "just live with it" two years ago are now worth solving properly, because solving them no longer requires Epic-sized resources. The friction you've been tolerating because fixing it seemed too expensive may be cheaper to address than you think.

That's the part most businesses haven't recalibrated for yet.

The Takeaway

Epic's Lore announcement is a big-company story about a big-company problem. But the instinct behind it is one every business should borrow: pay attention to where your tools fight your work, measure what that friction actually costs, and be willing to build the fit you need when the numbers justify it.

If you're sitting on a process that everyone complains about but nobody has fixed, that's usually a signal worth investigating. Sometimes the answer is a better off-the-shelf tool. Sometimes it's a custom agent or automation built around how you actually work. The right move depends on your specifics, and figuring that out is exactly the kind of problem I help businesses solve.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's worth a conversation about what's costing you the most and whether it's worth fixing.