Game Feature Plugins for Live Service Games at Riot | Unreal Fest Chicago 2026

Live service games require an efficient content pipeline to continuously deliver updates to players, and generally development of new seasonal content and features has to happen simultaneously for multiple releases at once.

Unreal Engine’s modular gameplay features and Game Feature Plugins (GFPs) map nicely to this problem, enforcing a good content structure and allowing for unrelated features for different releases to be safely built on a single game branch.

However, there’s a large gap between what UE offers out of the box and what game production practically needs.

In this talk recorded at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026, Riot Games start by exploring Game Feature Plugins and how they function in some detail, talking about their advantages and their flexibility.

They also cover some of the plugins’ weaknesses and common misconceptions. The team then dives into “Build Recipes”, a Riot-built data-driven UE system to manipulate the blend of GFPs that constitute a given released version of a game.

They cover how the inclusion/exclusion mechanisms work at compile time, at cook time, and in editor. Next, they show the in-editor tooling they built to visualize and modify the content for each game version, how the system interacts with streaming install and chunking, and some of the workflows they are building for content creators working in a GFP-rich world. Finally, Riot discusses some lessons learned adopting this system across multiple internal in-production titles.

Find out more about using Unreal Engine to develop games here: unrealengine.com/uses/games

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