i know this engine got dropped from the official release though I do not fully understand this move. My thoughts is with a group of volunteers maintaining a integrated engine to blender while engine with Unity has full support staff. I find the blender game engine fairly decent to use for prototyping levels. As longevity for blender game engine I haven’t seen any major games made with it.
It is maintained, in the sense that there’s people working on it. Last commit on the repository was yesterday.
But, as far as I understand, it is a community project, and does not have a lot of contributors, so progress is slow. It’s also a independent project, I don’t think anyone from the Blender Foundation works on it.
The engine was removed in Blender 2.8 because it was out of date and hard to work with, holding back a lot of other developments. The idea was to eventually create an “interactive mode” that would kinda replace it, but that is still missing on Blender currently.
As an alternative, you might want to look at Armory Engine.
I switched from UPBGE to the Range engine a while ago. It’s still blender/game engine at heart. The Range community is making some pretty amazing things with it.- And you can publish without sharing any code :))
I think UPBGE is still receiving updates, there are still commits happening, the latest stable version is based on Blender 4.4.3 and was released in May 2025.
Yes, it is still maintained. In a 1-2 weeks a new release 0.50 based in Blender 5.0.1 will be published. It will include GPU Skinning and fast add object as main new features.