Good news for Unreal Engine developers: we've made PVS-Studio more accessible! You can now analyze UE projects in PVS-Studio with a Team license, not just an Enterprise license. We'll explain below why we changed our licensing model and what it means for small and mid-sized game studios.
What is PVS-Studio?
In case you haven't heard of us yet: PVS-Studio is a static analyzer for C, C++, C#, and Java code (+ JavaScript/TypeScript and Go in the upcoming August release). PVS-Studio is a tool that automatically checks your project's code for potential errors, security vulnerabilities, and optimization opportunities without executing the code itself.
If you'd like to learn more about the analyzer's capabilities and use cases, check out our overview article.
PVS-Studio is now more accessible to Unreal Engine developers
Game projects continue to grow in both scale and complexity. A modern game can contain millions of code lines, hundreds of modules, and countless interconnected systems. Even experienced teams may miss bugs that slip past the compiler and code review.
At the same time, a large part of the industry consists of indie and AA studios. Despite having smaller budgets and fewer developers, such teams tackle complex engineering challenges and care just as much about delivering high-quality products.
PVS-Studio 7.43, released in June 2026, introduced an important change: Unreal Engine project analysis is now available with the Team license instead of being limited to Enterprise. This makes the tool more affordable for small and mid-sized game studios and lowers the barrier to adopting static analysis as part of their daily development workflow.
Why did we make this change?
Unreal Engine has long been the go-to option for teams of all sizes, from AAA studios and AA developers to indie teams and solo creators. For many of them, the Enterprise license was excessive, especially when working within a tight budget and carefully selecting development tools.
According to the 2026 State of the Game Industry report, Unreal Engine is now the primary engine for the largest percentage of game developers, with approximately 42% of respondents using it as their main engine. It's particularly popular among AA studios, where the engine is used even more broadly than in the AAA segment.
Figure 1—GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry Report: What game engine do you primarily use for game development?
Like larger studios, these teams face technical challenges such as complex game logic, ever-growing codebases, third-party integrations, platform-specific issues, and hard-to-reproduce bugs. The difference is that they usually have fewer resources available for extensive debugging, manual code reviews, and dedicated QA workflows.
QA often takes a back seat while the team focuses on building gameplay features. As a result, bugs negatively impact the player experience and damage the game's reputation right at release. In smaller studios, developers often have to handle testing themselves because the team isn't big enough and the budget may not allow for hiring dedicated QA specialists.
The Team license is designed with such teams in mind. By adding Unreal Engine support at this licensing tier, we've made static analysis more accessible where it can have the greatest impact: in teams where catching bugs early saves time, money, and effort while helping developers stay focused on creating great games.
How bugs affect development pace
The cost of an error
Players pay especially close attention to the quality of a game during the first few days after its launch. If bugs, crashes, or critical failures arise during that period, the team must immediately shift its focus to analyzing feedback, deploying hotfixes, and stabilizing the game. This means investing time and money on work that is rarely part of the intended project plan.
High-profile releases such as Assassin's Creed Unity and Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrate that technical issues at launch can lead to months of post-release fixes. Teams with limited resources may find it even more challenging to recover from a rocky launch.
In reality, the benefits of catching bugs early extend beyond saving money. Understanding and fixing the issue is usually easier when the code is still fresh in the developer's mind. If the bug surfaces much later, the team has to reconstruct the original context, untangle dependencies, and stop working on other projects to investigate it.
Static analysis naturally fits into everyday development workflows, including local development, builds, and CI. It helps developers spot suspicious code before fixes require lengthy investigations, repeated testing, or urgent patches.
If you'd like to learn more, check out our article on how static analysis affects the cost of fixing errors throughout a project's lifecycle.
What does this mean for a team?
Based on discussions within the community, it's clear that most people don't pursue a career in game development to spend their days shipping emergency patches or tracking down typos in legacy code. They'd rather focus on designing gameplay mechanics, building systems, creating content, and making their game better.
The static analyzer doesn't replace developers or make decisions for the team. Its job is much simpler: it highlights potential issues in code and helping teams find bugs earlier with less effort.
For the team, this means a more streamlined workflow with fewer interruptions and more time to focus on tasks that advance the project.
What does PVS-Studio offer for Unreal Engine projects?
Unreal Engine has its own architecture, type system, coding conventions, and internal mechanisms. So, the key to a thorough analysis is considering the engine specifics instead of relying solely on general C++ checks.
We continue to expand Unreal Engine support in PVS-Studio, including in collaboration with Epic Games. It helps us better account for UE-specific behavior, improve our integrations, and respond more quickly to issues developers encounter when using the analyzer with real-world Unreal Engine projects.
This translates into a smoother out-of-the-box experience for teams working with Unreal Engine:
Annotations for Unreal Engine code
PVS-Studio includes built-in annotations for Unreal Engine. They help the analyzer interpret code more accurately, account for engine-specific behavior, and reduce false positives without requiring extensive manual configuration.
UE-specific diagnostic rules
The analyzer also includes diagnostic rules specifically designed for Unreal Engine projects. They help detect issues stemming from UE-specific coding patterns, engine conventions, and the object lifecycle of the engine. Here are a couple of examples:
- V1100: Declaring a pointer to a type derived from 'UObject' in a class that is not derived from 'UObject' is dangerous.
- V1102: Violation of naming conventions may cause Unreal Header Tool to work incorrectly.
Integration with the Unreal Engine toolchain
Our goal is to support the workflows and tools that Unreal Engine developers already rely on. This way, introducing static analysis won't disrupt an established development process.
Run PVS-Studio in Unreal Build Tool
Starting with Unreal Engine 4.17, you can run PVS-Studio directly through Unreal Build Tool. This makes it easy to integrate the analyzer into your existing build pipeline and use it as part of your regular development workflow.
Support for multiple Unreal Engine versions
PVS-Studio supports both legacy and current Unreal Engine releases. This is especially important for teams that can't immediately migrate to the latest engine version and need to continue developing projects using their current version.
Integration with Unreal Build Accelerator, Horde, and SN-DBS
For large projects and CI pipelines, analysis speed and seamless integration with existing build infrastructure are essential. PVS-Studio is compatible with Unreal Build Accelerator, Horde, and SN-DBS. This streamlines the integration of static analysis into existing distributed build and code check workflows.
A comprehensive set of diagnostic rules for everyday C++ development
In addition to providing diagnostic rules specific to Unreal Engine, PVS-Studio detects a wide range of issues that can affect any C++ codebase. For example, it can identify:
- memory and resource management issues: memory leaks (V773), use-after-free bugs (V774), and double resource deallocation (V586);
- uses of uninitialized data: in local variables, class members, and constructors (V614, V730, V670);
- object lifetime and reference issues: dangling references, incorrect handling of temporary objects,
string_view,lambda, and objects afterstd::move(V758, V1017, V1047, V1030); - logic errors in conditions and expressions: conditions that always evaluate to true or false, suspicious comparisons, and incorrect operators (V547, V517, V709, V564);
- copy-paste errors and other human mistakes: duplicated code fragments, variable name typos, and suspicious inconsistencies between similar checks (V778, V722, V1013, V524);
- integer overflows, unsafe conversions, and signedness issues (V1028, V1083, V1112, V1029);
- issues with loops, indexing, and array bounds (V557, V621, V776).
Fast fixes for issues and false positives
Working effectively with Unreal Engine requires a stable and reliable tool. That's why we focus on both adding new features and refining existing integrations. We're constantly working to fix reported issues, improve compatibility, and reduce the number of false positives.
Our collaboration with Epic Games plays an important role in this effort. It helps us respond more quickly to changes in the Unreal Engine ecosystem and adapt the analyzer to the real-world needs of developers.
To learn more about our collaboration, check out the article on the Epic Games website.
Ready to give it a try?
Starting with PVS-Studio 7.43, you can analyze Unreal Engine projects under the Team license.
If you use Unreal Engine for development and have considered trying PVS-Studio, now's the perfect time to run the analyzer on your project. If you have any questions about integration or configuration, our support team will be happy to help you.
You can get a trial version here.
Stay creative, and we'll be there to help protect your code from bugs, vulnerabilities, and typos with PVS-Studio.
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