Unreal Engine showcased new PCG plugins with version 5.2 at GDC 2023, which will eliminate the need for many features to be developed in Houdini. How will SideFX respond to this change from Unreal Engine? What plans does Houdini Engine for Unreal team have to maintain Houdini's advantage in PCG for game development in the future?

I was lucky enough to use the Unreal Engine Source code 5.2 preview version.Although there are not many nodes at present, the generation speed is very fast，almost what you see is what you get,PCG graph supports vegetation, rivers, roads, and almost any tool that supports point clouds and curves can do it.
In terms of tool flexibility, it may not be as good as Houdini, but the most important thing is the generation speed.Many level artists and level designers actually prefer the fast generation method

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM9i9wYdrMw [www.youtube.com]

Although PCG Graph supports the use of external input point clouds, the improvement of Unreal 5.2 PCG Graph is visible. This improvement is precisely the weakness of Houdini engine (a large number of PCG generation is slow and requires cook). Houdini engine first needs to improve PCG in unreal engine Generation speed (although somewhat difficult to achieve, the bottleneck is often HAPI and unreal data transfer).

One more point, if you need 5.2 PCG Graph to run smoothly, you need a good graphics card , it may be a good choice to strengthen the terrain erosion(Although more people in the current project use Gaea), Unreal has not yet done a similar function, but I really hope that Houdini and Unreal can interact and generate faster can improve.
It will take a few years for Unreal Engine 5.2 PCG Graph to be fully applied to the project after it is announced now (you can refer to Chaos)

There is a level of sophistication that you still can't hit with PCG for certain types of layout. But I think it would be very interesting if Houdini Engine could actually interface more directly with PCG in some fashion. I'm building tools to do so at work, examples being having a way to directly export points from Houdini to bring into PCG via importing a Data Table. This might be out of the scope of Houdini Engine, more likely a labs export tool, but if it could even sync points at the click of a button between software then it would be almost like sessionsync for PCG layout between the software.