how dose this require the game engine? farther down the page Matt mentions something about scripts working a little different but nothing about the blender game engine...
It doesn't require the game engine, but it does require a boolean solver that can deal with coplanar faces. Blender 2.7x had two solvers - BMesh and Carve - which was slower, but could handle coplanar faces. Unfortunately Carve has been removed from Blender 2.8x
So it wouldn't make sense to update until the BMesh solver is up to the task.