Epic Games is under fire once again this week for its stance on AI, as the company is apparently pivoting to "AI-accelerated development"--and supreme overlord Tim Sweeney has been trying to make it seem as though he and his company are not bothered by the backlash even a little bit. But everything that Sweeney and his spokespeople have said this week makes them look like they're embarrassingly out of touch with the reality of our present moment.
Maybe it's time for Sweeney to go outside and get some fresh air and remember what it was like to be a regular person who doesn't have a billion dollars and a powerful corporation that he rules with an iron fist. It kinda seems like he hasn't done that in a while.
The fun this week started with a Bloomberg report about troubled production on a Marvel- and Star Wars-themed shooter game: one that would hook into Fortnite's system of cosmetics while being a standalone product. The project is reportedly behind schedule, and Bloomberg says the bosses at Epic are trying to compensate by offloading the so-called grunt work to Unreal Engine's AI tools, with new mandates that all code be written by AI and all art created with "full AI workflows."
Since there's never been a game worth knowing about that was made that way, the report was met with plenty of eyerolls and mockery from the gaming community. Frankly, the move looks like desperation. Disney gave Epic $1.5 billion a couple of years ago, and all they have to show for it so far are a bunch of Fortnite skins and some Creative islands that nobody plays--perhaps Disney is getting annoyed about that.
But Epic made every effort to appear unbothered by the criticism. Sweeney tweeted through the Bloomberg report, claiming that "the aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal."
Then, on Wednesday, the company revealed a new beta version of its Epic Games Launcher. The new version of the launcher is snappier to use and Epic claims it launches more quickly than Steam does--a small benefit very few people would even notice. But otherwise it has no new significant features, looks like it was created from a free design template, is very buggy, and Epic says you shouldn't use it with Fortnite or Rocket League for reasons it didn't bother to explain at all, which renders the beta useless for nearly everyone who might care about it. But it was apparently coded by AI, and Epic thinks that's really cool.
"Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look," Epic's sarcastic announcement about the launcher read. In other words, it's the same launcher you've hated for years, but it works a little faster now. But it actually wasn't faster than Steam, as Valve's newest Steam client update, which began rolling out a day before Epic revealed its new launcher, improved Steam's startup time--on my rig, both launchers now start up in about six seconds. Fortunately, no normal user will ever care about this competition either way.
This whole topic is silly, as we know. AI does not improve productivity because workers have to spend more time reviewing the code that the AI spits out. AI code is harder than human code to maintain over time because it's esoteric, and those workers who spend all their time prompting AI tend to lose some of their actual coding skill, which means they gradually become worse at reviewing the AI-generated code. Software products that are vibe-coded are more vulnerable to security breaches than those made by people. And there has never been a noteworthy game produced this way on any scale, so on top of everything else, the new approach to the Disney project is also unprecedented.
Workers hate working with AI this way, so it's unsurprising that the Bloomberg report mentions Epic employees were upset about it. And, lastly, the general public sentiment about AI and the data centers that power it likewise doesn't reflect well on this pivot. It's almost as if Epic were going out of its way to avoid reading the room.
Before he became an out-of-touch billionaire ruler of his private empire, Tim Sweeney used to be an excellent game designer. I suspect that, back in the day, he would have understood the value of actual human expertise over the approximation of expertise that AI offers. But as the king of Epic, where he is the sole majority stakeholder and can do basically whatever he wants, he's come to appear like just another rich boss who believes everything he does is above criticism, and who doesn't care about his workers or the work they're doing beyond whether it improves his legacy and gets him more money and power.
This entire pivot to AI is actually itself a perfect example of this, because none of this is for the players anyway. Sweeney is pushing these AI tools in the Unreal Engine as a sales pitch to developers and TV and movie studios to try to get them using his product. It's a buzzword feature to toss on the back of the box in order to impress managers who don't know better. It doesn't matter to him, apparently, whether he pisses off all us regular folks while making his sales pitch--he seems openly contemptuous of everyone who holds any anti-AI sentiment.
"Our job, as the provider of tools and technology to much of the industry, is to design for the present that is and the future that will soon be," Sweeney tweeted in response to a joke about his inability to read the room. In other words: Tim Sweeney gets to decide what the future is, and it doesn't matter to him if you dislike it. It's an interesting tack to take during Fortnite's worst year ever, but it's the one Sweeney is going with.
Maybe Epic would be better served if Sweeney and his pals took a different approach, though. We just need him to go outside, touch some grass, and reconnect with humanity for a minute. Doing that may not get Epic's Disney shooter finished any faster, but it might help him remember why he used to like making games.