Months after laying off more than 1,000 people, Epic Games is undergoing "a huge pivot" toward AI game developer, CEO Tim Sweeney said Tuesday on X. Sweeney's post came after Bloomberg reported an unannounced Star Wars and Marvel crossover game was delayed. Developers are prohibited from "hand-written code," according to the Bloomberg report, instead being asked to use Anthropic's Claude and other AI tools to finish the game. Art, too, will be "generated with full AI workflows," Bloomberg wrote, citing an internal Epic Games memo.
"We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," Sweeney posted to X. "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."
During the Epic layoffs in March, Sweeney wrote in a memo to employees that a "downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making." Sweeney said the cuts were necessary to keep the company funded, and were not related to AI. Weeks before the layoffs, Epic Games upped the price of its in-game currency V-bucks to "help pay the bills."
This new Star Wars game was initially expected in March and has no new public release date. Bloomberg said the game's progress is "slower than expected, in part because Epic underestimated how many staffers and how much time it would take to produce." Epic Games has an ongoing partnership with Disney, which invested $1.5 billion into Epic Games. Since then, Disney characters and properties have shown up a lot in Fortnite, including several Star Wars games and islands, characters and skins in Fortnite's battle royale, and all sorts of cosmetics. The unannounced Star Wars game, in which Marvel and Star Wars characters can shoot at each other, doesn't sound a whole lot different than how Fortnite itself feels these days.
Epic Games' AI bit isn't new, either. In June, Epic posted a video that detailed the company's "art concepting process" for Fortnite. That process includes the use of AI to help make characters and other assets. In the video, a developer acknowledges that the AI makes mistakes that an artist has to then fix, which surely doesn’t bode well for the Star Wars game’s workflow.
In a Game Developers Conference survey released this year, 36% of game developers said they use AI at work for tasks like brainstorming, research, prototyping, code generation, and administrative tasks like writing emails. But half of the GDC survey's respondents "think generative AI is having a negative impact on the game industry," a number up by 30% over the prior year's survey. Seven percent of respondents said "generative AI is having a positive impact on the game industry," a number that decreased from the year prior. Among executives, though, that number goes up to 19%.
There's generative AI all over games, but lots of players and game developers absolutely hate it; there's been a whole bunch of instances where players discover AI use in a game and loudly decry it before the developer backtracks with a How did that get in there? or an It's just a placeholder! There are a lot of criticisms over AI—its environmental impact, theft, and the massive RAM shortage that's making everything more expensive—and they're all valid. But it also just doesn't make games that look good. As demonstrated in Epic Games' own AI art video, these generative AI models make a ton of mistakes that must be fixed, including stuff that's immediate giveaways that AI was used, like missing fingers or unintentionally asymmetrical designs.
Sweeney seemingly acknowledged a large portion of the industry's distaste for generative AI in a response to his initial message. "Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it's not," Sweeeney wrote. "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. Personally I'm optimistic about it and see it as empowering for creators."
The other piece of Sweeney's announcement is that it'll make game development faster, that Epic Games can make more stuff in less time. And I don't know, man, but do we even want that? Why is that the goal? Hundreds of games are released on Steam each month; more are released on mobile. A lot of it is already pretty bad. Generative AI is making it worse. I don't think the problem with video games is that there aren't enough of them, or that Fortnite content isn't being released fast enough.
