Today Epic announced Unreal Engine 6, the latest version of the tech behind games including Fortnite, Clair Obscur, the Borderlands series, and frankly, too many others to count—and of course, it’s crammed to the gills with AI garbage. Developers aren’t happy, with one, Vampire Survivors creator Poncle, going so far as to say it’s now “reviewing” a forthcoming Fortnite collab in light of the news.
Epic development team lead Marcus Wassmer put AI front and center in a post introducing UE6 after it was teased in a Rocket League trailer a few weeks ago:
For UE6, we see LLMs, generative AI models, and tools like Claude and Codex playing a central role in helping you build content faster while maintaining the creative control you need. A big part of our effort is going into exposing a broad set of engine capabilities through the MCP protocol, so that developers can mix and match the best leading-edge models and build custom integrations of all sorts on an open Unreal Engine 6 MCP foundation. We are also improving the Epic Developer Assistant (EDA) as an optional turnkey solution, available to all by default.
Our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration, and increase the amount of iterations a team can make to polish their content. UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favorite models, battletested against internal development and in UEFN.
In other words, yet another tech giant fundamentally misunderstanding how the creative process works. Then again, not a huge surprise coming from the company led by Tim Sweeney, who, earlier this year, leaped to Elon Musk’s defense after Grok’s image generation tools allowed users to churn out pornographic imagery of minors. AI guys gonna AI, no matter how inane, objectionable, or potentially illegal the outcome.
“AI cannot assign copyright,” video game lawyer and MinnMax community manager Haley MacLean wrote on Bluesky. “You will not own the things [Unreal Engine 6] makes even if they try and assign it to you. This would technically be in violation of 100% of publisher agreements I have seen.”
There’s also the issue of AI’s business model and surging price, with subscriptions to tools like Claude costing individual users far less than the bills they rack up for their parent companies. For heavy hitters like Microsoft and Uber, Claude and similar tools have still proven near-prohibitively expensive to deploy at scale, and recent horror stories have included one company reportedly spending $500 million on limitless Claude usage for employees in a single month.
Nonetheless, Epic is moving full steam ahead with AI tech internally and externally: “We’ve been doing a lot of investigation to see what works and what doesn’t for code generation,” wrote Wassmer. “We recently opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams. We’ve had particular success with people writing custom tools for their own work, fast code indexing tools for helping LLMs deal with large codebases like Unreal Engine, fast incidence response analysis, automated root cause crash and CIS job failure analysis, automated test generation, and of course the acceleration and parallelization you’d expect on backend service development.”
In other words, juggernauts like Fortnite and Rocket League are now only partially the work of human hands. Relatedly, worth remembering: Epic laid off 1,000 people in March.
But don’t worry, says Wassmer, this is definitely somehow gonna benefit regular people first and foremost, as opposed to the executives, shareholders, and tech overlords trying to hollow out what remains of society.
“UE6 is going to change a lot about how games are made,” he wrote. “It will not change the thing that matters most, which is that the people in this industry—the game developers, the filmmakers, our Unreal Engine family—are the ones who make anything actually happen. Thank you for making Unreal Engine really shine.”
Many developers see the ill-conceived, machine-generated writing on the wall.
"Following today's news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sort[s] of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we're currently ‘reviewing’ our collaboration with Fortnite,” Vampire Survivors developer Poncle said on Discord. “We'll let you know if anything moves forward."
“Godot really is a very good engine,” said Tron: Catalyst and Thomas Was Alone director Mike Bithell. “Very easy to migrate to.”
As if that wasn’t enough, Epic also wants you to know that it hasn’t forgotten the metaverse. “Portable content” is going to be a major UE6 focus, starting with Fortnite skins. Wassmer wrote:
Fortnite cosmetics will be our first real proof point of portability. We will start by moving the base system to an open UE6 module. This means you’ll have the option to use a player’s entitled Fortnite Outfits in your own games, and you’ll get the tools to build Outfits for your own games that work inside Fortnite. We’re tackling this problem first because we want to prove things out with a system that’s complex enough to be a meaningful existence proof of the idea, and one that inherently comes with a ton of player value by respecting their purchases across an interconnected ecosystem of games.
We see this as the first step toward building a shared economy for smart assets: functional assets with logic and functionality that work across games, to recognize players’ time and spending in a better way. In the end, this isn't really a Fortnite story. It’s about proving that such a mature, complex system can work at scale—and that every game that works with these systems will immediately benefit from them.
During today’s State of Unreal presentation in Chicago, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney suggested that this is a very “different” vision of the future than the one proposed by Roblox, which Sweeney suggested could “grow and eat gaming.” But, at least on paper, it’s difficult to read Epic’s plan for a massive, interconnected ecosystem—for which it will supply the backbone—as anything other than a slight variation on Roblox’s pitch. Epic sees that pie cooling on the windowsill, and it’s licking its lips.
“All of the UE6 stuff is really exciting news if your idea of a video game is turning it into shitty Roblox-core slurry for Fortnite,” wrote artist and game developer Aura Hack. “Seeing the entire industry as pulp to be fed into the machine of a company's vision of the monoculture is unconscionably evil, but I suppose is fitting of someone who’s long been a loser and hater of human labor.”
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Luke Plunkett
