To no one’s surprise, Epic Games has now confirmed that it’s tripling down on its gen-AI push and will use the controversial tech on everything from Fortnite to the next iteration of its widely-used game development engine, Unreal Engine 6.
Speaking to This Week In Video Games, executive vice president of development Marcus Wassmer confirmed that “we are definitely using AI to develop code and features for Unreal Engine,” but that work will also be extended to the engine’s next big numbered version. “Almost all development happening right now is being done in the dev streams attached to Fortnite, UEFN [Unreal Editor for Fortnite], and UE6.”
When asked specifically if Epic is vibe-coding anything related to Unreal Engine, Wassmer put it plainly: “Yes, we are vibe-coding things. That means our engineers are no longer writing the bulk of the code, but they are still guiding the tools to get the architectural result we want. We’re not ‘one-shotting’ the engine; we’re iterating with AI to ship features developers want and keep the engine within the memory, performance, and scalability envelopes.” Wassmer claimed the AI tools would help the company push out updates faster and with fewer bugs.
Epic seemingly isn’t sweating over the divisive reaction to its gen-AI push, either – even as workers worry about job security, developers worry about plagiarism, and communities across the world worry about its environmental impact. Wassmer explained the company is “more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism.”
“We don’t think it’sed. “We think it’s best to just be up front with what we’re doing, share best practices with other developers, and make the best UE6 we can with the best tools available at any given time.”
Earlier this month, Epic proudly admitted to vibe-coding the latest iteration of the Epic Games Launcher in an attempt to run slightly faster than Steam. “Prograaming is hard,” the multi-billion dollar company explained at the time. “So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded the new Epic Games Launcher.” Developers working on a troubled Disney and Marvel shooter werereportedly told to let gen-AI handle code and art production, too.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney then started an online debate over Valve’s AI policy that asks developers to disclose gen-AI use on their Steam pages. Sweeney argued that “forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mod they’re helping organize is abhorrent.” It’s not surprising to see Epic dig its heels in further, then.
