Epic Games are, dunno if you’ve heard, on a bit of a genAI kick at the moment. It’s been tough to notice unless you listen very hard. Tim Sweeney’s lips have been sealed and no reports have spewed forth.
Sark aside, to this point Epic have had far more provocative soundbites and weird marketing lingo to offer than specific detail about how they’re using genAI in different parts of their business.
Responding to questioning from This Week in Videogames, Epic’s executive vice president of development Marcus Wassmer’s run through some of the exact tools and uses that make up the company’s current deployment of the tech.
“There are a number of tools in use but probably the most obvious ones are Claude Code and Codex with their associated AI models,” he said “They’re helping across a broad spectrum of development, with some particularly big recent wins being almost the complete elimination of non-deterministic cooking bugs which we’ve been fighting for a decade and an acceleration of work related to compressing shaders which both significantly reduce patch sizes. [Other wins include] a rewrite of a significant portion of the D3D12 rendering layer (which I estimated as needing three to six weeks of work for a single engineer, but the work was actually completed in about one week with a nice win on CPU time and fewer bugs), lots of help in keeping our internal test suites healthy as well as expanding those test suites for more coverage.”
Wassmer went on to add that Fortnite’s seen the additions of “automatic monitoring of PC stability”, “automatic root cause analysis and automatic fix generation”, which he claims have sped up the rectifying of long-running issues. He also noted that, engine-wise, Epic have been able to attempt “some larger architectural refactors with AI” than they previously could due to the amount of file changes required.
The dev went on to confirm that the Epic Store launcher preview released the other week isn’t the only bit of vibe-coding the company have been up to, with the practice also being used in Unreal Engine development. “Yes, we are vibe-coding things,” he said. “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 also managed to fit in some justification as to why Epic see no other way forward then shoving a bunch of genAI into their development, largely parroting the typical talking point of ‘everyone’s going to be doing it soon and we can’t possibly be seen to miss out on that gold rush for short-term speediness, baby’. “We are more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism,” is one of the lines he actually said.
To be fair, at least Wassmer and Epic aren’t hiding the fact they’re embracing this stuff, as much as Timmy Sweens hates the concept of devs having to disclose their genAI use to prospective customers or users. Sometimes the desire of AI bros to shout about their use from the rooftops out of sheer marketing zeal has its positives, eh?
