By 
Epic Games went gone all-in on AI, in what is possibly the greatest misreading of the room I have ever seen by a games company. It started with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier revealing that a Disney-licensed shooter being worked on by Epic is pivoting to an AI-first workflow, where art and code must use AI tools. This was then followed up by Epic smugly announcing a fully vibe-coded launcher for the store.
I’m not quite sure who these announcements were for, considering the broad unpopularity of AI in games. A game stuffed with AI code feels like a recipe for disaster, not to mention a hazard to a user’s security. Epic’s reveal of the slop browser felt oddly pathetic as it tried to position this as an improvement over Steam because it launches fractionally faster. Which was made extra sad once it turned out that Valve had quietly rolled an update for this the day before that made it even faster anyway.
The only person I can think of who is pleased by these announcements is Epic’s own CEO, Tim Sweeney. He’s famously big on AI, and even more famously anti-Steam. This was most notably seen when he criticized Valve for requiring developers to disclose AI usage on Steam store pages, claiming that it hurts small developers. While he does have a point, as studies have shown that AI disclosures led to reduced sales across the board, if he had the self-awareness to figure out the truth. Which is that this isn’t Steam punishing developers who use AI. This is customers clearly stating they doesn’t want AI slop.
Epic Games is adopting this pro-AI stance because, in the company’s own words, “programming is hard.” And it certainly is when you’ve laid off all your programmers! Now the company has a storefront entirely coded by AI, meaning that no one who prompted Claude (or whatever tool they used) has any idea how to fix the code if it goes wrong. To be clear, this is a launcher for a storefront, something that you will be putting your credit card info into. I’m not sure I trust that, especially with countless news stories of AI agents running amok in secure systems.
As for the Epic Games AI-focused development pipeline, it’s hard to see what good comes out of that. Epic’s development output is mostly Fortnite skins at this point. An IP-focused Marvel and Star Wars crossover already sounds like an idea cooked up by corporate executives. But add on the idea that no human-created code is allowed to be in this game and I fail to see how it wins over anyone.
What Tim Sweeney fails to realize is that the skill in programming isn’t just writing lines of code. It’s about being proficient enough with it to know how to solve any problems that emerge. This is how buggy games get patched, or how overtuned mechanics get nerfed. It’s in the creative solutions developers can come up with to make something work, even if the end result looks silly on the back end.
Tim Sweeney may be proud of the slop he’s putting front and center of his company, but it’s not going to do much to endear the already Epic-averse public from engaging with it. Fundamentally, if Epic aren’t going to bother putting effort into making its games or store, why should anyone bother playing them or shopping there?
