Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney believes artificial intelligence has crossed the line.
In an exclusive interview with GamesBeat, Sweeney said he believes AI is transforming game development, one that could make studios dramatically more productive, lower the risks of experimentation and unleash a new wave of game genres.
But he also sees a growing divide between developers embracing the technology and those resisting it, warning that studios that fail to adopt AI could find themselves unable to compete. And, as he tweeted recently, he believes rival platform Valve isn’t helping matters.
This kind of conflict over the usefulness of AI is playing out across gaming, as yesterday’s survey of 2,600 game professionals from GDC Festival of Gaming showed.
In our interview that also included Marcus Wassmer, Epic’s executive vice president of engineering, Sweeney described how rapidly improving AI tools are already changing the way Epic’s developers work. Sweeney estimates that AI is delivering productivity gains of four times or more in many areas, with improvements potentially reaching 10 times as the technology advances.
Wassmer cited an early Unreal Engine web deployment experiment that achieved as much as a 20-fold productivity improvement in its prototype phase.
The executives’ comments offer a glimpse of how Epic sees AI reshaping not just the production of games, but also the economics and creative possibilities of the entire industry. And that matters because their Unreal Engine is a foundation for developers to participate in that gaming economy.
Sweeney argues that AI will allow smaller teams to accomplish work that once required much larger staffs, while making it far less expensive to prototype, test and discard ideas that don’t work.
Our conversation touched on the controversy around overhyped innovations that have swept through gaming, such as blockchain and the metaverse. But Sweeney argued AI is different.
He thinks it’s coming just in time to address one of the biggest problems facing triple-A development: the enormous cost and risk of making games that don’t turn out to be fun enough. Sweeney said major projects have sometimes brought their playable experiences together too late in development, leaving teams insufficient time to experiment and improve them.
With AI accelerating prototyping, developers could find the fun much earlier and explore many more possibilities before committing to a costly production.
“We’re back in an age of experimentation,” Sweeney said. He predicted that faster development could lead to new genres and fresh combinations of existing gameplay ideas, particularly in areas such as shooters and massively multiplayer online games, where large-scale experimentation has been limited by the cost of development.
Wassmer described how Epic developers are already using AI to make changes to games during playtests, generating a new build while a session is underway and then resuming with the requested changes. He also discussed how AI is helping engineers and designers tackle projects that might previously have taken years, sometimes compressing the initial work into days or weeks.
The company’s recent Unreal Engine 5.9 preview, which adds a web GPU target, provided another example. Wassmer said a small group of engineers used fleets of AI agents to accelerate the work and get a preview ready for Epic’s Mega Jam this week. The prototype came together in a fraction of the time that such an effort would traditionally have required.
Epic is now cleaning up the implementation before calling it a finished release.
Sweeney criticized Valve’s requirement that developers disclose certain uses of generative AI on Steam, arguing that such disclosures have become a stigma that can overshadow the actual quality of a game. Good and bad games can be made with or without AI, he said, and consumers should judge games on their merits rather than the tools used to create them.
He said user game reviews are a great way for fans to signal any problems related to AI quality, or to tell players if a game is AI slop.
He sees AI adoption as an economic necessity, not simply a matter of personal preference. Developers in Asia, he said, are moving quickly to incorporate the technology, and studios elsewhere risk falling behind if they refuse to do the same.
Sweeney compared the transition to the move from horses to cars and from assembly language to higher-level programming languages, arguing that technological progress will continue despite political opposition, market volatility and concerns about overhyped AI companies.
Wassmer emphasized that the latest advances have made AI substantially more useful than it was even a year ago, particularly in coding and 3D content creation. He pointed to the growing capabilities of new models and said developers who dismissed the technology previously should take another look.
For Epic, the argument is that AI is no longer a distant possibility or an optional productivity tool. It is becoming a defining technology for how games will be imagined, built, tested and delivered.
We last caught up with Sweeney after Epic scored antitrust wins against the mobile platform owners. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Sweeney and Marcus Wassmer, executive vice president at Epic Games. (Note: We interviewed Sweeney before Nvidia’s Jensen Huang resigned over alleged affairs that raised corporate governance issues, and Sweeney has shared his opinion…