> “No more hand-written code” and that the game will be “generated with full AI workflows,” employees were reportedly “stunned,” which many hoped the news was some kind of sick joke.

The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.

This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.

At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.

Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.

There’s this tendency for a lot of tech folks to think their expertise in tech gives them special insights into other disciplines. Often when this happens, they’ll be doomed by missing many of the details that the old domain experts took for granted. I feel like AI is going to supercharge that. Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI. The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.

"No more hand-written code"

Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?

Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.

AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.

i miss the days when my text editor was a blackbox to those above me in the org chart.

Epic fail incoming?

This is why I haven’t been able to play split screen Fortnight with my son for the past several seasons.

You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.

Code is not the hard part of game development.

Contemporary AI is absolutely trash at things like scene graph management and lighting concerns. It also doesn't do physics, materials, SFX or "fun" very well.

Do not let the apparent visual progress of diffusion models conflate things. Unless we intend to run the entire game via diffusion models (which is certainly possible), I don't think this represents a reasonable baseline against which any amount of AAA art capacity can be compared. The number of units is here is effectively zero. A single AAA artist is infinitely more productive than GPT6 because they can produce and iterate content that the model simply cannot.

Skull Emoji

Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code

Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself

but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?

Gonna be interesting flop

I don't think this strategy will flop.

AI is perfectly capable of doing all of the coding for games now, especially if you have your own engine (which Epic does), build around harnesses (which Epic does), and treat the job of making games like a job not a side-slop (which Epic does).

Maybe this will bring quality down, but I don't think so, at least not more than the usual crunch + Disneyification.

Either way, the more interesting effect of this is not Epic making another IP licensed shooter, but more people making/modding into existence the games they want. This is already happening. And that's probably what was the genesis of this policy from Epic.