Following Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney’s announcement from earlier this month that the company is undergoing “a huge pivot” with a focus on “maximum AI acceleration”, the company has now confirmed that it is using AI for the development of features in Unreal Engine. In a statement to This Week in Videogames, Epic said that AI is being used to “develop code for Unreal Engine”.
Interestingly, Sweeney had said last year that Epic wasn’t using AI tools for development. In a more recent social media post, however, he confirmed that, “Yes, we are now using AI tools to develop code for Unreal Engine.” Sweeney’s earlier statement revolved around Valve requiring game publishers to disclose the use of generative AI for player-facing things like assets in Steam store listings.
This also follows Epic’s recent announcement of a new Preview version of the Epic Games Launcher that the company has said was “vibe coded” because “programming is hard”. The company has claimed that this new version of its launcher is “way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.” In charts showcasing performance, Epic has claimed that the new launcher can boot up from a cold start 46 percent faster than Steam, with a 14 percent performance boost over Valve’s storefront when restoring the app from the system tray.
As for the future of Unreal Engine, Epic Games had offered a look at the next version of the popular game engine back in June. At the time, development lead Marcus Wassmer said in a statement that the engine will unify Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite. He had also said that the company was still investigating “what works and what doesn’t work for code generation” with AI.
In further statements about the next version of Unreal Engine, Wassmer had offered more specific details about what kinds of AI tools were being used for its development. Along with things like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, tools are also being used to eliminate “non-deterministic cooking bugs” as well as accelerate work on shader compression.
“Not only that, we’ve started deploying automatic monitoring of PC stability on Fortnite that’s already detecting issues with specific driver/hardware combinations and features that would previously have taken months to root cause, as well as automatic root cause analysis and automatic fix generation that together have started to measurably improve the long tail of gnarly PC issues in Fortnite and Unreal Engine.”
Generally speaking, Wassmer has acknowledged that the AI-based tools are “helping us not just develop code and features, but to keep the engine more stable as we work, trim, and streamline it, and really modernize it in a way that we haven’t been able to before given the size, complexity, and age of the engine code.”
In the meantime, Sweeney has continued to be quite vocal with his criticisms regarding Valve’s policy on the disclosure of AI use in game development, and has said that Epic Games welcomes projects that make use of the technology.
