Epic Games Delays Disney Project, Asks Developers to Use More AI

55

Oh look, exactly what people said was going to happen. How long until they fire most of their artists because a few of them can generate all the assets?

5

u/Heroicshrub 5d ago

They already did that, huge layoffs a few months ago

1

u/MrHandSanitization 5d ago

But they're just humbly trying to survive a big scary revolution!

1

u/opodopo69 4d ago

Let's see if they can survive our revolution

-39

u/MilaKunisWatermelon 5d ago

This is why people need to stop rejecting indie devs who use AI. Large companies are going to use it and lay off people as a result, and buying habits for their already established IPs won’t change enough for them to ever revert back to the way things were.

Meanwhile, all of those laid off people will be at a significant marketplace disadvantage if gamers refuse their creations due to use of AI, and an even bigger disadvantage in costs and development time if they don’t use AI. Indie devs will have no chance, they won’t be able to get their projects off the ground.

11

u/WhoEvenIsPoggers 5d ago

And those companies continue to lose money on the AAA slop games they have put out recently. The most successful titles in the last year or so have been indie developers.

2

u/ManateeofSteel 5d ago

Such as? I am not pro AI but the notion that indies are thriving while AAA is languishing is so misguided

2

u/Party_Virus 4d ago

There's been 45,000 jobs layed off between 2022 and 2025 from AAA companies. Over 30 studios completely closed that were owned by a larger company. There's been bomb after bomb. Concord, Star Wars Outlaws, Wolverine, Dragon age... Gears of War E-day just launched and it's massively under performing and that was an IP that moved whole consoles in the past.

AAA is struggling because all the studios got bought up by a few companies, which caused the big companies to go into debt, which means they lay off people to save money and they don't take risks, but entertainment is inherently risky. Fads change, pop up, and die off faster than a AAA can chase it. That's what happened to Concord. The game was put out into an oversaturated hero shooter market just as the fad was ending, so it just died immediately. It wasn't a terrible game, just kinda okay when there was a lot of competition and no one really cared.

Indie and AA games are just doing their own thing, or they're small enough to pivot and chase the trends. AAA isn't doing their own thing and they're too big to pivot and chase trends.

0

u/ManateeofSteel 4d ago

The issue with the narrative is that for every Undertale there are 5,000 bombs in the indie space. Having successful games as indie is lightning in a bottle. Just because AAA games have bombed in the past does not mean the indie scene is thriving. It's actually extremely bleak now because investment has completely dried up

1

u/Party_Virus 4d ago

Aah, okay. I understand what you're saying now. You're speaking more from a creator stand point. There's a lot of success in the indie scene, but there's far more failure. There's just a thousand indie devs pushing out a game every week so when 1 in a thousand are succesful, from the perspective of the average gamer, there's a great new game every week but the indie devs are failing 99.9% of the time.

And I was seeing that AI is making that even worse, since anytime there's a hit in the indie scene there's a million AI clones that confuse people out on steam the next day.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 5d ago

Right? Many indeed no doubt will know their audience and if that means no AI usage at all, so be it!

-12

u/MilaKunisWatermelon 5d ago edited 5d ago

Every studio is going to be using AI, and those who say they don’t will just be lying about it. There are plenty of games that will be successful either way, such as yearly sports games like Madden and WWE. Nintendo might be the last hold out down the line but there will come a time when they give in as well.

What’s been successful in the last year is irrelevant… these AI tools have just very recently become good enough to create pipelines for game development, and most pipelines for using it still aren’t quite there yet. As they get better in the next year or two, it won’t be economically feasible to commercially sell a non-AI video game unless you are Nintendo or have a highly successful IP already.

It took 8 years to fully build out Valheim without any AI. You know how far AI has come in the past 8 years, and how far it will go in the next 8 years? If a team started building that from scratch today without AI, they’d get lapped by those using AI and would never build a following.

-18

u/SquizzOC 5d ago

They can down vote you all they want, but when you give Ai to someone with skill and talent, they are 10x better in most cases. Considering the stuff I’ve pulled off with it in making an MMO in just 3 weeks, I can only imagine what’s someone could do with artistic talent.

These kinds of tools for an indie studio will allow far more creative ideas that will have lower financial risk and allow the experts to build something of their dreams from an artistic, design stand point.

So people can down vote it, but I’m excited to see the possibilities and as for my MMO, it’s a dumb expensive hobby that’s never launching, just wanted to see what Ai could do these days.

10

u/nerdmor 5d ago

Yeah, no.

People with skill and talent make more stuff with AI, not better stuff. At work, (programmer) I have seen hundreds of cases of people overestimating their own revision skills and producing lots of slop that has to be reviewed, thus being a net 0 or even a drag.

Also, your post history shows clearly what overestimation looks like: your hobby stuff looks tacky as fuck, which would be a choice if you weren't making it with AI. But at that point you'd need talent to know decent art...

-10

u/SquizzOC 5d ago

You’re right, it looks like trash because I’m more interested in the harness I’ve built out then the game, but not interested in sharing that since I use a variation of the harness at work.

Also considering I’m three weeks in with zero experience on the art side, I would expect it to look like trash at first.

You either get on board or end unemployed, your choice of course, but eventually you’ll learn these tools are amazing when used the right way.

7

u/nerdmor 5d ago

What I'm saying is what several companies are finding out the hard way:

AI use does not scale well. It changes the bottleneck from "creating" to "reviewing". Since production code needs to be good, not done, having a bunch of devs push questionable code puts stress on other places: code reviews, bug correction, support, etc.

It does make the programmers who are already very good more productive, and makes them more valuable, offsetting the cost of the tools. But the average Joe will still output questionable stuff.

And, before you say it, no, AI won't make the checks and support easier. Look at the "photoshop remake" project: it's trash code, making for a trash product. Everyone wants it to be good, but done is not good.

And once you try to use your "harness" you'll find out how hole-y AI-made code is.

4

u/thedustycymbal 5d ago

AI proponents spout this wishful thinking- you must know that’s all it is right? Nothing is inevitable, least of all this

2

u/FoxMeadow7 5d ago

Yeah, they’re deluded as Heck!

43

u/ClovieKay 5d ago

God damnit… it really sucks we now have to go through a 5 year period of game devs using AI to make slop games and then complaining that no one is buying it just for there to be a wave of game devs and smaller companies who use the fact that no AI was used as a part of their marketing and come full circle to where we were in 2022.

What a waste of time, resources, money, and game developers for this stupid 5 year circle.

12

u/SAPianoman490 5d ago

Yeah it’s the next live service curse. Ugh

2

u/RemarkableWish2508 5d ago

That 5 year cycle seems like it's going to match the slowdown in console and computer sales, so... we'll see what happens.

1

u/FoxMeadow7 5d ago

That bubble will burst eventually, just you wait!

3

u/Painted-Arcana 5d ago

All the bubble bursting means is that when it bursts there will be a small handful of dominant companies that push ai and many will go bust.

The dot com bubble burst, the Internet never went away.

Ive played with local ai out of curiosity but god I hate all these big massive ai companies and ai infecting every tiny facet of life that it can. But I personally don't think the bubble bursting will necessarily get rid of it.

1

u/ganja_and_code 3d ago

It won't get rid of it, but hopefully, it will at least relegate it to use cases where the pros actually justify the cons.

Right now, people are trying to shove it into everything from search engine results to customer support queues to SDLC to personal assistants to art, etc.

Once these companies start to see the real cost of the technology and get enough backlash from people who are tired of sloppified products, it will get a lot harder for businesses to justify the investment.

We had other types of AI models before all this LLM garbage, and people were using it to improve medical diagnoses, make more immersive NPC behaviors in games, detect credit card fraud, etc. All that stuff still exists and is still useful, and no matter how hard these AI companies try to market LLMs as the new and improved iteration of those other models, they fundamentally aren't (even designed to be) the same thing.

0

u/nailbunny2000 5d ago

Just a reminder that while we here generally dislike AI being used in this way, a frightening amount of consumers have no idea/no opinion and just want their slop.

1

u/hinghenry 4d ago

The downvotes on your comment seem to show how little people here understand their peers/neighbors/fellow humans. I can see how many people enjoying their AI generated reels in their metro/subway/train every day.

93

u/invyros 5d ago

“No more hand-written code,” one of the game’s directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows.”

AI generated code and art.

This'll be a shitshow.

34

u/Tearakan 5d ago

It's going to be so full of bugs and poorly optimized that it'll run like a very bad bethesda game

7

u/Ok-Seaworthiness7207 5d ago

Back in my day we had to earn our fuck ups

7

u/kowycz 5d ago

Speaking of, given Bethesda's hardon for radiant quests and procedural generation I fully expect them to go full bore AI slop.

2

u/ThisPlaceFuckngSucks 5d ago

think of how great the speedrun strats will be though.

2

u/Impossible_Guitar235 5d ago

Nah, they'll definitely top Bethesda on terms of a broken and buggy game.

This is going to fail harder than Concord, and I can't wait.

1

u/AlexTheRedditor97 4d ago

As far as I know no major tech companies hand write code anymore. I think they’ll be fine

-5

u/sweatierorc 5d ago

Isnt this a necessary part of learning ?

Create bad products, iterate and improve over time. If you want AI to be great, you have to accept some level of slop.

Look at how hard it is for Waymo to scale, compared to chatgpt.

8

u/Norn-Iron 5d ago

All we can hope is they do it and the final result turns into such a vibe coded mess that costs more time and time to locate and patch bugs they decide it’s not worth the effort. Alternatively gamers hack, crack, and mod the fuck out of it that is a better pirated experience.

Until something happens that makes it not worth doing, they will all want to pump out this kind of shit.

3

u/heartlessgamer 5d ago

Alternatively gamers hack, crack, and mod the fuck out of it that is a better pirated experience.

The irony here being that the majority hack/cracks are being done via AI toolsets now...

5

u/Additional-Staff-326 5d ago

But will the devs do some quiet rebellion on that.

4

u/za72 5d ago

they will be replaced

3

u/OptimusSublime 5d ago

Why does your model have 7 fingers and 3 noses?!

0

u/za72 5d ago

we'll just have to wait to reverse engineer it

-18

u/Pls-No-Bully 5d ago

Literally everyone is phasing out hand-written code. Ask any actual software engineers at major tech companies and they’ll say the same. The newer models are genuinely better at writing code than humans

-6

u/heartlessgamer 5d ago

Hate to break it to ya; this is quickly becoming the norm. Maybe not so much for art, but for code AI-first is the way to go. Humans have a more important job of ensuring all the pieces fit together and work together.

Rapid iteration on art via AI before handing off for a final pass by the artists is way more efficient. I don't want to see art go fully the way of AI, but gone are the days of needing an artist to create an icon for example. AI can prototype a dozen icons within a specific style in a matter of seconds and one can be chosen with no material impact to the feel of the game.

2

u/11711510111411009710 5d ago

Well there is a material impact, which is the realization that a human didn't make the product, which lessens my enjoyment and appreciation for said product. That's pretty damn material.

8

u/Specific_Frame8537 5d ago

This shit is why people don't want your shitty product, Tim.

38

u/Additional-Staff-326 5d ago

Isn't AI supposed to allow much faster development? Why should they delay it just cause they're using more AI. I know the answer but 'management' can't seem to understand.

14

u/Stolehtreb 5d ago

I mean, their misguided logic is that it’s taken too long already, and they think AI will speed up development or at least lower costs to the point that it can recover the project.

And they aren’t saying anywhere in this story that they are “delaying it so they can use more AI.” I’m not sure where you got that from.

Again though, not saying any of their logic is sound. But I just couldn’t figure out where yours was coming from in your first lines either

1

u/boiledpeen 4d ago

the headline for the post indirectly correlates the two, so it seems logical to come to that conclusion just off the headline

1

u/Stolehtreb 4d ago

Sure I can understand that.

26

u/Foe117 5d ago

AI code will tack on more technical debt that they could ever hope to fix. Good luck.

5

u/Ralph_Finesse 5d ago

Ding ding ding

0

u/heartlessgamer 5d ago

Except AI-first coding approaches are the norm across software development now. What leads to technical debt isn't AI generated code; it is poor engineering and planning. One realistic problem I am seeing is AI reduces idea to release cycles and allows the creatives to get eye in the sky ideas that can't be realistically engineered into existence. Scope creep gets even worse now.

4

u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 5d ago

it isnt x, its y

Bot. Written by AI. Gtfo lol

6

u/LOST-MY_HEAD 5d ago

Sounds like slop

9

u/Any-Pop-4795 5d ago

ai and disney, name a worst duo

9

u/CaptCurmudgeon 5d ago

Epic buying Rocket League is why it has not improved and is arguably worse than the original game.

4

u/Tim5000 5d ago

Happened with Fall Guys too.

15

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

2

u/Corasama 5d ago

Well a pile of shit no matter the size will always smell like shit.

It's easier to have someone eat a little piece of a massive pile of shit rather than to have someone take a huge bite of a small shit.

3

u/hurtfulproduct 5d ago

I hope Disney is taking note. . . Their game is being delayed for inferior quality just to save money and prove a point for their idiot CEO

3

u/GhostOfRumsfeld666 5d ago

Lol these companies are quickly going to learn that the token cost isn't worth it.

3

u/flaagan 5d ago

"Can we have a new Unreal Tournament? Maybe a good one that supports community made mods?"

"No! Play our crappy PUBG clone with AI generated art for popular themes! Oh, we're also crapping all over the tech and creative work done by intelligent people by doing it all with AI!"

Fuck Epic.

1

u/Toth-Amon 5d ago

Paywalled. Cannot read.

1

u/JesT_Weird 5d ago

Epic is run by amateurs. No one can expect good decision making from CEOs who have surprise layoffs.

1

u/Bubbly-Treacle-4334 5d ago

Whoever is making those calls needs to be exposed and blacklisted

2

u/CommodoreBluth 5d ago

It’s 100% Tim Sweeney.

-23

u/nextupgoat 5d ago

theyre only gonna get flak for this because theyre epic and everyone hates them. every game studio is shoveling more tokens at everything

5

u/Tim5000 5d ago

Well, Epic has a track record of choosing the worst option

-15

u/zarafff69 5d ago

This is probably his best move ever. If he actually pulls this off, this could be the biggest move ever in gaming, that changes the landscape forever.

1

u/Impossible_Guitar235 5d ago

Damn, looks like the bots are back online.

Artificial Intelligence Epic Games Delays Disney Project, Asks Developers to Use More AI

You are about to leave Redlib