Tim Sweeney retweeted
This is how cancel culture worked.
Once the debate is settled, everyone who joined the harassment will act like it never happened.
Once the debate is settled, everyone who joined the harassment will act like it never happened.
I spent my first year on this platform making lots of cool gamedev mutuals and my second year losing them all for trying to discuss AI too early
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
We will look back on games from today the way we look back at pong.
You simply won't be developing games on "base programming languages". Aside from niche/retro games, you won't be manually retopologising, or manually populating your MMORPG with an ecosystem. Gone are the yearly
Most games people play will be games *within* a guided, directed but fully generative world.
If you enjoy posting about AI use in games, make the most of it, because soon it will be 100% of all games that are using AI in some capacity.
On platforms that use AI. Shared on social graphs that use AI. To customers that use AI.
You simply won't be developing games on "base programming languages". Aside from niche/retro games, you won't be manually retopologising, or manually populating your MMORPG with an ecosystem. Gone are the yearly
Most games people play will be games *within* a guided, directed but fully generative world.
If you enjoy posting about AI use in games, make the most of it, because soon it will be 100% of all games that are using AI in some capacity.
On platforms that use AI. Shared on social graphs that use AI. To customers that use AI.
Devs should disclose AI use for the same reason I want to know if the eggs I buy are free range or battery hens.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
AI destroyed my industry. Real thing. I teach people. Always have. At one point I was earning 100k a month selling online coding courses.
Today I can’t make money with training videos if I wanted to. My peers have the same issue: AI is killing video courses. Why learn a tech skill when AI can do the work?
It’s frustrating. But it’s also an opportunity. Now I do more human coaching than ever before.
I spend way more time helping people reach outcomes (vs just a skill).
I’ve had to adapt. I have anxiety from time to time and working closely with people often drains me. But I’ve had to evolve how I work.
The same with coding and SAAS. Everything is changing.
It’s ironic, with AI I’ve personally been forced to be more human and connect at a more human level in order to connect with people and sell products. People are less tolerate of noise and slop.
I’m 40 and learning new things is harder. But I have to. And honestly, I’m having more fun learning AI than struggles and hardships.
All to say is that I’m navigating this changing world like everyone else and I think there is no need to group people in buckets of “Pro AI vs Against AI”
We are all people. And just because things are hard doesn’t mean they are wrong.
Today I can’t make money with training videos if I wanted to. My peers have the same issue: AI is killing video courses. Why learn a tech skill when AI can do the work?
It’s frustrating. But it’s also an opportunity. Now I do more human coaching than ever before.
I spend way more time helping people reach outcomes (vs just a skill).
I’ve had to adapt. I have anxiety from time to time and working closely with people often drains me. But I’ve had to evolve how I work.
The same with coding and SAAS. Everything is changing.
It’s ironic, with AI I’ve personally been forced to be more human and connect at a more human level in order to connect with people and sell products. People are less tolerate of noise and slop.
I’m 40 and learning new things is harder. But I have to. And honestly, I’m having more fun learning AI than struggles and hardships.
All to say is that I’m navigating this changing world like everyone else and I think there is no need to group people in buckets of “Pro AI vs Against AI”
We are all people. And just because things are hard doesn’t mean they are wrong.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Will parents have to be notified that a cancer cure uses Ai before they will use it on their son? Will they get public backlash for curing their child using Ai over letting him die by traditional means?
Anti-Ai people are in a cult. If you have to know an artist’s methods before you decide if his art is good, you don’t really love art.
I don’t understand why people are more in love with doctor’s tools, artist’s methods and director’s extra features than the thing they produce. I actually liked my video games, not just working on them using our intentionally-primitive analogue methods.
Speaking of process, did you hear the one about the butcher who backed into a meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?
Anti-Ai people are in a cult. If you have to know an artist’s methods before you decide if his art is good, you don’t really love art.
I don’t understand why people are more in love with doctor’s tools, artist’s methods and director’s extra features than the thing they produce. I actually liked my video games, not just working on them using our intentionally-primitive analogue methods.
Speaking of process, did you hear the one about the butcher who backed into a meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?
Tim Sweeney is criticizing Valve again over Steam’s requirement for developers to disclose their use of generative AI.
The Epic Games CEO called the policy “abhorrent,” arguing that developers are being forced to make a “political statement” that could be used against them by a s been criticizing the policy since 2025, previously comparing the disclosure to a “Scarlet Letter” and arguing that AI will eventually be part of almost every game production process.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Epic Games released an official plugin that lets Claude Code control Unreal Engine directly...
hundreds of editor tools across 30+ toolsets, installed straight from anthropic’s official plugin marketplace.
here’s how to set it up:
- step 1: in claude code run /plugin install unreal-engine-skills-for-claude-code@claude-plugins-official
- step 2: in unreal, enable the modelcontextprotocol and alltoolsets plugins
- step 3: open the editor console and run ModelContextProtocol.StartServer (default port 8000)
- step 4: run ModelContextProtocol.GenerateClientConfig ClaudeCode to create the connection config
- step 5: in claude code run /mcp and check that unreal-mcp is connected
- step 6: test it: “list all actors in the current level”
for teams: add the plugin to .claude/settings.json and everyone who opens the project gets prompted to install it
commit before every long session. claude edits live assets and can move or delete them in one call
github.com/EpicGames/unre…
hundreds of editor tools across 30+ toolsets, installed straight from anthropic’s official plugin marketplace.
here’s how to set it up:
- step 1: in claude code run /plugin install unreal-engine-skills-for-claude-code@claude-plugins-official
- step 2: in unreal, enable the modelcontextprotocol and alltoolsets plugins
- step 3: open the editor console and run ModelContextProtocol.StartServer (default port 8000)
- step 4: run ModelContextProtocol.GenerateClientConfig ClaudeCode to create the connection config
- step 5: in claude code run /mcp and check that unreal-mcp is connected
- step 6: test it: “list all actors in the current level”
for teams: add the plugin to .claude/settings.json and everyone who opens the project gets prompted to install it
commit before every long session. claude edits live assets and can move or delete them in one call
github.com/EpicGames/unre…
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
we took the red pill
built in Genex desktop with the Unreal Engine plugin + Opus 5.5
not a mod. the starting zone of Morrowind, vibecoded completely from scratch in our open-source app for game dev
play it: genex.games/morrowind-star…
built in Genex desktop with the Unreal Engine plugin + Opus 5.5
not a mod. the starting zone of Morrowind, vibecoded completely from scratch in our open-source app for game dev
play it: genex.games/morrowind-star…
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
In Unreal Engine 5.8, you can animate rig controls directly on your model.
👆Author controls directly on your character’s mesh, with intuitive click-and-drag posing and customizable colors and transparency.
✏️Edit PolyGroups directly in the Skeletal Mesh Editor and use Direct ntrol regions to rig states, such as IK or FK.
Learn more here: youtu.be/yi-oDmC1nqU?si…
👆Author controls directly on your character’s mesh, with intuitive click-and-drag posing and customizable colors and transparency.
✏️Edit PolyGroups directly in the Skeletal Mesh Editor and use Direct ntrol regions to rig states, such as IK or FK.
Learn more here: youtu.be/yi-oDmC1nqU?si…
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This is exactly what's happening.
Tim's making a really important point here and I think people fundamentally misunderstand it.
Let's paint a scenario. You are an indie developer and you want to make a game.
Traditional game development will take you 1 year and cost you $200,000 in outsourcing costs to buy itional programming resources.
AI assisted game development will take you 3 months and cost you $50,000 in credits + some additional resources.
In a good scenario your game could make $200,000 and break even, but in many scenarios you mortgage your house and no one sees your game and you are out your savings.
Now, with the anti-AI mania, Valve is forcing real economic harm on you because you get the equivalent of hate mobs at your door for your choice of tooling.
Your economic viability is harmed because Valve chooses to put a label on you that generates negative attention. It makes your economics worse.
Anti-AI proponents will point out that this proves their hate campaigns work. The appeal is not to them, because they are morons, but to developers to stand up to Valve and say remove these labels so that we can have livelihoods. And Valve makes money of you either way.
Stand up for your rights, devs!
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Tim's making a really important point here and I think people fundamentally misunderstand it.
Let's paint a scenario. You are an indie developer and you want to make a game.
Traditional game development will take you 1 year and cost you $200,000 in outsourcing costs to buy itional programming resources.
AI assisted game development will take you 3 months and cost you $50,000 in credits + some additional resources.
In a good scenario your game could make $200,000 and break even, but in many scenarios you mortgage your house and no one sees your game and you are out your savings.
Now, with the anti-AI mania, Valve is forcing real economic harm on you because you get the equivalent of hate mobs at your door for your choice of tooling.
Your economic viability is harmed because Valve chooses to put a label on you that generates negative attention. It makes your economics worse.
Anti-AI proponents will point out that this proves their hate campaigns work. The appeal is not to them, because they are morons, but to developers to stand up to Valve and say remove these labels so that we can have livelihoods. And Valve makes money of you either way.
Stand up for your rights, devs!
Let's paint a scenario. You are an indie developer and you want to make a game.
Traditional game development will take you 1 year and cost you $200,000 in outsourcing costs to buy itional programming resources.
AI assisted game development will take you 3 months and cost you $50,000 in credits + some additional resources.
In a good scenario your game could make $200,000 and break even, but in many scenarios you mortgage your house and no one sees your game and you are out your savings.
Now, with the anti-AI mania, Valve is forcing real economic harm on you because you get the equivalent of hate mobs at your door for your choice of tooling.
Your economic viability is harmed because Valve chooses to put a label on you that generates negative attention. It makes your economics worse.
Anti-AI proponents will point out that this proves their hate campaigns work. The appeal is not to them, because they are morons, but to developers to stand up to Valve and say remove these labels so that we can have livelihoods. And Valve makes money of you either way.
Stand up for your rights, devs!
@Filmbot There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
AI in video games are a confusing topic to me.
@TimSweeneyEpic recently got a lot of flak for pushing AI in game development.
There are opinion pieces left and right condemning AI use in game development.
Here I am, having worked for ~6 months on a game I released on Steam last week. And my sin, apparently, was using AI and disclosing it.
The comment section was pretty clear on that.
It's confusing to me. AI is a tool. IDE is a tool. A programming language is a tool. A graphics API is a tool. We're just using tools.
I've been writing software for about 3 decades now, I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing and am pretty good at it. I see AI as an incredible productivity booster.
It does some things that I pride myself on being good at, such as teasing out a math formula or optimizing an algorithm better than me most of the time (with a lot of handholding, granted), but for the most part it makes things I find tedious - fast.
As I software engineer, and a game maker, I take relatively little pride in knowing a programming language, or remembering 100 shortcuts in an IDE, or knowing a programming language spec by heart.
I remember the first time I needed to make an animated 3d model, almost 15 years ago now, and it took me about a week of full-time effort to get anywhere. I didn't feel particularly proud, I felt frustrated, I had a clear idea, but the tool and its complexity were getting in the way. Well, the tools are better now. Blender is better, animation tools are better, and there are AI models that keep improving at an incredible pace.
Ultimately, when I write a piece of software, or work on a game - I rarely think about the tools, they are a means to an end, not the point in itself.
@TimSweeneyEpic recently got a lot of flak for pushing AI in game development.
There are opinion pieces left and right condemning AI use in game development.
Here I am, having worked for ~6 months on a game I released on Steam last week. And my sin, apparently, was using AI and disclosing it.
The comment section was pretty clear on that.
It's confusing to me. AI is a tool. IDE is a tool. A programming language is a tool. A graphics API is a tool. We're just using tools.
I've been writing software for about 3 decades now, I'd like to think that I know what I'm doing and am pretty good at it. I see AI as an incredible productivity booster.
It does some things that I pride myself on being good at, such as teasing out a math formula or optimizing an algorithm better than me most of the time (with a lot of handholding, granted), but for the most part it makes things I find tedious - fast.
As I software engineer, and a game maker, I take relatively little pride in knowing a programming language, or remembering 100 shortcuts in an IDE, or knowing a programming language spec by heart.
I remember the first time I needed to make an animated 3d model, almost 15 years ago now, and it took me about a week of full-time effort to get anywhere. I didn't feel particularly proud, I felt frustrated, I had a clear idea, but the tool and its complexity were getting in the way. Well, the tools are better now. Blender is better, animation tools are better, and there are AI models that keep improving at an incredible pace.
Ultimately, when I write a piece of software, or work on a game - I rarely think about the tools, they are a means to an end, not the point in itself.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Unreal Engine 5, meet WebGPU.
Want to bring a UE game to the web? Then try Strata, our CI/CD distribution tool. Just a single prompt into Claude or Codex, and your UE game will be in WebGPU. Link here:
app.stratavcs.com @alightinastorm
Want to bring a UE game to the web? Then try Strata, our CI/CD distribution tool. Just a single prompt into Claude or Codex, and your UE game will be in WebGPU. Link here:
app.stratavcs.com @alightinastorm
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Lara, my GOAT 🤩 Celebrate 30 years of adventure with the @tombraider 30th Anniversary Sale! epic.gm/tomb-raider-30
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The crash in the game business nowadays is the first for the new generation of gamers, but only one of several in the history of games. Here are my thoughts from 2000 when a maker of beloved but long-unprofitable games went under.
Tim Sweeny's comment on the closure of Looking Glass Studios.
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Sometimes the creative magic that makes a game loved by some isn't accompanied by the economics of a viable business.
Game businesses are businesses, and though one can invest in anticipation of future profit or growth, ultimately a company must earn enough to pay the bills.
Game businesses are businesses, and though one can invest in anticipation of future profit or growth, ultimately a company must earn enough to pay the bills.
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This is a challenge all game makers face, and it's magnified during downturns.
The solution? Make a great game, make it efficiently, and set the budget based on to the size of the audience that will pay for it.
Technology that helps achieve that is, in my opinion, good.
The solution? Make a great game, make it efficiently, and set the budget based on to the size of the audience that will pay for it.
Technology that helps achieve that is, in my opinion, good.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
back in the day I learned a LOT about game programming from reading Unreal 4 source code.
their code always struck me as pragmatic. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. It solved the problem it needed to solve (most of the time). I always respected that.
so it's no surprise to me that again, Epic would follow the pragmatic decision and choose to adopt AI, despite inevitable public backslash. well done.
their code always struck me as pragmatic. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. It solved the problem it needed to solve (most of the time). I always respected that.
so it's no surprise to me that again, Epic would follow the pragmatic decision and choose to adopt AI, despite inevitable public backslash. well done.
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Vertical taskbar returns!
A great Windows experience starts with strong fundamentals and is ultimately defined by the moments people experience every day.
Our latest Windows 11 updates build on the foundational work we're doing across the product. They include more seamless phone-to-PC integration, a ience, a new Search experience, and new features for gamers. All designed to make everyday moments on your PC simpler and more intuitive.
More on what the team has been working on: blogs.windows.com/windowsexperie…
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The Australian Epic v Apple antitrust remedies were just issued, and are a huge victory for consumers and developers. We are studying the verdict and will share more soon.
The Court has freed Fortnite in Australia and it will return alongside the Epic Games Store…soon.
The Court has freed Fortnite in Australia and it will return alongside the Epic Games Store…soon.
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Also, for the first time ever on iOS, Australians will benefit from being able to install apps from the web as Scott Forstall had originally envisioned for iOS and Steve Jobs had vetoed, according to the publicly evidence record in Epic v Apple.
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