> “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.
I think you'd be also stunned about the custom scripting/tooling studios have built for themselves over the years. Like the Blueprint system of Unreal, and plenty of low-code scene editors and map editors.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.
The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.
Or perhaps the fact that they were stunned should tell you that it's not quite as standard as you think, industry-wide...?
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
I agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> “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.
I think you'd be also stunned about the custom scripting/tooling studios have built for themselves over the years. Like the Blueprint system of Unreal, and plenty of low-code scene editors and map editors.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.
The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.
Or perhaps the fact that they were stunned should tell you that it's not quite as standard as you think, industry-wide...?
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
I agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.
Agreed, you've got to have had your head in the ground to be "stunned" by what is largely "industry standard" now.
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.
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.
i miss the days when my text editor was a blackbox to those above me in the org chart.
Omg I've been thinking about this... You have to use company provided tooling and they're sure to log every single thought of yours.
Epic fail incoming?
Does Disney really need a bunch of random dudes to prompt Claude for them?
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.
That sounds like a bug and not a feature.
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?
From direct experience it's just fine to carefully, thoughtfully do gamedev coding with AI.
Gonna be interesting flop
Epic will blame the workers and say they sabotaged it, I predict.
Are they trying to get bought by MBS like Electronic Arts? They know that AI figures from Slop Wars will be hated by gamers. But MBS buys any crap.
Arguably, that game is the right testing ground for this kind of development pattern.
Ashes to ashes. Slop to slop.