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Epic Games CEO says it’s ‘really irresponsible’ of Steam to make studios disclose AI use | VGC - 25th Jun 2026 (www.videogameschronicle.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.ml
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Tim Sweeney claims it’s a “Scarlet Letter” which makes players “try to kill the game”

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has criticised rival Valve for forcing studios to disclose when they use AI in game development.

Epic recently showed how it was integrating AI into Unreal Engine 6.

Time Sweeney said:

“If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game.

“I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”

Which is totally ignoring the factor that the user should know about the purchase it makes and be able to decide for themselves. Transparency for the player is not a bad thing.

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[–] 11 points 1 month ago

Wait, so studios will have to avoid using AI tools, but then other people that do use those tools will be eating their lunch? Either there are a significant number of people that will base purchasing decisions on whether a game used AI in production, or there are not. This is a trivial question to answer by polling customers, or looking at what happens with competing products in your market segment, or any other variety of basic market research. Companies have to work with questions like this constantly.

Epic is exclusively mad because they think there are many people that will avoid (or pay less for, or delay purchase, or expect higher quality, or more worthwhile content, or... Anything like that) games that are produced with AI, and every game made with UE6 will have to bear that scarlet letter, and suffer lower sales. If they really believed you can make much bigger and better games with the new tools, then they would do it, and people will get over their skepticism to play fun games.

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