Epic Games has reportedly delayed a shooter based on Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars franchises, with its developers told to use more AI. According to Bloomberg, the yet-to-be-named game was supposed to be released in March of 2027, but its launch date has been pushed back to an unspecified date. Aside from that, the company also told the people working on the project to switch to an "AI first" production model. One of the game directors was quoted telling staff that there will be “no more handwritten code” and that the game’s art would now be "generated with full AI workflows."

Can't wait for the game to fall over due to excessive cheating.

'Disney shooter'

It's Marvel and Star Wars, so not that unusual aside from it being a crossover.

Epic are reportedly going all-in on integrating AI tooling into the next version of the Unreal Engine. I wonder if this is a test run for that, and if they'll backtrack on the idea once this catastrophically fails.

Probably not. Tim Sweeney is infamously stubborn about admitting his mistakes.

You can't have a cheating problem if nobody plays your game. *taps forehead*

I assume they are trying to reduce the need for skilled programmers. Over time, this will make skilled programmers near extinct, the pay will go down since the skill ceiling will lower, and there will be less jobs. The general population is doing it to themselves by allowing it.

Yeah, makes it sound like princesses are going to battle it out.

Except that that would be actually semi-creative instead of yet-another-hero-shooter in the year 2027+.

People will play, kids see that IP and go nuts for it.

Time for Anna and Elsa to finally throw hands.

I'm curious to see what that day-one patch is gonna look like.

Yeah, kids, sure.

Fuck literally everything about this

Good to know Epic will die when the AI bubble finally bursts.

Idk. I'm curious to see where this goes. Not sure why. Like fuck AI in many realms, but for gaming, I'm curious. Game developers were already in danger. For the past 10 years I kept hearing high turnover rate and poorly treated.

Fun! A new developer to boycott!

It won’t burst.

If you think it'll be the first bubble to expand for ever I've got some tulips to sell you

Ever heard of the housing bubble? We’re still waiting on that to pop.

A housing bubble (or housing price bubble) is one of several types of asset price bubbles which periodically occur in the market.

A bunch of them.

Okay. Neat. Still waiting for it to pop.

The point is that they don't pop just deflate and that happens all the time.

They are consumers not investors (I think). The bubble bursting will kill a lot of the frontier companies and their investors, but not directly consumers. At worst consumers have to make do without AI for a while, but more likely they will simply have to switch to a different LLM provider. Or maybe by the time the bubble bursts we have models good enough on hardware cheap enough to self-host them / run them locally.

Understood.

Blacklist Epic Games.

Did you just.... like..... forget about the 2008 housing crisis?

Except consumer demand for AI is fucking low, and professional demand for ai far outweighs the spend for AI. Meaning the infrastructure bill is going to come due and the amount of revenue coming in will not be able to support that.

This doesn't even get into the fact that a sizeable chunk of the AI revenue is just the Enron scheme happening again.

Did you not think that that’s the point I’m making? The housing crisis never ended. The bubble didn’t pop. Houses are more expensive now then they ever were.

I wasn't sure what you meant, hence my confusion.

I'm willing to bet Star Wars and Marvel have more old fans than young.

It's like they're trying to make a game that is as unappealing to me as possible.

Disney games do tend to feel generic.

The question is, was 2008 a housing bubble, or a banking scandal?

The market didn't become too much for consumers or sellers, overloading and resulting in rapid price deflation (eg. A bubble popping).

Instead Banks were doing dodgy accounting so that poor people were getting loans they shouldn't have been eligible for.

In fact, maybe we should have legalized some of what the banks were trying to do. Poor people getting a chance to buy the worst homes, the banks facing costs and fuss if they can't pay up. The burden of the housing crisis should be shifted a bit more onto banks and billionaires.

The cyclical economy has been a thing since economics started.

John Maynard Keynes proposed that we should tightening spending and save for a rainy day in boom times (taking money out of cycle), and splurge and spend to stimulate the economy when times were bad (flowing money into the dry cycle to top it up)... He thought the government should make those two counter moves happen. Make people save when times were good, and give them stimulus to spend when times were bad... Because it would smooth out the cycle and make markets and society appear more stable.

In practice whilst we can sometimes do the 'stimulus' part, businesses still tend to over spend in boom times, making the highs and lows worse.

Often society will vote in right wing austerity rulers when a crash happens, rulers who will cut services when the economy goes bust (starving the economy further rather than stimulating spending).

So the human inclination to save money when times are hard (keeping money out of cycle), and over spend when times are good (putting money in when they could afford to save for a rainy day) - is difficult to avoid.

Sure it won't.

If they rely on it so heavily as a part of their core business, then yes it will have quite the dramatic effect.

I can't think of any Disney game that became really famous/popular.

...and Unreal is pretty well known for just jamming characters into Fortnite.

The fact that it'll be AI is probably the only way it's going to get publicity.

Disney everything tends to feel generic. They ruined Star Wars and Marvel with mediocrity. Disney World hasn't changed much in decades. The only difference I noticed when I went in 2023 compared to the last time in 2007 (other than the massive increase in price) was that they removed the animals from Animal Kingdom and turned a third of that park into Pandora from Avatar. That part was kind of neat but definitely not worth selling both kidneys for. I could only afford it at the time because I collected a life insurance check. Someone had to die for me to afford Disney.

And crossover games feel souless and pandering.

How? LLMs won’t go away. If they rely on LLMs, they “just” need to switch the provider and potentially the model.

I thought they achieved that with fortnite.

They’re not all created equal. But I’m not here to convince you of anything. Enjoy your day!

There is not a single provider that operates on true costs. LLMs won't go away but they will either get a lot more expensive or worse for the same price.

Absolutely unhinged business decision in this, the year of our lord 2026.

you mean 6 AI (after intelligence)

I don't think we have to worry too much. I don't see how such a system is sustainable. AI requires references to work with. So if humans quit making those references, at best, it seems like AI generated products will become stagnant fast and at worst AI will fall apart feeding on itself.

"Wait, we didn't add enough enshittification! That's unacceptable"

Shoulda been doing that already tbh

I can't wait for what ever bullshit excuse They come up with when this blows up in their face.

Disney adults typically have kids, so yeah + Forknife

Good. I'm tired of epic games existing. Shame they're private, I'd love to short them. Easiest money ever.