Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been in a bit of a one-sided beef with Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell for a while now, lately about Steam's AI disclosure that requires developers to include a label informing Steam users of AI-generated content. Sweeney has had a number of complaints about Valve's storefront over the years, which makes sense as he owns one of its main competitors, the Epic Games Store, but he's been doubling and tripling down on the AI disclosure issue as of late. In a new interview, he not only sharply rebukes the AI label, but embraces AI in game development to degree rarely seen by him or other industry leaders.
Talking to GamesBeat, Sweeney gives one of the most bullish takes on AI generation in games I've seen in my many years covering this topic. Get on-board or die, is essentially his perspective.
"It's really clear to me that large-scale game developers–setting aside indies, where there's always going to be specialties and niches, large-scale game development will be totally changed by AI," Sweeney says. "Teams that don't adopt it will absolutely be left behind and rendered uneconomical, non-viable compared to their peers."
Sweeney says he's against any kind of legislation to curb the use of AI in game development in the US because it would give other countries the advantage. "Everyone is going to be adopting it," he says. "When one team can make a game four times more efficiently – 10 times more efficiently soon, perhaps – than another team can make the same game, there's just no possibility of competing the old way. No game developer has 75% to 95% profit margins that they can put at risk by not being as productive as possible."
There has been massive backlash to AI in games from players, voice actors, artists, and indie developers, but messaging from big studios and publishers generally ranges from cautiously optimistic to vocally and enthusiastically supportive. Meanwhile, a report from GDC found that 55% of respondents said AI was having a negative impact on the industry. Still, Sweeney wants to make sure companies aren't being bullied into choosing human workers over AI.
"Because there's a big resistance movement against AI that seems concentrated on trying to bully developers into not adopting it by attacking individuals, by review-bombing projects and so on, I've been trying to make my views known to as many game developers as possible," he says. "We have to power through this and build awesome games, use maximum acceleration, because it is a survival issue for all the companies in the industry."
Sweeney has called Valve's AI policy "abhorrent," politically motivated, and nonsensical among other things, and we can add another descriptor to the pile today: toxic. When GamesBeat pushes back and suggests Steam's AI label is there to inform players, Sweeney says he doesn't "buy it in the slightest," pointing to Steam's user review system as a means to let players know about "a game's quality, scope, entertainment value and so on." Ultimately, he says AI can be a force for good and bad in game development, and he sees Valve's mandatory disclosure as a judgment on the technology as a whole.
"You can build good games and bad games without AI. You can build good games and bad games with AI. You can repeat those distinctions for all engines, all development tools, all methodologies, all countries of origin, all teams and so on," says Sweeney. "If we were to identify AI as associated with bad games, that's just unfair to developers who use AI to make good games. It's a guilt by association pattern that all developers need to push back on."
Sweeney argues that Steam's AI disclosure is "being used toxically here, because it's absolutely being used by anti-AI advocates to undermine the reputations of developers and the viability of their projects."
Newell himself has yet to respond to Sweeney's many tirades, but prominent former Valve developer Chet Faliszek hit back in a YouTube video in which he called Sweeney's behavior "AI psychosis." Faliszek also argued that Sweeney was "treating all the players like children" and advised him to "act as a player yourself for a moment and go, 'What would I want to know about a game?'"
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