Epic Games founder and CEO.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Since 2023, before Tim found the courage to speak up, I've held the same position as a game-industry account under my real name. 2024 and 2025 were a long winter of division, but now that spring has come and big names are starting to join in, I'm genuinely happy.
That said, beyond MCP, please give us a UE CLI and a UE equivalent of bpy soon 😁
Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up. There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it - and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company.
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Hello from Shanghai, where I’ll be presenting at UnrealFest later this week. And two weeks later, UnrealFest Tokyo.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
🎯 Smart game devs have always worked “rough to polished” so they can find the fun (prototype core game loop) before spending money on production quality code or assets making something pretty but not fun.
Engines like UE/Unity/Godot, combined with custom studio pipelines, helped us all iterate toward the fun more efficiently.
AI is the next evolution. It doesn’t replace the human designer. It allows the Designer game vision to be playable and testable more easily and cost effectively.
It makes game development once again viable for the small indie dev or team.
Yes! Fun comes first. Nothing is more painful than a game development cycle where there’s a massive investment in code and content but the game isn’t fun yet. Fortunately AI makes rough prototyping and trying out ideas way faster, and accessible to every designer.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Once again, the smartest people in the room have rational takes on AI. Game developers who are against what @TimSweeneyEpic is doing, take note:
Linux maintainers have declared that LLM usage is no longer required to be declared.
Linus Torvalds calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid'.
Linus adds, "Quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools."
Linux Maintainers Can Now Submit AI-Generated Code Without Declaring It ift.tt/RfvxBJc
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
As someone early in my career at Epic, I’ll share my experience, especially since a lot of this conversation is about what AI means for people just starting out. I love using this as a tool.
I think a lot of people don’t realize how much AI has changed, even since 2025. It’s not just “slop”. It’s been amazing at helping me as a designer work through more advanced technical challenges so I can focus more on what makes games feel fun. I use it, I enjoy it, and I’ve built 3 UEFN prototypes I’ve always dreamed of making in a WEEK with its help.
I’m speaking for myself here, and I understand why other early career developers have concerns. But I’ve been having a blast learning and building with it. If you haven’t tried it recently, give it another shot. You might be surprised by what you can build. It’s a whole different tool now from even just a few months ago!
If you have any questions on it, please feel free to ask me via DM or reply!
Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up. There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it - and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
🚨 PC GAME PASS is now being made playable on Linux and SteamOS through an unofficial open-source project called Xodus Nexus. 👀
• Xodus Nexus can browse, install and launch supported Microsoft Store / Game Pass PC games on Linux
• Uses a patched Xodus backend + Proton-based Nexus runtime
• Xbox sign-in and cloud saves work for supported games
• Forza Horizon 6, Gears of War: E-Day, Sea of Thieves, Avowed and others are listed as playable
• Games can be added directly to Steam as Non-Steam shortcuts
• New v0.3.8 adds Xbox achievements, playtime and last-activity tracking
• Controller navigation and Steam Game Mode integration are actively improving
• FACT: this is an independent unofficial project, NOT Microsoft, Valve or upstream Xodus
• FACT: compatibility remains game-dependent and Steam Deck support is still experimental
• SPECULATION: if development holds up, this could remove one of SteamOS/Linux gaming’s biggest remaining limitations
Game Pass library has been a massive missing piece for SteamOS.
Huge credit to domsvoboda and everyone testing it, but this is still early software so I wouldn’t treat Game Pass on Linux as completely solved yet.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Build faster with UEFN source assets, now on Fab
Starting today, you can license UEFN source assets on Fab. Source assets are complete, editable systems—AI and NPC behaviors, vehicles, weapons, UI, and environments—many of which are built with Verse and Scene Graph. Unlike reference files, they open directly in UEFN and you can edit them right away, cutting down on the time spent rebuilding systems that already exist.
Browse what's live on Fab, or find source assets in the Fab window without leaving UEFN.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
In a few years the entire game industry will look back and thoroughly realize they should have adopted AI tech earlier.
To state this more clearly: if you're a programmer in this industry and not using agents right now, something is wrong.
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, gets it. While many in the gaming scene still oppose AI, he primarily sees its advantages: ideas that would otherwise be labor-intensive to produce can be brought to life in a very short amount of time.
AI acts as an enabler, allowing creativity to be realized more quickly - it is by no means a hindrance. The acceleration we have witnessed in other fields is set to revolutionize the gaming industry as well; we are about to see an explosion in intellectual output.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
There’s never been a better time to make games - aka conjure up worlds with software. We bootstrapped ZombsRoyale to 140 million+ players with just 3 of us but much of the time went into optimizing and squeezing out tiny bits of performance to save costs. AI can now do this for you and leave you to do the things it can’t do: creativity (& vision).
The reason why Tim is prescient about this is because at Epic’s founding - so much code had to be written at the lowest level of programming (assembly). Having come from a reverse engineering background, you can see how “magical” ai is.
These days - hooking up IDA pro or Ghidra to Claude/Codex feels like wizardry. things that took years to do by hand, now takes days. This will be reduced to probably hours in <6 months.
When you understand the magnitude of this by following how fast AI is progressing, you realize where the world is going — it’s a little scary, ngl, but it’s going to be wild for those who truly leverage these tools.
Coincidentally, amidst this AI X GAMING debate on X, my cofounder just informed me that our 96 Nvidia B300s have just arrived - we’ve readied our own post-trained OSS models to run them 24/7 on these machines and we have a good vision for what we want to do with them.
It is our first time on Unreal Engine after 10 years of Unity, but it’s never been a better choice. In 30 days, we’ve made things that we thought only possible with 1000x our budget and 300x our headcount.
We live in exciting times.
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
I’m 100% with Tim here, and have been for over a year now. Many false equivalencies have been put up as counter examples, but the simple economic math breaks through it all:
- AI tools bring the horizon closer, moving the cost of pursuing ideas out of the realm of risk and expense into that of “time” and “cognitive effort”
- creativity and craft maintain their supreme reign, even if the pieces between idea and playable experience have changed (which has been the case since Spacewar! showed up on a screen in the MIT lab)
The games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back, will soon become possible. As will the games developers wanted to build, but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
somehow missed this reply from big T, but this is insane.
unreal is already one of the most capable engines out there, and epic is actively working to make ai-assisted prototyping just as fast as it is with lightweight web engines.
the potential here is massive.
About 5x faster to prototype right now with Unreal Engine and 10x with ThreeJS. Working to reverse the gap by year end.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
I'm doing it, I'm loving it and I get extreme value out of it. They can call me a "talentless hack" all day long but I've been in engineering and design for 2/3 of my life. And now I'm doing it with AI.
Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up. There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it - and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Tim Sweeney gets it.
AI won't replace creativity. It will remove barriers that have kept countless talented people from turning their ideas into actual games.
Not everyone has the budget to hire a studio or spend years mastering every aspect of game development.
AI gives more people a chance to create, but it doesn't guarantee they'll make something good. That still takes vision, creativity, and effort.
The next gaming masterpiece might come from someone who could never have made a game without AI.
That's the golden age Tim is talking about, and I'm all for it.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney believes AI could lead to a “golden age of gaming.”
He says AI could change the way games are made by helping devs with many of the repetitive and time-consuming parts of development.
According to Sweeney, this could allow smaller teams to create games that would normally require much larger teams and much bigger budgets.
“We’re entering a golden age of gaming.”
Sweeney doesnt want to replace devs and believes AI can handle more of the technical work while developers spend more time on ideas and creativity.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
Gabe Newell and Tim Sweeney using 30” Apple Cinema Displays circa 2004.
The 30-inch used dual DVI connectors and had a 16:10 2560x1600 resolution.
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Epic cooked here, browsing games actually feels fun again!
When Epic gets things wrong, we should call them out, but when they do something good, we should give them credit too.
And honestly, aside from a few minor details, this Discovery design is by far the best one we’ve had so far. It looks amazing!
Good job Epic 👏!
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
It’s good for Tim to talk about all this publicly. Us devs have been in the trenches being assaulted by AI haters in games. The discussion is over. Stop fighting it. No one is lesser because of it. Let’s make games and stop attaching morals to how they are made. People just want to create. Let us cook.
This is bullshit, Kenney. I’m the same tech tree following optimist who moved from C to C++, from 2D to 3D, and from closed source to open source. I run a company. I write code. I contribute to published papers. I’ve upped my expectations of AI. Up yours!
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
The real moat in game dev has been and always will be artistic judgement, business skills, and game design.
AI doesn't change any of that.
Made a quick video for any indie dev who's been nervous about announcing their game lately
Not a strategy video. It's about the one thing in your game nobody can copy, and why that matters more than ever right now
This one's for you ❤️
piped.video/watch?v=HKfoKGnr…
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
I use AI to make my games, and I’m not afraid to say it.
Most developer friends I know use it too, but don’t dare say so publicly because they fear harassment and boycott campaigns from the anti-AI crowd.
Their silence doesn’t mean they aren’t using it. It means they’ve seen how you treat people who admit it.
Developers who are getting value from AI should speak up. There's safety in numbers. MOST developers are doing it and loving it - and if they're not talking about it it's mostly out of fear for haters attacking them, their product, and their company.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
100%. Creativity is now the bottleneck, not resources. A single person can now dream up and build a game that even a 1,000-person team couldn't have made just a year ago.
The games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back, will soon become possible. As will the games developers wanted to build, but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.
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Tim Sweeney retweeted
"Do not see AI as the bus driver, see it as a multiple performers in an orchestra where you are the maestro."
(was from LeCun or Carmack... i forgot)
Well, as you've probably noticed, there's a controversial discussion going on, and since controversy isn't something I shy away from, I'd like to chip in.
Specifically I would like to show example of using Ai acceleration to achieve YOUR vision while maintain absolute control over the result, hence this thread.
So here's a tool I've made, which I'll talk about a bit more in the comments.
#gamedev #indiedev
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