---
title: 'Tim Sweeney Interview: Epic Games CEO on AI in UE6 and Why Games Struggle to Find Success'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBPgVKXZFA8'
video_id: 'XBPgVKXZFA8'
date: 2026-06-24
duration_sec: 1027
---

# Tim Sweeney Interview: Epic Games CEO on AI in UE6 and Why Games Struggle to Find Success

> Source: [Tim Sweeney Interview: Epic Games CEO on AI in UE6 and Why Games Struggle to Find Success](https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBPgVKXZFA8)

## Summary



## Transcript

IGN caught up with founder and CEO of
Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, and EVP of
development, Marcus Wasmer, at Unreal
Fest 2026. We talked about performance
optimization with the upcoming UE6 and
how it could change game development, as
well as the increasing cost of hardware
and the current struggles across the
games industry with studio closures and
game shuttering. We also discussed the
controversial use of AI in game
development when it comes to artistic
value and its real world impact in light
of Unreal Engine's updated AI tools. So
many of the biggest games are built on
Unreal, so check out our recaps of the
state of Unreal keynote to see where
games are going in the future as you
stick with IGN. Now, here's our
interview.
I think it's two things like one as you
say just like efficiency of of
development like games are getting
bigger, games are you know getting more
difficult. So like all the architectural
work we're doing on the engine should
just smooth things out. Not to mention
um you know like AI creation flows. We
showed some demos today. Uh you know
really should take a lot of the tedium
out of of game creation. Let people just
actually focus on the creative part
which which would be really nice. Uh,
and then the really cool thing will be
the uh I think we're kind of inventing a
new kind of economy here hopefully with
the interconnected interoperable assets
like between games which I think is uh I
don't know if it's never been done but I
haven't I haven't seen it done at scale
at least anyway but
yeah I'm really looking forward to the
increased simplicity. Yeah, I wrote the
first generation Unreal Engine and with
every generation out of necessity of
taking advantage of new features of
hardware and um expanding the engine's
capabilities, we we've made the engine
progressively more and more complicated
with every generation to the point where
it's like somewhat daunting to open up
Unreal Engine 5 and look at the you know
five level manested uh menus in some
cases. Um, and the C++ programming model
really requires expert level programming
that the great cleanup in Unreal Engine
6 is to adopt diverse scripting language
that we've been pioneering in Fortnite
um with the Fortnite creator community
and bring that into UE6 as the primary
way to develop game gameplay code. So it
brings the ease of uh development of you
know an ease of programming that you
have in an engine like Unity or God um
together with the full power of of UE6
um you know all the high-end AAA feature
sets and to tame um you know complexity
of the engine the ability to prompt a
lot of different systems and you know
have it help you create a particle
system and tweak it um enable you to
focus on on the the details that really
matter rather than the boiler plate of
creating and you know you redoing the
same road actions over and over is going
to be really freeing. Um yeah, I think
it'll bring back some of the magic that
we had in earlier days and some of the
magic that each engine had in its like
first few years before each engine grew
more complex is that it just of making
it really easy to create stuff and you
know giving the the user an immense
amount of creative freedom and the
feeling that they can exercise it pretty
easily without going off and spending
you know hours or or days on tutorials
and learning.
I mean, I think we've I think we've
actually been addressing it through 57
and 5'8 even. Uh, and I think the trend
will continue through six, you know,
like we're a game developer, too. Um,
you know, Fortnite players have the same
issues as anyone else. And, you know, we
try to scale uh, you know, from mobile
all the way into high-end PC. So you see
initiatives we have like uh you saw
lumen light on stage uh you know as an
effort to like kind of bring the cost of
of of lumen down to be accessible to
more people for global dynamic
illumination. Uh we were showing off you
know mesh terrain where you can see
where new features we're building. Uh
you know that thing is built inherently
to scale from nanite to non-nanite
platform. So like when it when it cooks
down for a non-an platform, it it just
cooks down to regular meshes uh that
should run, you know, really efficiently
and more efficiently than the old uh
landscape system in in most cases. Uh so
it's really on our mind. I think you can
see, you know, games lag a little bit in
in shipping on engine releases, but as
more games kind of hit that 57 and 58
mark, I think you'll already see a trend
uh toward toward um efficiency and then
just like I don't know, we have a ton of
stuff in the pipe uh as we progress
towards UE6 and that's going to land in
the engine as well.
>> Yeah, it's the cumulative set of
optimizations that have been done. Um,
we've, you know, Fortnite back on
mobile, we're putting a lot of effort
into optimizing, um, the engine for, you
know, so that a developer can ship a
game and run on everything from the
highest end hardware all the way down
to, you know, low-end Android and
several year old iPhones. And we we've
also come to an increasing appreciation
over time of the need to make the engine
automatically scale uh much more of the
content in the game. Um, you know, it's
always been the case that with enough
effort and um, you know, trickery a
developer could make their game run well
on on low-end devices, um, but the more
our systems like Nanite can
automatically scale, the better. Um, and
that's going to be a source of ongoing
attention.
>> Yeah. And I think on top of that, just
even more directly, like I think we're
going to continue to see um, just like
small teams being able to punch above
their weight. you take a look at like,
you know, Clare Obscure and and just a
day um you know, no law getting shown
off like really small teams doing really
really impressive stuff. I I think
you're only going to see that that trend
kind of accelerate as we go towards the
the U6 era.
Well, it's an unfortunate and completely
unexpected event um that AI would surge
so much and to uh place so much
competitive pressure on memory prices
and everything. Um to the point where
it's you know affecting significantly
affecting cost of gaming hardware. Um I
think it's a temporary effect but it is
like temporary over the next 2 or 3
years. Um, I'm sure throughout Asia
there are massive fabs being built to
manufacture memory at scales that will
eventually relieve the supply pressure.
In the meantime, we're going to have to
be judicious um, and, you know, spend
more time optimizing and less uh,
knowing that we can count less on
Moore's law to uh, solve our problems
for us as, uh, the game industry uh,
like has always done um, with or without
an intention.
I I think its role is as as a helper
where it's useful, right? Like you go
look back at codegen tools back in last
November, they kind of weren't that
great. Like now they're pretty good,
right? So you can you can pretty easily
um put them into engineering pipelines,
right? I I think the main thing is uh
you know you want to make sure to
use AI to reduce all of the tedium all
the tedious tasks like I I don't know
like you don't need an engineer to go
and spend half a day doing root cause
analysis on a crash if you can you know
h have a thing do that for you for 20
minutes uh and then tell them what's
going on and they can spend that time
optimizing the engine instead or like
helping a content creator or whatever.
So I think it's it's horses for courses
and um there'll be places where it's not
useful, there'll be places where it
won't.
>> Yeah. You know, the whole space is
moving so fast. Uh we early on
recognized that like Epic should just
broadly enable everybody to use the
tools they prefer and to plug them into
Unreal Engine in any way they want. Um
and so we didn't go out to build like
the Unreal Engine coding model. or
rather we uh we built an MCP server so
that people could run Claude code or
Gemini or whatever tool they prefer
connected in and um you know every week
or two there's going to be new new
capabilities coming out lots of
different companies competing and we
want to you know be able to support them
all um and really put the put each game
developer in charge of how they how they
want to integrate um you know the AI
tools into their pipelines um to get
maximum usefulness out of it and figure
out Um, you know, what what really does
it what really gets acceleration, you
know maximized?
>> Sure. I mean, we're building all the
pipelines in Unreal to maximally
preserve artistic intent. You can see, I
mean, we gave the demos. There was like
a video we did this morning. Like you
can see every step of the way, our
intention is um whatever gets built is
is a real Unreal scene that people can
tweak and make exactly the way they
wanted it to be. Uh rather than just
like, you know, typing into the prompt
and trying a million times to to get a,
you know, like whatever pops out, right?
It's, you know, it's really meant to
help people explore creatively more
quickly and then settle in on the
details of what they actually want and
then do the tweaks they need by hand,
like right in the in the engine. So uh
for us it's it's it's human control all
the way through the pipeline.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly that. And you know
the gaming has always been driven by
great games built by great development
teams and that will continue to be the
case. You know every every generation
has had its way. You know it's
stereotypical lowquality games. um you
know from like just plain old bad games
to asset flips and now you know we'll
have AI slap but like you know the in
the hands of awesome you know
professional creators and you serious
indies
uh building a game uh these tools are
just an accelerant and uh you know just
as the industry moved from pixel art um
to Photoshop and then from 2D to 3D
these are just going to be ways of
making content more efficiently and um
avoiding the drudgery of, you know,
handwiring a giant blueprint um and
debugging really complicated problems in
a program.
I think that's for the you know model
providers to to sort out. Um a lot of
some of them are operating a loss such
that there's actually a higher cost than
they're charging um you know to try to
grow their businesses. Um then there are
trade-offs between local AI um and um
you know server based hosted AI. Um you
know I think the whole industry is going
to have to sort that out as a whole and
um you know our project Epic doesn't
have billions of dollars to invest in
building a leading edge model um to
compete with these things. So what we
what we can do is build you know an
awesome MCP interface so that uh every
one of them can talk to our engine and
uh so on and you know I think developers
and you know the market and um you know
are going to ultimately sort that out.
Um and that I think there's plenty of
incentive for everybody to do these
things efficiently. Um co cost is is
going to be formidable when you're using
a leading edge model at its maximum
capability. Um and you know optimizing
that is going to be a first class
objective for everybody.
You can't say that this is the first uh
time the industry has gone through a
shakeout because there have been many
before. I was a young gamer in the 1980s
when you know the Atari crash happened
and then uh I was a game developer and
um
uh you know in the transition from 2D
gaming to 3D um when suddenly a lot of
the games at the time that were being
built you know ended up not finding a
market for them and then um you know Bit
Torrent hit the industry pretty hard
too. Um there was a time when uh you
know the rumor industry rumor was that
crisis had sold 100,000 copies and that
10 million people had played it. Um uh
yeah and the solution to that was you
know was multifaceted. um every you know
technology generation whether it's seven
or 10 years um you know changes
accumulate um such so much that um the
way people build games and play games
changes um and the answer can't be that
every generation we just spend you know
exponentially more on game development
um uh because you know the the market
doesn't always support that um and you
know I I think we've seen some very
specific problems with specific games
you know sometimes was a really big
budget game. Shiftton wasn't very good
um and didn't sell but much much more
often and we've seen here with a bunch
of the big multiplayer games um and
about a good game um uh but the market
dynamics prevented players from coming
in simultaneously with enough scale um
to make it viable you know and that
that's why I was really talking about in
you know Unreal fastest talks we we
should set aside like flukes where you
know a game didn't meet expectations of
gamers and just look at the more of the
structural changes and those are really
appreciable. The fact that games are
becoming increasingly multiplayer uh and
not just multiplayer but social where
you're getting together with your
friends and then you're deciding what to
do, what to play, h how to play it. Um
and you know the trend of you know the
gaming economy shifting more and more
like some people like it and some don't
but more and more towards um buying
things in games rather than buying in
buying games and in-game economy is
driving driving gaming especially at
scale and especially over long
durations. You know as you see with
these longlasting multiplayer games you
have much more of a winner take all
phenomena. It's really really hard for
any new entrant to compete with an
established game. um even if it is
incrementally better and then you know
after years of established games
continually reinvesting and making you
know their games better and better. It's
hard for a new entrant to compete with a
game that's had you know many years of
development and potentially billions of
dollars of development investment going
into it over time um you know with a
small team building a small game. Those
are the huge challenges and those are
generational and they're in a different
sort of challenges than we've seen in
the past. Each of them was kind of an
isolated problem that had a solution.
Um, and here the answer has got to be
pretty broad change in the way that
everybody goes about developing games.
We've got to develop, you know, better
games more consistently and we've got to
develop them a lot more efficiently. You
know, the only way that we can hope for
new games coming onto the market um to
be able to succeed when there's so much
metastases
and the really big games, you know,
Fortnite and Roblox and PUBG Mobile and
um, you know, a few other really huge
ones. Um, it's got to be that those
games get momentum by connecting to the
economies and other games. Um, I think
that can really reinvigorate the market
if people are constantly um looking to
new games as sources of new items that
they can own everywhere um and able to
really easily move together with their
friends. And you know, I I think we we
it shouldn't be understated how badly
broken the social ecosystem is in gaming
as a whole. Most games now are broadly
multiplatform.
uh you have a lot of games that are
across mobile, you have a lot of games
that are across PC and console, and then
you have games that are across all
platforms like Fortnite is um and Roblox
is where literally the game is on every
platform everywhere in the world for
those to compete against that sort of uh
sort of thing. You've got to build games
that run everywhere and you've got to be
able to um have social connections that
work everywhere. You know, like if you
look at Epic and a number of other
independent multiplatform game
developers, we built social ecosystems
for that. Your Fortnite friends, your
friends across all platforms. You can
connect with them. Uh, you know, an iOS
player, an Android player, an Xbox,
PlayStation, and Switch player, and a PC
player. We bled for that. We had a
pretty big confrontation with Sony and
which we ultimately got crossplatform
play across consoles sorted out um in
2018 and we're grateful for that and the
industry is better off for it. But still
most game developers are you know locked
into these single platform ecosystems.
Xbox voice chat doesn't chat with
PlayStation voice chat and Nintendo is a
separate thing still. All these players
in Steam can't talk to their friends on
Xbox and PlayStation unless they're
playing a big game that's developed at
Bespoke uh as a custom system. And so,
you know, one of the one of the
solutions to this has to be making
social work across all platforms
natively and naturally and getting all
the platform makers uh and all the big
game makerers to work together to make
that happen. Um, let's talk about an
unreal fest. I think it's in everybody's
interest to do so and like massively so.
I think every platform would have a lot
more engagement um and every game acting
ecosystem would have a lot more
engagement um if we connected things
like literally I think Xbox not not just
Epic and you name all the top game
developers uh Epic and Roblox um you
know and Riot um Tencent and uh EA um
you know all the different studios
within Microsoft we'd all be better off
if we connected our stuff um and we'd
all be making more money and our gamers
would be happier so it'll be just a
great outcome for the