Earlier this week, Epic Games said Unreal Engine 6 will deepen AI integration into the game development process. That revelation did not sit well with Vampire Survivors developer Poncle, who said they will reassess a planned Fortnite collaboration.
Epic Games teased Unreal Engine 6 at the recent Rocket League Championship Series event. Epic announced that the game would be entering a new era in Unreal Engine 6 after spending over a decade on Unreal Engine 3.
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The details on what’s coming with UE6 were revealed at the June 17 State of Unreal presentation. Epic revealed how the upcoming engine will differ from its predecessors. Also revealed is that in the next two years, UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite will be merged to create Unreal Engine 6.
However, the biggest talking point was that the engine will introduce integration with AI models like Gemini and Claude to reduce redundancy in game development.
“Our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration, and increase the amount of iterations a team can make to polish their content,” Epic said. “UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favorite models, battle-tested against internal development and in UEFN,”
Poncle to reconsider its partnership with Epic Games
Poncle has not reacted positively to the June 17 State of Unreal presentation. In a response to a Reddit post highlighting the upcoming collaboration between the Vampire Survivor developer and Epic Games, a Poncle official noted they were in discussions to review the collaboration.
“Following today’s news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sort of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we’re currently ‘reviewing’ our collaboration with Fortnite. We’ll let you know if anything moves forward,” read the comment.
Epic Games has collaborated with several IPs on Fortnite, including SpongeBob SquarePants, WWE, and Looney Tunes. If the collaboration with Poncle falls through, it would likely not cause any damage to Epic. However, such an act can spark a movement that can snowball into a trend that may hurt the company.
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