Vampire Survivors developer Poncle is “reviewing” its collaboration with Epic Games—to feature items based on the game in Fortnite—after the company announced a slate of AI-powered features coming to Unreal Engine.
Yesterday, Epic announced four new crossovers of existing game franchises coming to Fortnite, which included Control Resonant, Phantom Blade Zero, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and Vampire Survivors. The team behind the latter, however, expressed doubts shortly after the presentation.
“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,” reads a comment by poncle_Official on Reddit. “We’ll let you know if anything moves forward.”
Studios continue to toot the genAI horn, despite the fact that it has garnered a largely negative reception from developers in recent years, with many arguing that it is having a corrosive effect on the industry. More and more developers, including Poncle, appear to be taking a more vocal stance.
Although the Vampire Survivors dev doesn’t mention specifics, “gen AI usage” may refer to the news about Unreal Engine 6, which is set to feature integration with tools such as Claude and Gemini.
According to executive vice president Marcus Wassmer, AI-driven pipeline features will serve as “creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development.”
Wassmer also waxed on about goals to “enable developer collaboration” on bigger scales, enabling “content, code, and economies” to become portable and interoperable across games, and more.
In a video shared earlier this week, Epic did a demonstration of artists using genAI to develop character and environment concepts for Fortnite. Wassmer mentioned that Epic plans to move Epic’s Fortnite cosmetic base infrastructure to an open UE6 model, with the aim of allowing devs to use players’ existing Fortnite outfits in their own games. In turn, any outfits they create will seemingly work inside of Fortnite.
“We see this as the first step toward building a shared economy for smart assets: functional assets with logic and functionality that work across games, to recognize players’ time and spending in a better way,” Wassman wrote.