Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney spent part of the weekend on X talking up two things: the future of Fall Guys and what he sees as a coming “golden age” of game development.
“Don’t give up on Fall Guys”
On Saturday afternoon, Sweeney replied to a joke post claiming Disney had bought Fall Guys developer Mediatonic from Epic. “Not so, but don’t give up on Fall Guys,” he wrote. “There’s a huge retooling underway that will make new things possible.”
That is all he said about it. Sweeney did not explain what the retooling involves, whether it is a technical rebuild or a change to how the game is made and updated, or when players might see it. Epic and Mediatonic have not announced anything to go with it. Still, it is the clearest sign in a while that Epic has bigger plans for Fall Guys, which went free-to-play in 2022.
A “new golden age of gaming”
About an hour later, Sweeney followed with a broader prediction. “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,” he posted. “As will the games developers wanted to build, but couldn’t with the resources available. It’ll be a new golden age of gaming.”
That post does not name AI, but the rest of his weekend did. In a long post about writing Unreal Engine 1, Sweeney said around 30% of his time went to “seriously deep coding on hard problems” and around 70% to typing and refactoring, and that it “always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%.” He added that what surprised him was AI acting as “a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems.”
On Sunday morning he replied to a developer who warned that AI makes it easy to build pretty levels with no real gameplay. “Fun comes first,” Sweeney said, adding that “AI makes rough prototyping and trying out ideas way faster, and accessible to every designer.”
Why it matters
The comments land less than a week after a report that Epic had indefinitely delayed its Marvel and Star Wars shooter and pushed teams toward “AI-first” development. Sweeney has also been blunt about the state of the business, at one point calling the current slump the worst crash since the 1980s. Put together, his posts suggest Epic sees AI tools as the way to make its games cheaper to build and update, and Fall Guys may be one of the first places players get to judge the results.
