Epic Games has confirmed a ‘huge pivot’ towards AI. The company that gave the world Fortnite has decided the future is something it can generate, not something it has to make.
The boss has responded to critics. His message to the people who miss the old days was blunt: “much of the room wants it to be 2016, but it’s not.” Nobody in the room was asked whether they wanted it to be 2016. They were asked to clap.
The 2016 Epic Games had a battle royale that ate the internet. Kids dropped onto islands, dance emotes were a cultural force, and grown adults learned what a ‘skin’ was. That was the lightning. The new strategy is an attempt to bottle it with a machine that has never once been bored.
The pivot is not about innovation. It is about a company watching its own relevance slide down a slope and deciding the fastest route back up is to pretend the slope is a runway.
Nostalgia is now the enemy. A studio that built its fortune on people reliving the same dance for a decade has discovered that people want the dance again. The fear is not that AI will make better games. The fear is that the games will not be remembered at all.
The press materials will say ‘the future of play.’ The future of play is apparently a text box and a prompt. Somewhere a 14-year-old is being told that the thing they loved is ‘legacy content.’
The boss says it’s not 2016. He is right. In 2016 the company still had the nerve to be the thing everyone was talking about. Now it is announcing a strategy so it can be talked about again.
The pixels are being replaced. Nobody asked which ones were the problem.