Hours after announcing a collab with Fortnite, Vampire Survivors dev suggests it may back out over Epic’s touting of generative AI

Epic announced several upcoming Fortnite collabs earlier today, including one with Vampire Survivors. But a few hours after the presentation, Vampire Survivors developer Poncle left a Reddit comment suggesting that the partnership might not happen after all.

While the post is brief, Poncle seems to be reacting to a recent video which demonstrates how Epic artists use generative AI to assist with the design of Fortnite characters and locations, and perhaps also to today’s reveal of generative AI features in Unreal Engine.

“Following today’s news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sorts of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we’re currently ‘reviewing’ our collaboration with Fortnite,” the developer wrote. “We’ll let you know if anything moves forward.”

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At Unreal Fest today, Epic showed off a new experimental plugin feature that integrates generative AI models like Claude and Gemini with Unreal Engine. In a blog post about features coming to Unreal Engine 6, Epic said that these tools will act as “creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time–consuming manual tasks.” During the presentation, it demonstrated using generative AI models to change the lighting or add objects to a scene.

A Look At Epic’s Art Concepting Process – YouTube

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The more immediate concern for Poncle, however, may be the video Epic posted earlier this week (embedded above) in which artists use generative AI to quickly develop character and environment concepts for Fortnite. Assets created for the Vampire Survivors collab could presumably be made in the same way.

I’ve asked the studio for more information on its concerns, and PC Gamer has reached out to Epic for comment.

It’s unclear when Poncle and Epic made the collab deal. At the presentation, Epic announced several other collabs coming to Fortnite: Control Resonant, Phantom Blade Zero, and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.