Towing a Lambo with a Honda

Welcome to the daily 'cuppa. Each day (or thereabouts) we help ourselves to a nice warm cup of Clown Tea. It helps to calm the nerves.

Timothy Geiger, courtesy of Techdirt, gives us quite the doozey to mull over.

Before we get to the main course, we need some context: In February 2024 Epic Games Inc, in conjuction with the bloodborne parasites at Disney Inc, agreed to hatch a vast multi headed hydra of a brand crossover deal. One crossover deal to rule them all. Epic Games, via it's primary cash cow Fortnite, bad become increasingly enamoured with these arrangements in recent years, treating gamers to an endless slew of boardroom spawned delights. This netted in many Highly Recognizable And Beloved Household Brand Names such as Marvel, Travis Scott, John Wick, Marshmallow, Family Guy, Miley Cyrus, Star Wars and dozens of others into the Fortnite universe.

The cash rolled in. Investors rejoiced.

Enter Disney, stage left. Let's establish two little known facts about Disney: they have lots of cash and lots of IP. For Epic, this is a match made in heaven. Disney were the perfect pay pig - and it's not like Epic and Disney hadn't done business before. Fortnite was littered with Disney cosmetics, themed seasons and other goodies. But this one was going to be bigger. This was The Big One. This was going to be an advertiser friendly brand crossover extravaganza with more x's and 0's than anyone could count.

All nighters were common at the office. Multiple power meetings had to be called off due to excessive nose bleeds. Selfies were snapped. Hashes were tagged. Consumers in the most lucrative demographics were PUMPED on the concept during focus group pre-testing. Vibes were through the roof.

The pitch, in a nutshell, was everything you could hope for: Take the entire portfolio of Disney assets, now spanning dozens of unrelated intellectual properties, throw them in a giant chum bucket, add a cheeky $1.5B for expenses, and get Epic Games to make a new original video game out of it. What sort of game? Well, just copy the most recent thing that sold well (Ark Raiders). Genius.

With such a rousing and pure artistic vision to animate it, surely such a project is destined for great things. With a slated March 2027 release, the entire gaming world could only wait with baited breath to find out.

Yet tragically, we have reports, per Bloomberg, that development is not going so well. While we're all grieving to hear this, delays in a large project are nothing new. In fact; they're par for the course, and griping aside, gamers will generally forgive a deadline slip or two if the end product delivers.

Enter Impending Shitshow, stage right. Reportedly, Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney, via an internal memo, has instructed the now behind schedule team developing "The Game", to embrace an "AI first" production model using tools like Claude Code being managed by humans. While the Bloomberg article did not confirm whether the smell of desperation was palpable simply by being in the same room as the memo, they were able to confirm something even more interesting.

Quote: "The director [the source for the article] added that all art for the game would be 'Generated with full AI workflows.'"

I shall allow that to sink in for a second, as we have finally arrived at the title of todays episode. The endgame of poor business decisons.

For the record: I am a "true artiste" and coding savant, and therefore, I do not use AI. I do not utilise AI to make art or write any code for me. However, I have in fact used AI to make many things, up to and including code, video games and art. This gives me the confidence to say, from personal experience, that this is a terrible idea. The Mother Of All Terrible Ideas.

While the current generation of frontier models (with Fable 5.5 and Opus 5.5 being the cream of the crop) are good and getting better, they are still substantially worse than even a mediocre human designer or artist, let alone a talented one. Suffice is to say Epic Games are not hiring mediocre artists, either. Yet now these talented artists, each masters of their craft, will be reduced to prompt monkeying Claude Code to churn out art they would feel ashamed to put their names to if they weren't under pressure to ship.

To be fair - they should have been ashamed to put their names to this green-tinted Logan Paul x Baby Yoda x Nike The Video Game(TM) abomination in the first place. Now at least they get to distance themselves creatively from this garbage.

In time this awful cash grab game dies a greasy little death. Whether that is prior to, or post release, remains to be seen.