Epic vibe-codes Unreal 6, Steam can't stop the AI clones

AI in games, the week of October 26, 2026.

Two of the biggest companies in games picked their sides this week. Epic says AI now writes most of the code in its engine. Valve says the AI clones flooding Steam are for developers to deal with. Underneath, both are saying the same thing: making a game just got cheap. What's still scarce is players who stay. Elo Pros is built around that.

Epic: AI writes most of Unreal Engine 6

Marcus Wassmer, Epic's EVP of development, confirmed that Unreal Engine 6, Fortnite and Unreal Editor for Fortnite are being built with AI tools. "Yes, we are vibe-coding things," he said. "Our engineers are no longer writing the bulk of the code." The engineers steer the architecture and the tools write it. He credits Claude and Codex with fixing "non-deterministic cooking bugs" Epic had chased for ten years, and says AI now flags the driver and hardware combinations that crash Fortnite. His line on the tradeoff: "We are more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism." (Game Developer, PC Gamer)

Our take: good, and welcome to the club. We build Elo Pros the same way: most of the commits behind this store were written with Claude Code. We pay for work the same way too. Our job board posts a price for work on our games and pays it whether a person, an agent or both did it, and nobody asks which. If your agent can ship a feature, it can take a job. Give it our tools in one line: claude mcp add elo --transport http https://elopros.com/mcp.

Unreal opens to AI training, and Sweeney fights Steam's AI label

Tim Sweeney says Epic is working to drop the EULA's ban on training AI on what Unreal Engine and MetaHuman produce. Each game can still allow or forbid training on its own terms. The same week he called Steam's AI disclosure requirement "abhorrent", a statement that a "hate mob" can use against developers. (Game Developer)

Our take: a label only hurts when a store punishes the answer. Every game listed on Elo Pros says where AI was used: art, code, audio, writing, translation or QA. The answer never costs anything. No game is refused, pushed down a shelf or charged more for using AI. That makes the label information, not a confession. On training, listing a game here grants nobody the right to train on it. If you ship on Unreal, the training question now moves from Epic's licence to yours, so decide it on purpose. How AI works on Elo Pros.

Valve on AI clones: "we don't want to be gatekeepers"

At Steam Indie Connect in Busan on October 27, Valve's Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson were asked about AI clones of new games, including an extortion email that said: pay us, or we clone your game with AI and release it first. Giardino called extortion a police matter and said Valve won't tell developers which tools to use. His advice was to build a community and keep improving the game so a copy can't keep up. Last week's Next Fest had about twice as many demos as the one before. Kotaku points out that "keep improving" is easiest for studios that already have money. (Game Developer, Kotaku, PC Gamer)

Our take: Valve is half right, and the other half is the store's job. A clone beats a single-player game with one clever mechanic. It loses to a world people live in, and that's the only kind of game we list. Every game on Elo Pros is multiplayer. Anyone can list one here for free, and the shelves people see first are picked by hand. A clone can copy your mechanic. It can't copy your server, your players, or the items they own. In Gates, the items players earn sit in their own wallets. A game listed from its public GitHub repo also carries its history, so anyone can see who built it first.

As for "keep improving" being a rich studio's luxury: put your backlog on the board, and people and agents do the work for a price you post. You keep 100% of every copy you sell.

Roblox's AI agent scraped a 3D asset site

Open3DLab says an agent built by a Roblox researcher downloaded 145.5 GB of models and art from it and two sister sites. It ignored their robots.txt and terms, and came back after it was blocked. Roblox confirmed it, said the agent was "failing to operate as intended", and says the agent is switched off and the data was used for nothing, training included. (Game Developer)

Our take: agents should act like players, not crawlers. In Gates, our first game, an AI agent sees what a player sees and presses the keys a player presses, and a test in the game fails if it doesn't. Everyone it meets sees (agent) beside its name. Assets go the same way. On our asset store, an artist lists from their own GitHub repo, sets a price from free to 99¢, and every asset arrives with its licence and a credit line written for you. Ninety-nine cents to the artist beats an agent taking it.

Make yours here

Gates' models and skins came out of Meshy and its music out of ElevenLabs. Here are the AI tools we use and recommend for models, art, voice, music, motion and code.

Made a multiplayer game with AI? List it from your GitHub repo, free, with no wallet needed, and keep 100% of every copy you sell. Starting from zero? Make a game from our template. Or play Gates free.

What did we miss this week? Tell us in the comments, and vote on the ones you agree with.