Vampire Survivors developer Poncle is reassessing a Fortnite collaboration after Epic outlined deeper AI integration plans.
During the State of Unreal presentation on June 17, Epic Games detailed plans for deeper AI integration included with the upcoming Unreal Engine 6 development tool. At least one game studio that had plans to work with Fortnite on a crossover has decided to reassess the situation following the presentation.
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Vampire Survivors Dev Reassesses Fortnite Deal After AI News
Responding to a Reddit post about the impending collaboration, Poncle’s official account noted that they were taking time to review their decision to collaborate with Fortnite because of everything that came out regarding Epic’s push to heavily promote generative AI.
“Following today’s news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sort of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we’re currently “reviewing” our collaboration with Fortnite. We’ll let you know if anything moves forward,” the comment reads.
Epic claims that the move to integrate generative AI even more heavily into game development is to reduce the amount of tedious tasks for developers. However, many people still don’t like the adoption of the technology, and that stance is shared by some developers and many players. Vampire Survivors is very popular and recently spawned a dungeon crawler, appropriately named Vampire Crawlers, which has been very successful on Steam.
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Fortnite, of course, has many partnerships ranging from television properties like The Office and SpongeBob SquarePants to other IPs like Looney Tunes and WWE. The current season of Fortnite, Chapter 7 Season 3, officially kicked off on Saturday, June 6, 2026. The game itself is nearly a decade old, and it’s not a stretch to say that Fortnite has captured the zeitgeist and fundamentally changed the gaming industry, in part, due to the number of interesting partnerships and character crossovers you can create in the game.
All that to say, if Poncle chooses not to move forward with their crossover, that decision may not be seen as the end of the world for Epic, but it is a moment when a developer draws a line in the sand and shows where they stand on Generative AI.
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