In an attempt to outdo Steam’s performance, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney resorted to vibe-coding a new version of his Epic Games storefront, a decision that naturally blew up in his face. Is this just plain bad decision-making, or the plot of the dumbest Cyberpunk tale ever told?
Epic recently took to Twitter to gloat about putting an AI in charge of coding your platform, because “programming is hard.”
And I don’t doubt it, but it’s clearly even harder if you lay off a large part of your staff and then put their code in the hands of an AI.
The “new” Epic Games Store has only been out for a short while, so this is “just” the beginning when it comes to glitches. Valve, either as a direct response or as a result of accidentally brilliant timing, released an update that made Steam even better in comparison to the Epic Games Store.
Times are tough. Things are growing ever more expensive, less useful, less durable, and filled with dumb AI bloatware—with the specter of having to rent experiences for a while, rather than buying games for good.
In a hilarious twist of fate, people have started using Claude and similarly wacky-named LLMs regularly used to steal the work of artists to turn the stealing around, a move that has resulted in heavy blows to the likes of Sony. We still don’t know how the story of the little vibe coders that could get the PlayStation ecosystem to run on PC will end, but I cannot deny that even the threat of such a dent on a megacorp by a ragtag group of people armed only with bad code is wild.
Even wilder, however, is when nobody really has a bone to pick with you, because nobody really cares enough about your storefront to hate it, so you accidentally torpedo it yourself. This is the kind of stuff that would fuel bonkers inside-job conspiracy theories for years if Tim Sweeney hadn’t openly bragged about making the dumbest possible decision himself.
I must admit I love it when a rich AI bro puts his money where his mouth is, and instead of just polluting social media feeds with their inane blabbering, they actually invest in the tech and end up learning a valuable lesson in losing money and credibility.
Tim Sweeney is famously one of the best at misreading the room, which is one of the most competitive fields in the modern tech world, so there’s just no telling how much more of his Fortnite-built empire he’ll be willing to burn down to stall his admission that he’s been had by a kind of technology that makes the Juicero seem like utopian sci-fi.
