// KOTAKU — GAMING
Now That The Shoe Is On The Other Foot, Microsoft And Epic Games Suddenly Agree That AI Is Theft
The past four weeks have been something of a wake-up call for the video game industry. You’ve read the headlines, so you know the deal by now: AI advancements spearheaded by Claude Opus 5.5 have turned the world of coding on its axis. Decompilations that used to take months, or even years, are now being pumped out on a daily basis, and publishers can’t keep up with the deluge of vibe-coded browser ports and “native” PC recompilations.
I’ve been covering and researching this over the past month, and there’s one recurring topic that keeps popping up in every comment section I read: karma. For many, this is the video game industry’s “you reap what you sow” moment, proof that the AI tools many publishers have brazenly admitted to using are a double-edged sword.
It’s a tricky subject to tackle, because it comes packaged alongside so much bias. For instance, where the PlayStation emulation scene is concerned, many see it as retribution for Sony’s decision to kill physical media. Nintendo has maintained a mostly ambivalent stance on generative AI, yet some consider the explosion in vibe-coded recomps as punishment for the company’s litigious history.
However, there’s a less ambiguous side to this discussion that I’m far more interested in tackling: hypocrisy. Many publishers are gleefully and very publicly advertising their use of AI to develop games, yet two specific publishers are attempting to have their cake and eat it too in this respect: Microsoft and Epic Games.
Hundreds of DMCA notices have been fired off by companies in response to the recent flood of AI-powered recomps. Indie games are the prime targets, with takedown notices for open-sourced versions of Mega Crit’s Slay the Spire 2, Maddy Makes Games’ Celeste, and Ludeon Studios’ RimWorld all featuring in GitHub’s DMCA logs over the past four weeks.
These three examples are important to note because they are blameless victims of vibe-coding: games that feature no generative AI content, yet have been open-sourced against their developers’ wishes.
On the other hand, Epic Games issued a DMCA notice against a vibe-coded browser port of Fortnite on October 10, and Microsoft has issued multiple DMCA notices for Minecraft, Call of Duty, and Halo-related web browser ports over the past month. I could fill this article with dozens of examples of Microsoft’s and Epic Games’ love of AI, but here are two off the dome: Epic Games’ vibe-coded shitshow of a launcher that launched on October 14, and the mere existence of Microsoft’s Copilot.
Epic Games took down a recent project that allowed Fortnite (recreation) to be playable through a web browser.
They also DMCA (copyright) almost every post featuring it LMFAOO pic.twitter.com/7lSK4QksBk
Here’s a fun quote from Tim Sweeney in an interview with PC Gamer: “It’s unfortunate that so many of the AI companies operating early on had such shitty practices, you know, like one of them was found by a court to have gone off to a BitTorrent site and downloaded terabytes of data. That’s ridiculous, they shouldn’t do that.”