Epic promises up to $50,000 for games made with AI

Epic Games has announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam — a four-day jam built around AI tools. It runs November 12–15, participants are allowed to use any neural networks — from asset generators to code agents — and team size is counted separately for humans and for agents: up to five people plus an unlimited number of agents.

The prize pool is $65,000. On top of that, Epic will hand the authors of notable Unreal Engine and UEFN entries grants to continue development — up to $50,000, so teams can take their jam projects further.

Four days and agents with no cap

The jam starts on November 12 at 00:00 Eastern Time, and submissions close on November 15 at 17:59 Pacific Time. Latecomers are disqualified.

Using AI is not mandatory, there are no limits on the number of agents, but development cannot begin before November 12: prompts, scripts and assets prepared in advance must be declared in the submission. Third-party assets, including ones from Fab, are allowed if you hold a license and list them in the submission.

• participation — solo or in a team of up to five people, age 18 or over and an active Epic account;
• the team picks one: Unreal Engine or UEFN, submitting an entry to both tracks at once is not allowed;
• for Unreal Engine you need a packaged development build for Windows, macOS, Android or iOS, an archive up to 1 GB named in the TeamName_GameName format and uploaded to your own itch.io account;
• for UEFN, a private code for the version of the final build is accepted — codes for live islands and playtests do not qualify;
• the submission includes a 30–60 second gameplay video; a dev log is optional.

Online and offline entries are judged the same way. The jury scores every submission from 1 to 5 across seven parameters: ambition and novelty, theme fit, fun factor, gameplay, visuals, level design and progression, audio. Winners will be named by January 29, 2027.

The money is spread across a dozen categories

There are three main categories, each with the same grid: $7,500 for first place, $5,000 for second, $2,500 for third. These are "Best Unreal Engine Entry", "Best UEFN Entry" and "Best Student Project" — the last one requires being enrolled at a university at the time of participation.

On top of the main categories come the modifiers:

• Best Team — $5,000 for the best entry from a team of two or more;
• Solo Driver — $2,500 for a lone developer;
• Render Royalty — $2,500 for visuals in Unreal Engine;
• Pocket Powerhouse — $2,500 each for the best mobile entry in Unreal Engine and in UEFN;
• Glass Box — $2,500 for a dev log showing exactly how the game was put together (without a dev log you cannot land this category);
• Walkie-Talkie — $2,500 for a narrative UEFN game with NPCs driven by a language model.

A single entry can take one main category and one modifier. A separate line is the Development Continuation Grants: the Unreal Engine and UEFN tracks will each get three grants of $50,000, $25,000 and $10,000, so teams keep working on their project after the jam. Some of Epic's AI partners will hand out credits for their services to participants.

What to do before the start

The opening broadcast announcing the theme takes place on November 11 at 11:00 Pacific Time on Twitch, YouTube and X; after that, streams will go out daily at the same time. Epic advises setting up agentic coding tools and hooking up the Model Context Protocol in Unreal Engine and UEFN before the kickoff — fiddling with integrations on day one eats into development time.

The in-person part runs November 14–15 at the Digital Jungle space in San Francisco from 9:00 to 19:00, alongside teams from Anthropic, Google, Meshy, OpenAI, SpaceXSI and other partners. Seats are limited; registration for offline attendance opens November 1 at 7:00 Pacific Time. Everyone else takes part from home or at local community venues; registration is on the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam page on itch.io.

Why Epic is doing this now

The jam looks like a continuation of the line the company has been pursuing lately: Epic is publicly promoting the connection of external models to the engine pipeline via the Model Context Protocol and generative tools for assets, and MCP itself in Unreal Engine and UEFN is listed in the jam's preparation materials as a baseline requirement for participants.

Against that backdrop, the MegaJam also works as a venue for gathering practice: the grants and the dev log category encourage participants to document which agents worked, and how, in tandem with the engine. Over four days Epic will likely get a cross-section of real usage scenarios for MCP and code agents in Unreal — data that would otherwise take noticeably longer to collect.

The reaction to the announcement turned out mixed: comments under the Unreal Engine post carry the charge that the contest devalues the labor of working developers, and that those who want to assemble something out of prompts already have plenty of simpler tools without Unreal. If a lot of entries come in, Epic will have an argument in favor of embedding agents into the engine further — and then job requirements at Unreal studios will probably start changing faster than the developers themselves expected.

Will $50,000 be enough for jam prototypes with AI agents to grow into a release? Or will the grants go to demos that are forgotten by spring?