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Epic Games asks its staff to use AI to finish its delayed Disney game
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
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Epic Games has postponed, with no date set, the shooter it is making with Disney and will complete it by leaning on AI, according to Bloomberg. Developers stop writing code by hand and instead direct and review what tools such as Claude, from Anthropic, produce, the artwork included. The decision follows a cut of 1,000 jobs in March and comes with the project already behind its timetable.
Epic Games wants to finish its Disney game with AI and without hand-written code. As Bloomberg reported on Monday, October 12, the company has pushed back its project with Disney, a shooter with Marvel and Star Wars characters that, as Ars Technica notes, had been due in March 2027. A new launch date has yet to be confirmed.
It will now be an "AI first" project, meaning AI becomes the foundation of development. In an internal note that Bloomberg saw, relayed by GamesIndustry.biz, one of the directors of the game told the team: "No more hand-written code." The same director added that every piece of art would be "generated with full AI workflows." Developers have been asked to put the game together using AI tools, Anthropic's Claude among them, and to supervise what comes out.
Bloomberg's sources say development was running late, in part because Epic got wrong how many people and how much time the game would take. In March of this year the company had announced it was cutting 1,000 jobs, partly because of weaker player activity in Fortnite. Staff learned of the change last week on a video call and, according to those same sources, some were "stunned."
Epic's communications director, Jake Jones, told Bloomberg, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz, that the company is "embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers." After the story came out, chief executive Tim Sweeney wrote on social media, according to Ars Technica, that the aim "isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people" but to let everyone at Epic build more and better things. Disney did not immediately answer Bloomberg's request for comment.
Disney put $1.5 billion into Epic in 2024 and became a shareholder, and both firms unveiled a partnership spanning several games, of which this one was meant to be the first. Bloomberg notes that Epic was already pushing its divisions to use AI and that until now no other large video game company had attempted to build a game made mostly by AI. A 2026 survey by GDC, the Game Developers Conference, cited by GamesIndustry.biz, found that over a third of developers rely on AI at work and that more than half consider it harmful to the industry.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Until now, studios used AI as a support: for research, trying out ideas or helping with part of the code. Epic takes a different step and puts it at the center of a commercial game built on Disney licenses, with people in the role of directing and reviewing. It is a test at real scale and nobody knows yet how it will turn out: the game has no date, the decision comes with the project running late and a reduced workforce, and part of the team took it badly. The outcome will show whether this method truly shortens schedules without lowering quality, and other studios will watch it closely before copying it. For any company that writes software or produces content, the practical lesson is a different one: whoever supervises what AI generates needs as much craft as the person who used to do it by hand.
Source: Bloomberg · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
