Epic Games Told Developers Its Disney Shooter Gets No More Hand-Written Code, and Some Staff Were Stunned

Epic Games has pushed back its unannounced Disney shooter, a game starring Marvel and Star Wars characters, and told the people making it to stop writing code by hand. The project was due in March 2027. It now has no release date at all, and the team has been ordered onto an "AI first" production model.

Bloomberg reported the change, based on people familiar with the project and internal messages it viewed, and described it as the first attempt by a major game company to build a title with AI as the primary foundation of its development pipeline.

The order

In an internal message, one of the project's directors told staff there would be "no more hand-written code" and that the game's artwork would be "generated with full AI workflows." Developers were told to use tools such as Anthropic's Claude, with humans managing and guiding what the AI produces.

The game was already in trouble before the AI order. Epic misjudged how many people the shooter needed and how long it would take, so the team was understaffed and moving slower than planned. It had once been rumored for November before slipping to March.

The room did not take it well

The news came during a video call last week, and it shocked a number of developers on the team. Staff asked how errors in AI-generated work would be caught and fixed, and doubted the plan would work. Some reportedly hoped the request was not entirely serious.

Epic's official line was short. "We're embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do," communications director Jake Jones said.

CEO Tim Sweeney went much further on X. "We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," he wrote. The aim, he said, "isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff."

When people told him he was misreading the mood, he did not back down. "Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it's not," he replied. Asked about an IPO, he said Epic's "more modest aim is to survive the AI revolution."

He also put numbers on the speedups. Right now they range from 20% in the most technical parts of Unreal Engine work to 5x in areas like web development, he said, and by this time next year he expects "very little will be less than 3x of January 2026 efficiency." None of this is new thinking for him: last November he argued that AI disclosure tags like the ones Valve requires on Steam "make no sense" because AI will be involved in nearly all future production.

Disney's money and Epic's layoffs

The stakes are not small. Disney put $1.5 billion into Epic in 2024 for an equity stake, and this shooter was supposed to be the first product of that partnership. Disney did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.

The order also lands on a workforce that has already been cut hard. Epic laid off more than 1,000 people in March, pointing in part to falling Fortnite engagement. Months later, Fortnite manager Stephanie Arnette tried to calm nerves: "I know everyone's biggest fear is, 'Oh my god, AI is going to take all our jobs.' That's not our goal. The goal is to make us more efficient."

Epic's own AI experiments have not always gone smoothly. Last May an AI-voiced Darth Vader in Fortnite started repeating curse words until a hotfix shut it up.

An industry souring on the idea

Epic is moving against the mood of much of the industry. In GDC's annual survey, 52 percent of developers said generative AI is bad for the industry this year, up from 30 percent in 2025. Over a third of game developers do use AI, but mostly for research and brainstorming rather than making assets, and games with AI-generated content have drawn player backlash over quality.

Games are not the only creative business where management is leaning on AI while the people doing the work push back. Big book publishers are quietly using Claude and ChatGPT to pitch and market books even as they sue AI companies.

Epic has never officially announced the Disney shooter. For now, the team building it has a new way of working, a boss defending it in public, and no date to aim for.

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