CARY, North Carolina — Epic Games has delayed an unannounced shooter built around Disney's Marvel and Star Wars characters and told the developers making it to switch to an "AI first" production model, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

An internal message from one of the game's directors told staff there would be "no more hand-written code" and that the game's art would be "generated with full AI workflows", according to the report. Shortly afterwards, Epic founder and chief executive Tim Sweeney said on X that Epic as a whole was undergoing a major shift towards artificial intelligence.

The decision puts a Disney-backed game in the hands of AI tools at the company behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, software used to build many of the industry's big-budget games. It comes as performers, artists and many players continue to push back against generative AI in games.

The shooter had been due out in March 2027 and has no new release date, according to Bloomberg. The project fell behind because Epic underestimated how many people it would need, the report said. Developers learned of the change on a video call the previous week, and some were stunned.

Under the new model, AI tools such as Anthropic's Claude would write code and AI workflows would produce art while staff guide and manage the work, according to accounts of the Bloomberg report by Game Rant and FRVR. Claude is a large language model, a type of AI system that writes text and software code from plain-language instructions.

Some developers hoped the directive was not serious, and others joked about asking Claude to fix its own errors, Tom's Hardware reported, citing Bloomberg.

Epic defended the change. "We're embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do," Jake Jones, Epic's communications director, told Bloomberg.

Disney, which invested $1.5 billion in Epic in 2024, did not comment for the report. The shooter was meant to be the first in a series of games built on Disney properties.

Sweeney's post reached well beyond the Disney project. "We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration," he wrote. "The aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal."

In replies, he said the gain from AI tools was "highly variable, from 20% in some areas (like the most technical areas of UE dev) to 5x for other areas (like web dev)". He predicted that by this time next year "very little will be less than 3x of January 2026 efficiency", according to posts compiled by Wccftech.

When a follower asked, half in jest, whether he was preparing Epic for a stock market listing, Sweeney said Epic's "more modest aim is to survive the AI revolution". When a solo developer told him he could not read the room, he answered: "Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it's not."

Much of the response from players was hostile. Some replies to Sweeney read simply "RIP Epic", FRVR reported. Critics pointed to the company's own recent history: Epic cut more than 1,000 jobs in March, in a memo in which Sweeney blamed a downturn in Fortnite engagement that began in 2025 for leaving the company spending more than it earned.

The A.V. Club argued that the laid-off employees had been crucial to the kind of projects Epic was counting on to revive engagement.

Sweeney has long championed the technology. In June he told PC Gamer that Valve's rule requiring Steam games to disclose AI use was "irresponsible" and made it "much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success", Game Rant reported.

Opposition elsewhere in the industry has been organised. Video game voice and motion-capture performers represented by the SAG-AFTRA union went on strike in July 2024 for nearly a year, largely over protections against AI copies of their voices and likenesses. UK Games Expo, a large British convention, has banned games built mostly with AI, according to Tom's Hardware.

Some industry veterans say the argument is already over in practice. Aakash Gupta, who worked at Epic as a producer on Fortnite, wrote on X that public resistance does not reach the tools developers use every day.

"Studio heads can ban AI art. Voice actors can strike over AI voices. Steam can put warning labels on AI games," he wrote. "None of that touches the layer Epic controls, because Epic makes the tool everyone builds with." He cited a Google Cloud finding that nine in 10 game developers already use AI agents at work.

Jacob Novak, a former Square Enix executive, was blunter. "It is over for non-AI workflows," he wrote, GamesRadar reported.

Epic has already started wiring the technology into its engine. Sweeney said at the company's Unreal Fest conference that Unreal Engine 5.8 would ship with an experimental plugin that lets developers connect any large language model to core engine systems such as assets, levels and materials, Wccftech reported.

Epic has presented that integration as central to Unreal Engine 6, for which it is targeting early access by the end of 2027 and a full release 12 to 18 months after that, according to Wccftech.