Fortnite maker Epic Games has delayed an unannounced shooter with Marvel and Star Wars characters, Bloomberg reported Monday. Epic had planned to release the game in March 2027. Now it has no release date. Bloomberg reported that the project was behind, partly because Epic underestimated the staff and time it needed. Epic told the team to switch to an "AI first" model using tools like Anthropic's Claude. One of the game's directors wrote to staff, "No more hand-written code," and said the art would be "generated with full AI workflows." Disney, which took a $1.5 billion stake in Epic in 2024, declined to comment. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney posted Monday that Epic has "a huge pivot" underway toward "maximum AI acceleration." He didn't comment on the Disney game. Epic laid off more than 1,000 people in March, and Sweeney said then that those cuts weren't about AI.

AI Will Make Better Games, Faster (Tim Sweeney, Epic)

Epic's CEO says AI lets the same people build more and test their ideas sooner.

Epic says the goal isn't to cut people. Sweeney wrote that "the aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff." Jake Jones, Epic's communications director, told Bloomberg that Epic's developers stay "the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do."

Sweeney says faster testing could save big games. Sweeney blamed most recent big-budget flops on game systems that went too far into development before the team could playtest them. He says AI now speeds up the most technical Unreal Engine work by about 20% and web development by five times. By this time next year, he expects almost all of it to be at least three times as fast as it was in January 2026.

Sweeney says the industry can't go back. One reply to his posts said he couldn't read the room, and about 14,000 people liked it. Sweeney answered, "Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it's not." Epic makes tools for much of the industry. Sweeney said Epic's job is to plan for "the future that will soon be." He said Epic's "more modest aim" is to "survive the AI revolution."

But Most Game Developers Think AI Is Hurting Games (Lisha Howen, GDC Survey, PC Gamer)

Many game workers say AI can help with code, but it shouldn't replace the people who make the art.

AI can help with code, but it shouldn't replace artists. Lisha Howen is a 23-year-old game designer who doesn't work for Epic. She told BBC Newsbeat that she knows developers who use AI to help write code. But she says artists "hate it because it's taking away their jobs." "You can tell when something's been generated by AI, it looks terrible, it's cheap," she said.

Most game developers now think AI is hurting their industry. In this year's Game Developers Conference survey, 52% of respondents said generative AI is having a negative effect on games, up from 18% two years earlier. Visual and technical artists were the most negative, at 64%.

A critic says AI companies love calling their tech inevitable. Shaun Prescott, PC Gamer's Australian editor, called Sweeney's 2016 comment "telling." He wrote that the AI industry "loves to frame uptake of the technology as an inevitability."

Epic Is Using AI to Save a Game That Was Already Behind (Players, Creative Bloq, Kotaku)

Skeptics say Epic is grabbing AI to rescue a project in trouble.

Players are suspicious because the game was already behind. Bloomberg reported that progress on the game was already slower than expected. Creative Bloq wrote that many gamers see the switch "as an attempt to rescue a production already in trouble." One Reddit user wrote that pushing to finish it with AI "makes this sound like even more of a mess."

Critics say AI-made art could leave Epic redoing the work by hand. Another Reddit user called the plan for all-AI art "insane." That user predicted Epic would waste effort "not getting what they want and having to make it all manually anyways." Some developers on the team asked how anyone would fix the mistakes the AI makes, Bloomberg reported.

Epic hasn't said how it will keep the quality up. Ethan Gach, a Kotaku reporter, wrote that it's unclear what quality checks Epic has. Creative Bloq wrote that so far "nobody's explained why it'll be better rather than just cheaper and quicker to churn out."

Still, Most Players May Never Notice (Lisha Howen)

Some think Fortnite's huge audience will keep playing no matter how the games get made.

Howen says Fortnite's core players will keep playing. Howen, who also streams Fortnite, said the people objecting are a "vocal minority." She said most players "don't really care about the external politics of it all." "They'll just keep playing like nothing's changed," she said.

Where This Lands

Sweeney says AI will let Epic's people build more and test ideas sooner, and that the industry can't go back to 2016. Most game developers in the GDC survey say AI is hurting their field. Artists say it's taking their jobs. Skeptics say Epic is using AI to rescue a game that was already behind. They say Epic hasn't shown a plan to keep quality up. Howen thinks Fortnite's players won't care either way. Epic hasn't set a new release date for the Disney game.

Sources