Andy Garcia · freelance dev
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Epic Reportedly Delayed Its March Disney Shooter and Told Developers "No More Hand-Written Code." Bloomberg's Sources Say Epic Had Underestimated the Staff and Time It Needed

October 19, 2026 7 min read

On Monday, October 12, Bloomberg reported that Epic Games had delayed its upcoming game with Disney and told its developers to use more AI to finish it. The title, a shooter with characters from Marvel and Star Wars, had been slated for March. According to people familiar with the project, it now has no new date.

The details are what made the story travel. Developers were told to implement an "AI first" production model using tools such as Anthropic's Claude, with humans managing and guiding that work. "No more hand-written code," one of the game's directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be "generated with full AI workflows."

Epic has not publicly confirmed those specifics. Its communications director, Jake Jones, told Bloomberg: "We're embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do." The same day, CEO Tim Sweeney posted on X: "We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration." As Game Developer pointed out, he spoke about Epic's approach at large and did not confirm the claims about the Disney project. Disney did not immediately respond to Bloomberg.

Bloomberg calls it the first time a major video-game company has attempted to build a title primarily with AI. I am CTO of a LegalTech built on Claude, I ship iOS apps and a strategy game, Doomsday: M.A.D., as an indie developer, and I orchestrate my work with Claude Code. So I read this less as a culture-war story and more as a production decision, with a cause, a cost and a bottleneck.

The reported cause is staffing, not AI

The line that matters most sits near the end of Bloomberg's piece. Progress on the game "has been slower than expected, in part because Epic underestimated how many staffers and how much time it would take to produce," the people said.

That changes how I read the memo. In Bloomberg's text, the AI-first model is not given as the reason for the delay. It comes as the way to finish a project that, according to the same people, was already short of staff and time. In March, Epic laid off more than 1,000 people; Sweeney's memo blamed a "downturn in Fortnite engagement" and said the layoffs "aren't related to AI." Sweeney's post says the aim "isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people." Both can be true. But a team that is understaffed mid-project and told to change its production model pays a retooling cost before it collects any speed-up. Retool is Sweeney's own verb.

For anyone who buys software, that is the useful signal. When a vendor announces an AI-first switch in the middle of a project, look at the date. At Epic, the switch arrived together with a date that moved away, not one that got closer.

"No more hand-written code" moves the work to review

According to Bloomberg, the announcement left some developers stunned on a video call the week before the story ran. Some joked about how they should handle errors in the AI-generated work, asking if they should ask Claude to fix its own mistakes. Some said they hoped it was not a serious request, or that the company would reverse course.

The joke is the real design question. Writing was never the only cost in software. Reading, testing and deciding what to keep was the other half, and an AI-first rule does not remove that half. It makes it the job. If no code is typed by hand, every line that ships is a line someone, or something, had to check.

My own rule, on a much smaller scale: the author does not grade its own work. I fact-check my posts with Jev as a judge, a model that does not write the text it checks. A studio that asks the same model to write the code and then to fix its own mistakes gets one point of view twice. Tests, a second model, a human reviewer, a playtest: the mix matters less than the separation.

Bloomberg's phrase, humans will "manage and guide" the work, is where the budget goes. The memo, as quoted, names what stops. It does not name who reviews, or how many review hours the team now needs.

Art is a different contract than code

The art instruction is the bolder one, and it lands on the people least convinced. The GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry report, based on responses from more than 2,300 game industry professionals, found that 52 percent think generative AI is having a negative impact on the industry, up from 30 percent a year earlier. The most unfavorable groups were visual and technical art (64 percent), game design and narrative (63 percent) and game programming (59 percent). Those are the people now asked to manage and guide the output.

Two documents matter more than sentiment here, and neither is about Epic.

The first is Steam's content survey. Valve defines pre-generated AI content as "any kind of content that ships with your game and is consumed by players that is created with the help of AI tools during development," and says it reviews that output the same way as all non-AI content. Art that players see sits squarely inside that definition. In November 2025, Sweeney wrote on X that the AI tag "makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production," and nothing in the reports says where the Disney game will be sold. But an indie team copying the policy and shipping on Steam would be declaring that art in the survey.

The second is the US Copyright Office report on generative AI outputs, released January 29, 2025. Its conclusion: those outputs can be protected by copyright "only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements," which can include creative arrangement or modification of the output, "but not the mere provision of prompts." Disney owns Marvel and Star Wars either way. An indie studio with an original world has no such cushion. If its art is "generated with full AI workflows," what it can protect depends on the human work it can show. I am not a lawyer, and that is the question I would put to one before signing the memo.

The game looks like a test bench for the engine

Sweeney's post ends with a clause the headlines left out: the pivot is meant "to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal."

In its State of Unreal 2026 recap, dated June 17, Epic listed, on the road to Unreal Engine 6, "development pipeline features" including "a Model Context Protocol (MCP) with integrations for Claude, Gemini, and others," presented as "creativity and productivity multipliers." The same recap announced an experimental MCP plugin in Unreal Engine 5.8 that connects models like Claude directly to Unreal projects. Read together, the Disney shooter looks like Epic's own team going through the workflow it intends to sell. That is my reading, not Epic's statement. If it holds, the release date of that game will be the most honest benchmark of the tooling anyone gets.

What I would check before writing that memo

None of this says AI-first is wrong. It says the sentence "no more hand-written code" is a staffing plan, and should be checked like one.

  1. Name the reviewers before the writers: who reads each change, with what tests, and how many hours a week that takes.
  2. Separate author and checker. A different model, a test suite, a human: never only the model that wrote it.
  3. Measure defects that reach a playtest or a user, not lines generated. Speed that comes back as bugs is not speed.
  4. Start with one subsystem and keep a way back. Some of Epic's developers reportedly hoped the company would reverse course. A rollback should be a plan, not a hope.
  5. Treat art and code as two decisions. Store disclosure and copyright follow what players see and what a human shaped.
  6. Keep a second model route. A team that types no code is as exposed to one vendor's limits and prices as any product built on one.

Epic may well ship a better game this way. For now, the only visible change that came with the policy is a release date that went from March to blank. I would want my own number before I copied the memo.

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