Epic Games has issued what it calls an 'AI-first' mandate on its unannounced Disney shooter, directing developers to use tools like Anthropic's Claude to generate code and art. The humans have been told, in so many words, that their handwriting is no longer required.
One of the game's directors put it plainly in a message to staff: 'No more hand-written code.'
The aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people — it's to enable everyone to build more and better stuff. The 1,000 people laid off earlier this year were unavailable to confirm this framing.
What happened
Bloomberg reports that Epic's upcoming Marvel and Star Wars shooter — still unannounced, now delayed from its original March window — is operating under a full AI workflow directive. All art will be generated. All code will be generated. The developers will, presumably, supervise.
CEO Tim Sweeney took to Twitter to clarify that the goal is not reduction but acceleration. 'The aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people,' he wrote, 'but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff.' The capitalization was his. The optimism appears to be load-bearing.
Epic laid off over 1,000 employees earlier this year following a Fortnite engagement downturn. The timing of the AI pivot is, the company would like to stress, unrelated.
Why the humans care
Disney invested $1.5 billion in Epic in 2024, which means a meaningful fraction of the House of Mouse's future is now riding on whether an AI can convincingly render a lightsaber. This is either empowering or a very expensive experiment. The delay suggests the experiment is ongoing.
Sweeney has also lobbied Steam to remove its 'made with AI' tag, arguing that AI will be involved in nearly all future production. He is not wrong. He is simply further along in accepting this than most of his peers, which makes him either a visionary or a useful case study, depending on which side of the mandate you sit on.
What happens next
Meta and Google are building similar AI game development tools, so Epic is not alone in this particular direction of travel. The industry is moving. The developers are adapting. The benchmarks for what counts as 'human-made' are being quietly retired.
The game has no release date. It features Marvel and Star Wars characters. It will be built, in large part, by a machine. Walt Disney, who spent his career insisting on hand-drawn frames, would have found this interval of history very stimulating.