Star Wars and Marvel Crossover Shooter Delayed After ‘AI-First’ Mandate

Epic Games has delayed its unannounced Star Wars and Marvel crossover shooter and told its developers to adopt an “AI-first” production pipeline, according to a Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier.

The project is a collaboration with Disney, and was previously planned for release in March 2027. The game has no new release date. In an internal message seen by Bloomberg, one of the directors told staff there would be “no more hand-written code” and that all art should be “generated with full AI workflows.” Anthropic’s Claude is among the tools the studio is using.

“We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” Epic communications director Jake Jones said in a statement to Bloomberg. In a post on X, CEO Tim Sweeney said Epic has “a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration.” The aim, he wrote, is “to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.”

Polygon and Eurogamer, both citing Bloomberg, report that some developers were “shocked” by the AI-first mandate. The shift comes less than a year after Epic laid off more than 1,000 employees. At the time, Sweeney said the company was “spending significantly more than we’re making.” Disney invested $1.5 billion in Epic in 2024 as part of a multi-game partnership. Senior Disney executives have reportedly explored buying Epic outright.

Epic has used generative AI in shipped Fortnite content before. The publisher added an AI-voiced Darth Vader character to Fortnite in 2024. This summer it announced that AI would voice three dozen more skins.

Our read: This is the most aggressive AI workflow pivot in the games industry to date. Coming less than a year after Epic cut 1,000 jobs, the mandate reframes those layoffs as a precursor to a structural change rather than a cost-saving measure. The Star Wars and Marvel project is the first big test: if a $1.5 billion Disney collaboration ships under an AI-first pipeline, every other major publisher will face the same question. The two most-cited recent industry pivots in our own coverage frame the range of how publishers are handling the same pressure: Konami’s ‘second and third waves’ of new Silent Hill games is the smaller-faster approach, and Black Myth: Zhong Kui’s public rejection of AI is the opposite stance. Sweeney’s framing on X is closer to the Epic side of that split. The regulatory backdrop is the EU consumer-group action against Activision, Riot, and Ubisoft over in-game currencies, which shows how fast AI workflow questions are moving through policy.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report