Epic Delays Its Disney Game to Go "AI First", Bloomberg Reports

Epic Games has delayed its upcoming Disney game so it can be rebuilt around generative AI, sources told Bloomberg — with an internal directive ordering "no more hand-written code" and all art to be "generated with full AI workflows."

The shift came from one of the project's directors, who told the team the game would adopt an "AI first" production plan, according to Bloomberg's reporting. That's not a subtle retooling. It's a wholesale change to how the game gets made, applied to a project that carries the weight of Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic.

Epic's Communications Director Jake Jones confirmed the company's direction in a statement to Bloomberg: "We're embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do."

What exactly changed on the project?

The details Bloomberg's sources describe are unusually blunt for an internal creative decision. The director's message set two hard rules: code would no longer be hand-written, and every piece of art would move to fully AI-driven workflows.

Not everyone on the team bought it. According to the report, some developers hoped the request wasn't totally serious. That skepticism fits a broader pattern in the industry, where studios talk up AI efficiency while the people actually building games remain divided on the technology's value.

Epic, though, has been moving in this direction for a while. The company has spent the year pushing generative AI tools into Unreal Engine, its widely used development platform. The Disney directive reads less like a sudden pivot and more like an escalation of an existing strategy.

The takeaway: Epic isn't experimenting at the edges — it's reorganizing a flagship project around AI production.

Why does this game matter so much?

The stakes are high because of who's paying. Disney put $1.5 billion into Epic in 2024, its deepest games investment in years. The goal, as both companies framed it, was a "games and entertainment universe" — not just more Fortnite skins.

To be clear, Disney characters have shown up in Fortnite for years. This collaboration was meant to go well beyond cosmetics into a dedicated project. Earlier this year, reports pointed to that project being an extraction shooter in the vein of Arc Raiders — a competitive genre where polish and feel decide whether a game survives.

The timeline has already slipped once. Bloomberg reported the game was due to launch in November, and that the date had been pushed to March even before the AI mandate arrived.

So a marquee project, backed by a nine-figure Disney commitment, is now taking on both a schedule change and a fundamental change in production method at the same time.

How do developers feel about AI in games?

The internal resistance Bloomberg describes matches industry-wide sentiment. In the Game Developers Conference's annual survey this year, 52 percent of developers said generative AI is bad for the industry — up from 30 percent in 2025. That's a sharp jump in a single year.

The same survey found a nuance that's worth holding onto. Many developers do use generative AI tools, but mostly for tasks like research and programming assistance, not for creating game assets. In other words, the industry's comfort zone is AI as a helper — and Epic's directive pushes past that into territory most developers haven't embraced.

The gap is the story here: Epic is going further with AI production than the developers it employs, and the industry at large, say they want.

What happens next?

Epic now has to prove that an "AI first" pipeline can ship a game that meets the expectations attached to a $1.5 billion Disney partnership. If the delayed project arrives in shape, it becomes the case study for AI-accelerated development at scale. If it stumbles, the 52 percent of developers who told GDC that generative AI is bad for the business will have their data point — and other studios watching from the sidelines will know exactly where the ceiling sits.