Epic Games Reportedly Pushes AI-First Development for Disney and Marvel Games as Industry Concerns Grow

Epic Games has reportedly instructed developers working on an upcoming Disney collaboration to adopt an AI-first production model as the project faces delays. According to a Bloomberg report by Jason Schreier, the company wants its developers to use artificial intelligence tools to accelerate production, including generating artwork and handling coding tasks.

The project, which features characters from Marvel and Star Wars, was originally scheduled to launch in March but has been delayed without a new release date. The reported decision has raised concerns about how far major publishers are willing to go to integrate AI into game development.

According to people familiar with the project, Epic Games has instructed developers to use tools such as Anthropic’s Claude to handle significant parts of production, with human employees managing and guiding the results. 

Epic Games has instructed developers to use tools such as Anthropic’s Claude to handle significant parts of production, with human employees managing and guiding the results. One of the game's directors reportedly told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg that handwritten code would no longer be part of the process.

The director also stated that the project would create all artwork through fully AI-driven workflows. If implemented as described, the approach would make the game a notable example of a major production relying heavily on AI rather than using it only for selected development tasks.

Before this announcement, Epic Games had been pushing AI adoption across its divisions, but the reported plans are a significant step further. Bloomberg says this is the first time a major video game company has tried to develop a game predominantly with AI. Some Epic Games developers were reportedly stunned when the plans were disclosed during an internal video call. 

The project has also encountered development delays, partly because Epic Games underestimated the number of employees and the amount of time required to complete it. Using AI to accelerate production appears to be part of the company's response to those challenges, although it remains unclear when the game will eventually arrive.

Epic Games communications director Jake Jones told Bloomberg News that the company was embracing AI-accelerated development led by its developers, whom he described as the creative forces behind its work. Disney did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.

This story gets more complex with Disney’s involvement, which invested $1.5 billion in Epic Games in 2024.

That investment makes Disney a key player in the broader partnership, rather than a company on the outside being affected by Epic Games’s decisions. The partnership combines two of the largest entertainment companies with extensive experience in games, movies, and other digital entertainment.

However, the reported move toward fully AI-generated artwork has raised concerns about how much human creativity will remain central to a project built around some of the industry's most recognizable franchises. It also raises questions about whether Epic is prioritizing faster production over the artistic work that makes these beloved universes special.

He argued that the goal was not to produce the same amount of work with fewer people but to help employees create more and better products while bringing AI-related benefits to teams using Unreal Engine. His comments came despite Epic Games' previous layoffs, prompting criticism from people who questioned whether the company's stated goals matched its recent decisions.

The discussion extends beyond Epic Games' own games because developers across the industry use Unreal Engine. In June, reports about the direction of Unreal Engine 6 indicated plans to pull Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite together into one development environment.

Epic Games also announced a move to Verse, a programming language designed to make its evolving development ecosystem easier, and AI support for models like Claude and Google’s Gemini. Such changes can have a massive impact on how developers make games and how they keep old games alive.

One area of concern is blueprints.

The visual scripting system of Unreal Engine is a key area of concern for many developers who use it to create game mechanics and organize complex projects without relying solely on traditional programming. Modifications to the core technology of the engine could have an impact on the tools and workflows relied upon by existing projects.

If the official support for some systems changes, developers might end up relying more on community-maintained solutions and plug-ins. This poses another challenge for studios as they decide whether to adapt to new tools or continue to maintain older workflows as the engine grows. Epic Games is not the only company pushing AI further into game development. Unity has also started to incorporate AI within its development ecosystem, and NVIDIA is continuing to invest money into AI-powered technologies to make games look and run better.

One of the most controversial examples is DLSS 5, which uses AI-powered visual processing to alter aspects of a game’s visual appearance, such as lighting and character materials. The technology has faced criticism over issues such as its visual output and hardware requirements and impact on artistic direction, but companies are still using it.

Capcom also plans to leverage AI to improve its proprietary RE Engine for quality assurance, debugging, and data processing. Programmer Ishida discussed these developments within the framework of the REX project to continue evolving the engine for future development during the company’s annual technical conference, IGN reports via GameBiz.

The proposed enhancements are RE Docs for standard data processing, RE UI for development toolkits, and RE Log for ID-based logging. Capcom also said that its visual scripting tool RE Flows, the RE Runtime core, and the RE++ execution framework will be updated. These changes are intended to make the development process more efficient and easier to manage.

The company said that integrating AI will help developers generate and interpret code, automate playtesting, find bugs, and improve performance.

These applications are distinct from the use of generative AI to produce final artwork, although the distinction remains important as the technology evolves. That’s especially pertinent to developers and players because the RE Engine has driven games in series like Resident Evil and Monster Hunter.

Capcom has proceeded to make successful games without making AI-generated creative content the defining feature of its releases, so questions about how much more automation the company actually needs remain. Its future decisions could reveal how far it intends to take AI integration.

But the bigger issue is that developers are increasingly leaning on commercial engines and tools that are integrating AI into their workflows. It’s part of the tough decisions that developers have to make, and studios like Larian have also been talking about needing to adapt to these technological changes rather than risk becoming obsolete.

For smaller studios, it’s often a better idea to use publicly available development tools, as it takes a lot of resources to build and maintain your engine. If those tools become more and more dependent on AI-assisted workflows, then avoiding the technology might become more difficult, even for developers who favor more traditional production methods.

AI could eventually integrate so deeply into development that players don’t immediately notice its involvement. Games may be marketed as traditional products, yet AI is used in many stages of their production, much like food products that appear to contain only a few ingredients but are actually produced through more complex manufacturing processes.

This increasing use of such tools doesn't mean that every AI-assisted game is poorly made, but it does raise questions about transparency, creative control, and the future of human developers. With Epic Games pushing for AI-first production and other companies integrating the tech into their engines, we’re approaching a change in the gaming industry that developers may find difficult to avoid.