Fortnite maker Epic has delayed its collaboration with Disney – a shooter featuring characters from Marvel and Star Wars – to retool it as an “AI first” production.
Bloomberg’s highly reliable Jason Schreier (paywalled) reports that the unannounced game was planned to release in March, but no new launch target has been communicated to its team.
According to an internal message signed by one of its directors, staff will be required to take full advantage of Anthropic’s Claude model in their work, with art generated using “full AI workflows” and “no more hand-written code”.
Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney appeared to corroborate the article on social media, saying “we have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration”.
He continued:
“The aim isn’t to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build more and better stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.”
Sweeney’s comments appear to run counter to business decisions made by the juggernaut dev earlier in the year, when it slashed its workforce by 1,000 due to declining Fortnite figures.
In 2024, Disney invested $1.5 billion into the developer, kickstarting a collaboration on an “entertainment universe”.
As part of that, the abovementioned extraction shooter will now be built almost entirely with AI.
I obviously understand AI is being implemented into the workflow of practically all developers right now, but I’m really not keen on a game being entirely generated using the technology.
I suppose you could make the argument that a Disney shooter sounds like a soulless cash grab to begin with, and while I will reserve judgement until I see it, I’m feeling increasingly confident I won’t want to interact with this in any way.
