Epic Games has delayed an unannounced Star Wars and Marvel crossover shooter indefinitely and told the team behind it to adopt an “AI first” production model built on AI tools, according to instructions given to staff last week.
The game had been planned for a March 2027 release that Epic never announced publicly. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney addressed the change in a series of posts on X, describing a companywide shift toward AI development.
The instructions call for the team to use tools such as Anthropic’s Claude, with art “generated with full AI workflows.” Epic has not officially revealed the game, its title, or a new release window.
Tim Sweeney Explains Epic’s AI Pivot
Sweeney said Epic is moving developers around “to retool for maximum AI acceleration.” He added that “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.”
Responding to criticism that Epic is ignoring how players feel about generative AI, Sweeney wrote that “much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it’s not.” Epic’s job as a provider of tools and technology to much of the industry, he argued, is to design for the present and the near future. He described himself as optimistic and called AI empowering for creators.
Asked whether Epic plans to speed up an IPO, Sweeney said the company’s “more modest aim is to survive the AI revolution, help other developers do the same, and come out on the other end making better code and content faster.”
The CEO also put numbers on the efficiency gains Epic is seeing. Current improvements range from about 20% in the most technical areas of Unreal Engine development to 5x in areas such as web development. By this time next year, Sweeney expects “very little will be less than 3x of January 2026 efficiency.”
Epic’s AI Push Follows 1,000 Layoffs in March
The shift comes after Epic laid off more than 1,000 employees in March. At the time, the company cited declining console sales, its ongoing legal disputes with Apple and Google, and difficulty delivering “consistent Fortnite magic with every season.”
Sweeney also argued that the biggest change for game design will be a much shorter path from an idea to a playtest. In his view, most recent AAA failures trace back to game systems spending far too much of their development without being playtested.
Players following the project have little to act on yet, since the shooter exists only as an internal project with no store page or trailer. Epic has not announced a new release date for the Star Wars and Marvel shooter, and the company has not confirmed how much of the final game will use AI-generated art.
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