Epic Games told staff to build its Disney game without hand-written code

Bloomberg reports that Epic Games has told staff the Marvel and Star Wars project it was behind on will be built without hand-written code. The AV Club, summarising that reporting, quotes the internal line as "No more hand-written code" and work "generated with full AI workflows." The game had been scheduled for a March release. Bloomberg's story sits behind a subscription, so what reaches a non-subscriber is through secondary coverage.

The confirmed line from Epic reads differently from the internal one. An Epic Games spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company is "embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do." That is a careful sentence. "AI-accelerated" and "no more hand-written code" are not the same claim, and the difference is where the test of this decision sits.

Where the test sits

Three things that reach a developer reading this are worth separating. First, "AI-first" is not a defined term in game development, and a studio that calls a project AI-first can mean anything from a code generation step in the engine pipeline to a goal that nobody at the studio writes code any more. Epic has not published the mechanism. Second, a game delayed from its March launch is already late by months, so the AI-first turn is being asked to recover that schedule as well as change how the team works. Third, a licensed Disney IP is a product where generated output has to pass a licensor's review: a Star Wars character that looks or sounds wrong is a legal problem as well as an engineering one.

The watch item for the rest of us

Over the next few months the question a team outside Epic can watch is the one no benchmark has answered. An AAA game is a code and art project at a scale no current measurement of AI-written output has covered. Studies that find AI code adoption raises throughput and also raises defects were done on web and backend codebases; a game engine is a different kind of codebase, with harder determinism requirements and no easy rollback. The release this becomes, or the next delay the project gets, is the data point that will settle whether an AI-first process holds at the scale the industry's biggest studios ship at.

For a team on the smaller side, the useful read is cautious. Epic's spokesperson said AI-accelerated, led by developers; the internal line said no more hand-written code. The difference is the one every team deciding how aggressively to lean on an AI coding stack is sitting on this quarter. Watch which line turns out to describe the shipped game, and decide from the real result rather than from the staff memo.

Source

Epic Games tells employees to use AI to get Disney game done, in The AV Club, summarising Bloomberg's reporting.