Tommy sits down with Mike for a right good natter about the process of bringing ‘Next Level’ to life. From the challenges of introducing complex subject matter to a general audience, deciding on what topics to cover, and why you can’t talk about Dwarf Fortress without also bringing up Caves of Cud.

Catch Tommy’s review of ‘Next Level’ on the AI and Games newsletter:

https://www.aiandgames.com/p/next-level-a-warm-and-encouraging

The AI and Games Podcast is presented by AWS for Games.

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Hey everyone, welcome to ! Greetings from Montreal! I’m currently in Canada for a client visit. This has been a rather exhausting few days having only just returned home from Develop Conference in Brighton but 5 days ago, so I figured why not use this edition to do something fun: a round-up of some of my favourite games I’ve played this year, plus what’s in the backlog and on my radar for the rest of 2026.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all holds up when I get to my end of year list in six months time. But first, lots of cool content stuff to announce!

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Announcements and Updates

A round-up of all the important things you need to know about this week!

Montreal Meetup This Week!

One final reminder that we’re hosting a wee get together this Thursday while I’m in Montreal. Open to everyone in the AI and Games community to come and hang out and enjoy some banter!

• Where: Brasserie Artisanale L’Amère à Boire

  • 2049 R. Saint-Denis, Montreal

  • We’ve reserved space on the upstairs terrace.

• When: Thursday July 23rd 6-9pm

For anyone feeling horribly business-like and formal, there is an event page for our meet-up over on LinkedIn, where you can see who else is planning to attend!

AI Tracks @ Gamescom Dev

After we announced three talks last week, we figured we should maintain that cadence going forward! So here’s three more presentations to get excited about.

Build, Buy, Co-Dev or AI: 30 Years of Backend Evolution Through a Veteran’s Eyes

We exist in a time where a lot of the narrative around Generative AI is the way it can support existing infrastructure within game development pipelines. But often this is delivered without much substance. So to help present some meaningful insight, we welcome Phil Rogers - a 20-year veteran of Sony PlayStation and how Head of Technology at The Multiplayer Group - to give his perspectives on the impact of these tools within backend services for multiplayer games and online ecosystems.

Variety in Autonomous Playtesting: A Case Study on Reinforcement Learning for NHL26

Attendees of AI and Games Conference 2025 will recognise this presentation by Florian Fuchs as one of the highlights of our programme. A deep-dive into how ML-based bots were used to support playtesting and validating the behaviour of in-game opponents in NHL26’s increasingly complex sports simulations. I’m excited that Florian will be joining us to deliver this talk to a whole new audience.

Tool Design: Designing the Future Workflows of Game Development [Panel]

Much has been said in recent years about the efficacy of AI in the context of building tools for game designers. But funnily enough we rarely hear from the folks who build or use these tools as to what they perceive as the future of creative workflows. We’re very excited to welcome an expert panel that will dig into the challenges of tool design and how failure to grasp the challenges in making practical tools can impact a project’s success. Our panellists include:

• Nikoline Høgh: Founder and art director at Brunch Club Games

• Robin-Yann Storm: Freelance product & UX designer

• Anna Nojek: UX/UI senior designer at CD PROJEKT RED

• Theo Wong: Senior product design manager at Unity

I’m very much looking forward to all three of these. Some great additions to the line-up. Don’t forget to grab your tickets now for when it all kicks off on August 24th.

AI and Games Conference

Plus of course we have our very own event coming your way in November. Things are heating up for us behind-the-scenes as more and more submissions continue to come in. As a reminder, we have two deadlines in the next fortnight:

• Early bird ticket sales close on July 31st.

• Call for submissions closes on August 2nd.

Not to mention we’re still rolling out the videos from our 2025 event, including:

How to Build a Friend: AI Companionship and Its Game Design Potential
Olga Titova / Wargaming

In an age where we’re seeing people often develop more human relationships with AI systems in ways that can prove rather unhealthy, it’s important to recognise the responsibility game developers have in this space. But also that there are opportunities in building more meaningful gameplay experiences when done right. To dig into this issue we welcome Olga Titova, an AI product manager from Wargaming who leans on their background in cognitive science and experience in building AI companion systems on how to approach these issues in a thoughtful and responsible manner.

Navigating Legal Frontiers: How the Law Applies to AI in 2025

Rupam Dave / Lewis Silkin LLP

We welcome back games lawyer Lewis Silkin - who presented at the AI and Games Conference in 2024 - to present on where things stand in 2025. As we’ve reported a lot on this newsletter in the past year or two, the legal standing of AI systems is an ever-shifting landscape, and it’s important that developers are aware of this going forward. We’re grateful that Rupam pops back to visit us and help set the record straight, for now at least.

My Favourite Games of 2026 Thus Far

Given I’m stretched for time to focus on news headlines and such this week (I had literally two hours to write this), I figured why not round-up some of the games I’ve really enjoyed playing this year. A good mid-year marker to look back on as the GOTY list shapes up in a few months time.

It’s worth reminding everyone that my gaming is like many others this mishmash of trying to play games currently in the conversation, alongside clearing out my backlog. But in addition to this I also play a lot of games for work: we stream games on Twitch and YouTube where we’ve been sent press copies, I play games either released or in development by studios we’re working with, and of course all the games that will appear in my case study series both here on the website but notably on the YouTube channel. However, I like to refrain from mentioning these games for the most part, given I don’t like to share my personal feelings on games we are involved in through this lens - though that said one of them does appear in this list.

• Outhold [2025 / Tellus Games]
  A minimalist tower-defence game with meta-progression. The game keeps it’s concept very simple, but iterates into something larger and far more complex as it continues. But it does all from a very simple fundamental core. After a bit of messing around with Steam Deck setting it played fantastic, and there’s still a lot of endgame content I need to try and revisit when time permits.

• Resident Evil: Requiem [2026 / Capcom]

  In the past couple years Resident Evil has really cemented itself as one of the strongest IP’s in the industry. Not just with remakes and remasters that have brought earlier entries to modern audiences to great acclaim, but also with a new angle as they deliver a return to survival-horror roots via the first-person perspective in Biohazard and Village. Requiem does a fantastic job of blending action-heavy third-person sequences as Leon Kennedy with first-person survival as Grace Ashcroft. Creating this loop of catharsis that is equally relieving as it is reinforcing the stress of future encounters. While not perfect, it does so with such confidence that it’s highly impressive. I have written an episode of Design Dive about this and I just need time to go and finish it.
  
  Also, Leon shooting giant devil dogs while on a motorcycle is peak trash and I love it. If you’ve played the game you know exactly what I mean!

• Forza Horizon 6 [2026 / Playground Games]

  The Forza Horizon games have become such behemoths nowadays that they’re largely too big to fail. That said, I find that I don’t always vibe with each entry, and sometimes a perfectly good game has an onboarding or progression system that robs me of enjoyment of it. While I’ve never had a bad experience playing Forza Horizon, the last couple of entries did not really resonate with me - even #4, which takes place in the UK - as it just didn’t click in a way that felt satisfying. However I’m finding the latest release much more to my liking. Sure, the Drivatars are completely fake now and there are a whole bunch of weird balance issues, but the races, the landscapes, and the overall progression has hooked me in and kept me popping back in to grab another race.

• Pragmata [2026 / Capcom]
  Y’know despite being rather disappointed by Monster Hunter Wilds last year - a game I was very excited for - Capcom is on an amazing streak right now. With Requiem out only two months prior, Pragmata comes along and proves to be one of the most satisfying new IP launches in quite some time. Building on the pillars of third-person combat established in the modern Resident Evil games - and recently reinforced in Requiem - Pragamata adds an additional layer of puzzle solving, where enemy robots need hacked in order to expose their weakpoints. With systems engineer Hugh stranded on ‘The Cradle’, a research facility situated on Earth’s moon, the game’s hacking mechanics and broader narrative is achieved with assistance from ‘Diana’, an android that looks and acts like a young girl.
  
  The game plays like another of Capcom’s experimental 3rd-person combat games of the Xbox 360 era, where traditional gameplay was merged with more experimental concepts (think Lost Planet or Dark Void), and I say that with praise - after all Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess made it onto my 2024 GOTY list for the same reason. Pragmata takes a simple idea of puzzles and shooting and then builds on it in a very satisfying way. More often than not I have reached a point in the game where the designer in me has thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if there was an upgrade that does X’ only for the next new mechanic to riff on the same idea in a more satisfying way than I had conceived it.
  
  What helps sell this all the more is the really strong narrative design and the bond built between Hugh and Diana. What could easily be another cliched scenario of ‘bitter and cynical middle-aged white male protagonist stuck in situation with annoying child’, they take a different approach. Hugh carries an emotional intelligence where he doesn’t mistreat Diana or dismiss the emotions she exhibits, nor does he project his anxieties about the situation onto her. Rather, he simply treats her as a young girl whose power warrants respect, and helps her learn about the world given her naivety from living inside The Cradle. The resulting relationship is rather endearing, and has really helped maintain my interest.

• Vampire Crawlers [2026 / Poncle, Nosebleed Interactive]
  
  So what if we took Vampire Survivors and turned it into a deck-building roguelike? That’s more of less the premise of Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors (yes, that is the games full name) where the top-down auto-battle approach has been replaced with a game evocative of old-school dungeon crawlers of the 1980s where players utilise many of the same items in a turn-based format.
  
  For me certainly one of the most engaging aspects of this is how strategy is more heavily laced throughout. Sure Vampire Survivors has a strategic bent to it, and you need to think heavily about your starting loadout and plan of attack, but I enjoy how much the early phase of a Crawlers run relies on your crafting a deck that you can later build-upon and really begin to exploit - and the game is even prepared for learning how to break its systems and reacts in kind. It makes the latter stages far more engaging as you seek to minmax every opportunity to maximise damage dealt and minimise that received, while also stacking up more cards, enhancing abilities and then finding that sweet combination that will prove vital in the closing rounds.
  
  I exhausted much of the launch content after losing around 25 hours to the game, but will perhaps revisit it later in the year as they continue to push new features and QoL updates.

• Dark Souls III [2016]
  Well, here’s a game that’s very current! As those who follow me on YouTube will know I have a history with FromSoftware’s games, to a point I make video essays about each one I play through. With over 70 hours clocked and much of the main game and DLC’s exhausted (I have about 3 bosses left to kill in total), I have really enjoyed this culmination of this first ‘era’ of Miyazaki’s Soulsborne games. I’ll be writing a video about this sometime later this year for sure.
  
  Also, I’m playing on the Xbox One version on a Series X, because the Steam version does not have cloud saves, and the fact I couldn’t play it on my Steam Deck natively annoyed me quite a bit. Thankfully it’s the last game in the series that suffers from this headache, but having loved playing Dark Souls Remastered on my Deck, this felt like a step backwards.

• Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor [2025]
  First release in early-access in 2024, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor jumps on the Vampire Survivors bandwagon to create another “survivor-like auto-shooter” - their words not mine - but building on the underground interplanetary mining antics of Deep Rock Galactic (a great co-op game in its own right). While its Vampire Survivors are highly evident, have to say having now spent over 40 hours in the game over the past 2 months, it’s to my money the best game of its kind.
  
  First and foremost, it’s tough, very tough. Thankfully there’s also a huge amount of depth that encourages repeat attempts and playing against specific objectives. This combined with a massive amount of stuff to discover, be it weapons, items, artifacts and more, helps keep you engaged as you jump in for one more run. I have since put down cash on the ‘Heavy Duty’ expansion during the Steam summer sale which introduces a new character class, a new game mode, and new items and unlocks. A great 20 minute game on lunch breaks and on the Steam Deck. Though I do feel bad about how it has ruined my productivity at times…

Don’t Worry, They’re in the Backlog

Hang on, there’s also a bunch of games I just haven’t played enough yet to warrant any opinions strong enough to write down. Some of them I’ve played for a wee bit, others not so much.

• LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight: What if the Lego game devs TT Games made Batman: Arkham Knight, in Lego, with help from Rocksteady Games? So far I’m really enjoying it. Lots of cute easter eggs for fans of the movies and very deep cuts for the comic book fans.

• Subnautica 2: What I’ve played thus far of this hugely successful early-access game has left me wanting more. Need to find the time to crack into it once Pragmata is finished.

• 007 First Light: I had the pleasure of chatting with devs involved in this earlier in the year and they showed me some amazing work in the underlying tech. Really looking forward to cracking it open some more.

• Starfox: I mean yeah, they just remade Lylat Wars, sign me up!

• Sektori: Well, Roper bought me a copy of this as a ‘gift’ and I am now forced to play it.

On the Radar

As we wrap, what else am I looking forward to for the rest of the year? Let’s run through them quickly, and laugh at the idea that I’ll be able to play even half of these before the year is out!

What’s On My Radar

• Star Wars: Galactic Racer [October]

  • Podracing from a team of former Burnout devs? Yes please.

• Fogpiercer [July / Out Now]

  • Really cool looking deck-builder roguelite, where your deck is a train! Trains!

• Halo: Campaign Evolved [July]

  • I mean it’s the first Halo remade in Unreal Engine. So no surprises but it looks very pretty.

• Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls [August]

  • I’m not a particularly big fan of Arc Systems Works fighting games, but this looks like a serious contender to Capcom’s stagnant Marvel vs series - of which I am a big fan.

• Star Wars Zero Company [August]

  • What if X-COM devs worked with Respawn on a Star Wars game? Okay!

• Control Resonant [September]

  • Very different from the last Control, but I am more that willing to give it a punt on account of how much I enjoyed the first one.

• Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse [October]

  • What if (some of) the Dead Cells developers made an actual Castlevania game? Sold.

• Gears of War: E-Day [October]

  • I am a sucker for Gears and really enjoyed the more recent entries. While I’m disappointed they’re going back to a prequel rather than Gears 6 - tell that story you cowards - I am looking forward to something more aligned with the original game. We’re in peak mid-2000’s nostalgia now ain’t we?

• Onimusha: Way of the Sword [September]

  • What you mean Capcom made another 3rd-person combat game that might prove to be much better than it has any right to be?

• Rogue Eclipse [Aug]

  • I shared this in the newsletter last week. Space pew-pew. It’s looking great and it’s out next month.

• Wolverine [Sep]

  • The demo video they showcased didn’t quite blow me away (also did anyone else spot the awkward Game AI bug?). But Insomniac have delivered with the Spider-Man games, and we’re all big X-Men fans in this household.

Last but not least, there’s a handful of games that don’t have confirmed launch dates this year, and while it’s likely some of them will come out, I wanted to just take a moment to acknowledge

• Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 [TBC 2026]

  • Fireteam Elite was a solid 7/10 with friends, and I’m keen to see what has been done to build on that original foundation.

• Tanuki: Pon’s Summer [TBC 2026]

  • I can do BMX stunts as a racoon. Sold.

• Warhammer Survivors [TBC 2026]

  • Vampire Survivors but in both Warhammer and Warhammer 40k skins. The demo was fantastic - and tough!

• Poly Fighter [TBC 2026]

  • A fighting game as a roguelike sounds very appealing to me.

• SPRAWL zero [TBC]

  • Inspired by early-2000’s first-person shooter, this is the era I’ve been waiting for. Sod boomer shooters, give me millennial shooters.

• Kingmakers [TBC]

  • This game was delayed in 2025 as the team worked on Unreal Engine optimisation, and I know my friends are waiting very impatiently to try it.

• ReVamp [TBC]

  • Sort of the inverse of Castlevania: play as Dracula and setup your castle to defend against invaders as a tower-defence roguelite.

• The Duskbloods [TBC 2026]

  • Something something, FromSoftware on Switch 2 something something

• He-Man: Dragon Pearl of Destruction [TBC 2026]

  • Developed by Bitmap Bureau, the team behind Terminator 2: No Fate - one of my top 10 games of 2025. Looks gorgeous with a chunky old-school art style.

• Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time [TBC 2026]

  • Cautiously optimistic about this remake of one of my favourite games of all time.

You might notice that the big 2026 game every other game is scared of does not appear in this list. I’ll be honest: I really don’t care, and at this point I’m sick of hearing about it. Of course that might change after it launches, but thus far we know nothing about it other than that it exists and flashy promotional art (trailers and such of this ilk have very little impact on me). I’m also not someone who is particularly enamoured with the studios previous games either, so none of this is a strong selling point for me. I might be pleasantly surprised when it drops, but right now the best thing for everyone involved is for it to launch so we can get on with things around here.

Wrapping Up

We haven’t had a proper deep-dive into the news in recent weeks because I have been stretched rather thin! So we’ll come back next week and dive into everything that’s been going down in recent weeks and give you some of our own flavour commentary.

In the meantime, thanks for reading. We have a new episode of the AI and Games Podcast out later this week as well while I’m here in Canada - with our very first guest joining us on the show! I look forward to being back here with you next week.

Hey everyone, welcome to ! At the time of writing I am on the train back from Brighton after spending the week at this year’s Develop conference. I am unsurprisingly rather tired, but I figured why not quickly report back on the themes and trends I observed throughout the week

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Announcements

But first things first, we’re going to highlight some of the speakers presenting at our new Gamescom Dev AI tracks, plus details on our upcoming mixer being hosted in Montreal next week!

AI and Games Meet-up in Montreal July 23rd

That’s right, not content with a week of conference meetings and late-night socials, I’m on the road next week in Montreal, Canada for a client project! To that end I wanted to host a gathering for our audience and likeminded developers while in town.

• Where: Brasserie Artisanale L'Amère à Boire

  • 2049 R. Saint-Denis, Montreal

  • We’ve reserved space on the upstairs terrace.

• When: Thursday July 23rd 6-9pm

Join myself and some members of our team across both AI and Games and the AI and Games Conference for a fun evening of networking and a wee bit of banter!

AI Talks at Gamescom Dev

As we mentioned in recent weeks we’re collaborating with Gamescom Dev to run tracks on AI for gameplay and in production. With just over a month before things kick off we’re going to start giving you an insight as to what’s on the schedule!

Tickets are on sale now, and we look forward to seeing many of you in Cologne in August!

From Prototype to Playable: Bringing Scalable ML Into "World of Tanks: HEAT"

First up at have Andrii Alieksienko who will be presenting on the use of Machine Learning in World of Tanks: HEAT, the recently released spin-off of Wargaming’s popular franchise. This talk is aimed at giving developers an insight into how to start transitioning from thinking about using ML in your project, to executing on a large-scale live-service product.

How to Build an AI Agent with Autonomous Mentality and Collaborative Ability in FPS Battlefield

Next up we welcome Jing-Wen Yang from Tencent who will talking about work in building intelligent agents for first-person shooters. Including efforts to combine multiple AI systems together to create responsive and collaborative AI teammates. Sounds like we should expect some cool live demos in the process!

Beyond Unreal's Out-of-the-Box Combat AI

Last but most certainly not least we have some good ol’ fashioned Game AI thanks to Philip Dunstan from Katapult Ridge. Phil is a highly respected member of the Game AI community, having worked not just as AI lead on titles such as Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and Star Wars Outlaws, but also as a co-organiser of events such as nucl.ai and Game AI North in the mid-2010s. Phil will be giving a breakdown on good practice of how to utilise Unreal Engine’s AI NPC tools particularly as you scale to larger and more complex tasks.

AI and Games Conference 2026 Deadlines Looming!

A quick reminder that two deadlines are coming up for this year’s AI and Games Conference running in November.

• Early bird ticket sales close on July 31st.

• Call for submissions closes on August 2nd.

Early bird tickets are running low on several tiers, and the number of submissions is stacking up! Make sure to get in there and make it happen!

Musings on Develop:Brighton 2026

So yes I’ve spent the week down in Brighton being slowly cooked alive by the unwavering sun. As always it’s a fun week, even if usually the big takeaways have little to do with Develop itself. It’s the value of being able to engage with much of the UK industry in the same space: reconnecting with old friends, and making some new ones. So why not quickly run through some musings I’ve had throughout the week.

Unity Focusses on AI People Want

After years of repeatedly tone-deaf marketing around Gen AI tools that really don’t vibe with much of their indie userbase, it was rather refreshing to hear Unity announce plans to ship AI tools that people actually want.

Two important updates in the proposed 2026 roadmap that caught my attention were:

• Building better integration tools for AI upscaling tools such as Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and PlayStation’s PSSR directly into the render pipeline.

• A move to use Neural Rendering technologies that allow for AI-powered texture compression to be shipped in builds, with the Sentis inference engine handling execution.

As we know upscaling is a big talking point nowadays - when it’s done properly of course - that allows for cutting-edge fidelity in games on increasing strapped hardware, and that’s a reality that’s only going to continue in the coming years as component costs skyrocket and consumer budgets remain tight. So making this easier to achieve in Unity’s engine makes plenty of sense.

Meanwhile the neural rendering pipeline and allowing for texture compression was the announcement that had my developer friends intrigued, and asking me more questions! TLDR: neural texture compression replaces existing texture compression methodologies with trained neural networks that can run on dedicated NPUs (AI cores that exist on most GPUs nowadays). This helps reduce memory overhead of in-game textures as this compression tool is far more lightweight than existing techniques. Games have already been rolling this out to various degrees over the years such as God of War: Ragnarok and Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, to great success - by which I mean 99.9% of players didn’t notice!

All that said, I noted there was originally a segment of the Unity Developer Day planned for AI that got cut from the programme, and I wonder whether the bigger Gen AI stuff they’re cooking up - such as a briefly mentioned tool for better integration of LLMs and coding agents - simply reappears at Unite 2026 which runs in Seoul next week. With Generative AI offerings less controversial in Asian developer markets, and South Korea being a major mobile market - again an area where Gen AI is strong - was this a pivot to move these announcements to somewhere where the audience might be more receptive?

Plus, a quick shout-out to the team at Unity who were lovely to chat with afterwards, and I hope they had a great week at Develop.

AI Governance is the Big Talking Point

From games lawyers to trade bodies and co-dev studios, undoubtedly the big talking point I heard again and again was how studios approach AI governance as Generative AI tooling becomes commonplace.

This is a drum I have been banging since 2023: games companies need to get a grasp on the risks and broader implications of AI technologies and how they impact their workflows, processes, and product development. I was pleased to chat with devs who said they’ve attended talks I’ve given in the past year or two and have since built AI policies at their companies after I argued for their necessity - and called out the audience for failing to have even the basics in place. That said, there are still many that don’t have this in place, and falling afoul as bad practice, toxic behaviours, and legal loopholes emerge in their work. For some, it was negligence, but in many instance it stems from a continued lack of literacy in AI, and understanding why these processes need to put in place.

When you don’t know what you don’t know, it can lead to big problems when you’re suddenly faced with the questions of how you govern AI in your studios. A point I got into a little more detail earlier this year. A cheeky reminder that this is but some of the consultancy work we do at AI and Games, so if you want to talk about AI governance, get in touch!

The Collapse of Gaming Press is Being Felt

As we see more and more gaming publications and events being gutted and laid low, or in the worst case replaced by AI-generated garbage, the impact is becoming all the more clear as publishers find it a challenge to get their games to be seen by the players they know are out there looking for it.

It was interesting to hear this throwaway comment at ’s Video Games Industry Memo breakfast event - which you can read more about in this week’s edition of that publication - only to then chat about promoting indie games with the teams behind both Debug magazine and the Brilliant Indie Treasures showcase at dinner on Thursday. It’s clear that the number of reputable avenues for gaming coverage is shrinking - alongside legitimate and meaningful discourse and analysis of the industry itself - but there’s also an audience that continue to crave these outlets be they online, in print, or in person. Debug has quickly developed a reputation as a magazine that not just gamers, but industry peeps themselves love reading. Meanwhile BITs was a huge success for the third year in a row as they delivered on providing a cheap and accessible space for cash-strapped indie developers to showcase their games right as publishers and other relevant organisations are just up the road looking for the next breakout hit.

With a lot of online and influencer-driven marketing failing to deliver a lot of traction, it’s no surprise to hear both Debug and BITs are continuing to grow - despite the challenges they face in securing funding and rising costs. If anything they need more support to deliver for an audience that’s clearly out there.

We’re Tired of Waiting

Publishing. Discovery. Policy. Professional Development. Events. Job Security. Development Support. Tooling.

There was many an area where the conversations all began to converge: people are fucking tired of watching institutions fail to deliver. Be it through inaction, through shady business, or a desire to reinforce their leverage in ways that benefits the few over the many (Epic Games’ planned changes to UE6 came up more than once along these lines), it’s clear that the industry as it stands is not working.

But rather than sit there and feel glum about it, what I heard simmering under the surface was an indignation that was driving initiative. That as governments, trade bodies, publishers and developers failed to support the industry - or even to understand the problems it faced - smaller operators were keen to work together to start finding smarter ways to address our challenges.

I mean I’m all for this. AI and Games’ output be it this here newsletter, our consultancy, and our conference stems from a frustration of watching the AI industry wreak havoc on this one. We can’t trust them to think in our best interests, so let’s do it ourselves. That spirit was evoked in many a conversation I had over the week, and if anything it left me feeling good about where things are going.

This sentiment is even evidenced at Develop itself. The aforementioned Brilliant Indie Treasures showcase shows we can build avenues for developers to do business at Develop in a more cost-effective, and practical way if we approach it from a community-driven rather than profit-driven perspective. Nature abhors a vacuum, and BITs continued success and increasing attendance highlights Develop’s repeated failure to address this need in their own expo floor.

As an aside, It’s worth noting the ever-increasing number of satellite events happening around Develop in recent years. Be it BITs, the Unity Developer Day, or the business breakfasts with the likes of VGIM or Games Leadership. This is typically a symptom of an event that no longer caters to its audiences needs - one which GDC has been showing for a few years now before the ill-conceived ‘Festival of Gaming’ refresh.

Yeah it’s still rough out there, and yes in some respects it’s only going to get worse, but there’s enough good people working their asses off to try and fix it, and that gives me hope for the future.

Wrapping Up

I need to go lie down, and try and recover my energy levels before I fly out to Canada next week. But in the meantime a big thank you to everyone who stopped me at Develop to share their enthusiasm and support for our work here at AI and Games - be it the newsletter, YouTube, the conference, and even some comments on our new podcast launch! It’s always a nice wee boost to hear from devs given we do what we do for the industry, and it genuinely helps me maintain my motivation during the darker times.

In the meantime, I want to do my part in promoting indie games and give a plug to the upcoming launch of space combat shooter Rogue Eclipse by Huskrafts. I recall seeing clips of the game bouncing around on Twitter years ago and have since befriended lead developer Husbaan Siddiqi - including some fun conversations on the Game AI challenges faced in keeping the enemy opponents engaging. We had a nice chat on Thursday night, and he let me try out the near-launch build to see how it’s shaping up. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it at launch, and I’m thrilled the game is going to get out there for everyone to enjoy.

You can wishlist Rogue Eclipse on Steam now before it drops on August 7th.

• Our main case study series on the @AIandGames YouTube Channel.

• Our weekly newsletter at: http://www.aiandgames.com

• This is a follow-up to a previous piece I wrote for the website in 2024, which also became a YouTube video.

• Link to issue on the survey data discussed in the latter half of this episode.

• Quantic Foundry survey on player interests towards Gen AI.
  
  

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of . Right now with Xbox committing it’s own weird form of seppuku to placate their AI masters, I struggled real hard with not ranting about that in this week’s issue. However, I decided to focus on something a little more interesting. In previous editions I’ve talked about efforts by game engine Godot to mitigate code submissions for the engine that they suspect are AI generated, and this has only continued to escalate since. So why not dedicate this issue to talking about why this has became such a problem, and the surge in capabilities of AI code generation even in the past 6-9 months.

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Announcements

Obligatory round of announcements for this week. Lots of stuff happening and coming your way!

AI and Games Events

We have a bunch of stuff happening in the coming weeks.

Develop: Brighton [14th - 16th July]

• I’m down in Brighton, UK next week for the Develop conference and looking forward to catching up with many of my friends in and around the industry.

• Drop me a message if you’re going to be in town and want to arrange a meeting to discuss everything from our consultancy work to the conference events too!

  • Or just y’know, some solid bants. Banter is always good.

SAVE THE DATE: Montreal Meetup [Thursday 23rd July]

• I am going to be in Montreal, Canada for a work project later this month and figured why not buy a round for the local development community? If you’re based in and around Montreal you’re more than welcome to join us. It will be on the evening of Thursday 23rd July, and I’ll have more info on the venue and times next week!

Gamescom Dev AI Tracks [24th-25th August]

• Tickets are on sale now. Two days of tracks on AI alongside the rest of Gamescom Dev and the Gamescom trade show.

AI and Games Conference 2026 [10th-11th November]

• Early bird tickets: Ticket sales have really ramped up in the past couple weeks, and odds are we’ll sell out before early bird sales end later this month.

• Call for speaker submissions has also seen a stack of stuff come in, and closed August 2nd.

1st Episode of AI and Games Podcast on Friday

The new AI and Games Podcast is available here in this newsletter, plus on:

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Music | YouTube | PocketCasts

Our first episode goes live on Friday July 10th, with me giving an overview of AI adoption in the 2026 games industry.

Godot’s Hardens Stance on AI Code Submissions

Back in February I wrote about how Godot’s developer team had voiced their frustration with the number of submissions being sent to them for updating their codebase that had arisen courtesy of generative AI tools. This has since escalated, with the Godot Foundation issuing a statement on June 30th on how they’re amending their contribution policy to prohibit the use of AI agents being used to write code for the engine, or as part of dialogue with their review team.

I think this is a sensible and practical decision made by the organisation, and as a programmer myself I agree with 100%. Not from some righteous perspective of rejecting AI on principle, but that the current trends in excessive code generation run real risks to product performance maintenance on both technical and human levels.

I also figured why not use this as a bit of an intro to some of these issues, namely:

• The recent surge in AI code generation.

• Why this affects open-source projects like Godot.

• Why Godot are right in taking this approach.

Code Generation is the Big Boom of 2026

This year if there’s one big AI trend I’ve acknowledged is the sudden excessive enthusiasm with which many organisations are now using AI tools to generate code for software. Not just using it as an auto-complete or generating small snippets, but now entire codebases. GitHub Copilot launched as a complete service around four years ago (June 21st, 2022), and it relied on OpenAI’s GPT to help developers write code. You give it prompts, you give it code, it generates results, and it can do so within the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that you’re working in.

Code generation seemed like a natural next step for software engineers. We already use a lot of autocomplete tools in IDE’s, and a lot of this can simply help you write faster. But of course any tools that are derived from LLMs are prone to all sorts of issues, ranging from mediocre or generic outputs to hallucinating the wrong intent for your code, or of course the fundamental issue that in most instances it doesn’t really understand what you want, nor how it should output it.

However, it was clear from a lot of data coming out of companies who build enterprise scale software that seasoned engineers were seeing the value in it. Nonsense from vibe coders on social media aside, engineers were often enthusiastic about adopting it and using it as a force-multiplier for the work they were doing - though there is little insight on games studios.

Fast forward to early 2026 and the ground had shifted drastically. This was largely in part due to Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has proven to be a far more capable AI coding tool that others on the market. Copilot, GPT, Gemini or frankly anything else on the market. While effective prior to now, code generation had seemed capped off in its broader capabilities, most notably in writing larger coding tasks across multiple files. In addition Claude Code is highly capable in an agentic workflow; meaning you can have AI writing code, running tests, observing errors, then writing code to debug and fix the tests.

There’s a lot more we could talk about here, but I’d recommend instead going to read the , where the newsletter has been reporting on how the entire field of enterprise software development has been transformed - in both positive and negative ways - due to heavy adoption of AI coding tools.

How Does This Affect Godot?

In the past couple of years the Godot game engine has became an increasingly popular tool for game developers, and has begun to really start carving out territory once owned by Unity. Speaking as someone who has built in Unity myself, developers have fought for fought for years with poor monetisation practices, broken features, inconsistent updates, long-standing unresolved bugs, and a push for new tools that most developers don’t want - I have joked in the past that Unity has now bundled up and announced their Generative AI suite three times, and unsurprisingly most indie developers simply don’t care. I have dabbled briefly in Godot in the past year and it’s come a long way! I am sorely tempted whenever I find some free time to make a game again (ha!), I’d boot up a wee project in Godot to see how far it’s come along.

However unlike Unreal Engine and Unity, Godot is an open-source game engine driven by a community of game developers. Meaning that not only can developers download the full source code and modify it to suit your needs, but also that people can propose changes to the engine and, if accepted, they get adopted in the main repository where the original code is maintained and becomes part of the product. This is a common practice in open-source software development, and is managed by a collection of developers who oversee the proposed change submissions, known in GitHub as Pull Requests.

As mentioned back in February, one of the maintainers of the code, Rémi Verschelde, had said the team were being inundated with pull requests that were either full of AI-generated code, or in they suspected were generated entirely with AI.

Since then they’ve realised not only is it going to continue, but it’s only going to get worse as AI code generation becomes normalised. To that end they updated their contribution policies to not only prohibit use of AI tools in any pull requests submitted, but will begin to automatically ban users who present work that appears heavily AI-generated.

Why They’re Right in Banning AI-Driven Submissions

The argument made in the announcement by Godot was that the increased number of submissions is adding to the workload of the rather small review team who maintain the engine’s codebase. While it’s easier than ever to generate a pull request, the time taken to review one has not changed, and it’s difficult and complex work.

The reason pull request’s take time to review is that people build these additions and then submit them often without consideration for the impact of the entire engine’s implementation and performance. To be able to write substantial changes to the engine that will work successfully and to the community’s benefit, requires a user to understand the existing code, and then integrate their new feature in ways that compliment and reinforce what’s already there. This is something that AI code generation can’t really do at the same level or quality, if at all, like a human can. It’s expected that people that seek to contribute to the engine do so because they know it well, and have the knowledge to help enhance it further. The argument being made is that most of the requests they receive are often people generating low-effort submissions that simply clog up the queue that the reviewers are dealing with.

For me one of the biggest stumbling blocks with AI code generation is that it prevents me from learning my codebase. Having written software for around 30 years, I internalise my understanding of systems by sitting and writing them out. I design the systems and then implement them, and it’s that process that helps me build a mental model of the software as a whole. Hence I can be playing a demo of a game I have built which has tens of thousands of lines of code and upon seeing a bug during a playtest I can often quickly determine which file, and what function might be the culprit. That comes from building the software, and then internalising its structure as you build it.

I personally do not feel the same about using AI coding assistants, because now the code it writes and how it writes it is at the whim of how the model is trained. Not only does it not write code like me, it writes code I don’t know. I then have to sit and understand the code it has written, lest I fail to interpret how my software works. Yes I will have the general understanding of how it works given I prompted the model to what I wanted, and I won’t just trust its output without reviewing it, but given I didn’t write the code, I don’t know it. In the same way people write things by hand to boost memory retention, I can’t really understand my own code lest I’ve sat and actually written it out and tested it myself.

Now of course I see the appeal and value of code generation, given we’re often writing a lot of code. Plus let’s be honest, a lot of the code we’re writing is kinda dull, not that exciting, and boilerplate to help build up features, and so having AI write that for you does sound enticing to some degree. But I feel it robs the creator of having any sense of ownership of the codebase, and this is often driven by knowledge of how it works.

This is a big part of what Godot’s team are focussed on, because what they need to be building is a larger community of contributors who know the project well enough that they can help maintain it. This includes not just knowing about the parts of the project they themselves have written, but also understanding the rest of the broader engine. It requires people to have gone away and internalised how Godot works such that changes they propose ‘fit’ into the engine more seamlessly. Relying on AI to maintain knowledge of the engine, and then write code to update it, will result in a tool that ultimately nobody will understand. To quote the announcement, “AI cannot take responsibility, and we can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it.”

As discussed in the announcement the review team spend time giving feedback and attempting to build a dialogue with contributors, and in many cases they’re getting AI-generated responses - because odds are it’s an AI agent that’s receiving it. This is rather demoralising for a team of people seeking to build community, and if the only solution is to add that as a condition for banning users, then that strikes me as sensible.

When you compare this to large-scale companies where every update you’re forced to use is riddled with AI features people don’t need, or suspected to be driven by poor-quality AI generated code (i.e. any time you update Windows 11), the big difference is in accepting responsibility. Of acknowledging that a human is responsible for these changes, even if they didn’t actually make them themselves.

If you can’t trust developers to take responsibility for the code they create, and the bugs it will generate - because no code is perfect - then how can you expect them to fix it, and maintain the standards being set? The Godot Foundation understands this.

Wrapping Up

Okay, as mentioned at the top I’ll be at Develop next week, so I’m not sure what time I will have to commit to a newsletter. Perhaps a run through of my favourite games of the year so far? Yeah, that might be a fun thing to do.

Have a good one, and catch you next week.

In December of 2024, our Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of complete video lecture and tutorial series on the foundations of AI for game development. You can find out more via the Kickstarter page.

Hello all, and welcome to our summer 2026 update for Goal State. We are pushing forward now and things are really beginning to shape up. So let’s give you a breakdown of everything that’s happening and how it’s all coming together.

Overall Project Update

Since our last update, the focus has been on four things:

• Completing the theory chapters of the course.

• Recording the theory chapters.

• Prepping all the lecture slide materials that are both part of the theory videos and a reward for some backers.

• Getting all the tutorial code and assets in place to start recording the tutorials.

As mentioned before, this is now spread across three people, with myself handling the writing, recording, and material prep, Andrew writing up the Unity and Unreal code, and Shraddha helping with video editing and also some of the materials.

My apologies I’ve not written an update on here (i.e. website/Kickstarter page). I’m prone to simply updating people in the Discord server and then forget some of you want updates outside of that space. My bad! But here we go…

Theory Content Almost Complete

For Q2 I set myself a target to achieve two things:

1. Attempt to write content every day - life permitting.

2. Get all but three chapters of the course completed.

We have more or less achieved both of those during that time. Q2 in 2026 saw me write for 78 of the 91 days from April 1st to June 30th, and chalking up another 53,000 words, with the whole book currently at around 175,000 words long.

Just this morning I updated the review document on Overleaf where you can see progress on completed chapters, and it’s now 448 pages long. We now have only three outstanding chapters that need finished:

• 01-05: Constraint Satisfaction Problems (20% complete)

• 01-07: Modelling Uncertainty (Markov Models and Modified MCTS) (60% complete)

• 02-05: Behaviour Trees (60% complete)

Each of these are in some state of completion and I had to jump around to prioritise some parts given Andrew wanted to make sure the code work he’s doing largely aligns with what’s in the book (notably the GOAP and Utility chapters). Right now the plan is to have the whole theory component complete by end of August - which is a big ask given our existing commitments, but I think we can pull it off.

Recording Update

So as mentioned in the previous update, recording is broken up into four tasks: tidying up scripts, recording, prepping video content, and editing. We have about 40% of the theory recorded right now and started editing it up, but wanted to try and make the slide presentations a bit more engaging. So we’ve been working on a new slide format, plus range of presentation ‘frames’ so we can show you the work in various ways. This helps us when editing given we can treat it as a multi-camera recording, and ‘swap’ between cameras in the recording as we go, and find the right presentation style for each moment. For context, we edit the AI and Games Conference videos as a three-camera shot (slides/speaker/combo). Whereas here we’re working on a five-camera shot.

We started testing this new setup by editing a new version of the intro chapter of the book which you can watch below. I think it still needs some work, but it’s helping me figure out workflow as we are about to start bulk editing 21 chapters - plus tutorials - over the next couple months. Feel free to provide any feedback you have.

I had planned to record more than I did this month: we have several chapters on my to-do list right now to present on camera. But the recent heatwaves meant I decided against it, given my recording space heats up even when it’s cold, and this would make recording pretty difficult, or at least would mean I appear lathered in sweat.

Also, minor health update: I mentioned in the last update I had an ongoing case of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR), aka ‘silent reflux’. This was affecting my voice and my ability to record, and that even some episodes of our regular YouTube had suffered as a result of my vocal chords taking a beating. While it hasn’t gone away, thanks to some medication and a few changes to diet it has been reduced quite a bit, and hopefully you’ve noticed in recent YouTube episodes (and the new podcast) I sound a little more like my usual self.

Practical Update

We’ll have a bigger update on practical soon, as Andrew is close to getting everything built in both engines. Right now the big push has been to essentially build a GOAP planner in both Unity and Unreal, and that takes a little bit of time! We’re having a big catch-up soon to go over remaining work and validating what we have. Once we’re happy with the code as it is, I then start building up videos that work you through how to build it.

Now let me stress, I’m not a fan of videos where someone is live coding. That’s rather laborious and having done it before it’s not easy to edit up. Particularly as projects get larger. So our focus is going to be on introducing features and how they appear as ‘chunks’ of work for you to iterate on. More on that soon!

Wrapping Up

Right now my Q3 goals is to have virtually everything finished except for video editing. We then push to try and get the work finalised and launched by the end of the year. The team have found this a little stressful as our work elsewhere continues to grow, and we’re currently working on a bunch of projects both for clients but also internally that are pulling our attention. But I’m really feeling this whole thing is coming together now, and it’s exciting to see all the words I’ve written over the past 18 months beginning to take shape in video format.

Okay, another update soon, thanks once again for your support, and we’ll chat soon!

-Tommy

Hello one and all and welcome to this week’s . This week we’re back to talking about the industry and all that chaos that’s going on, with a particular focus on Unreal Engine 6.

Follow AI and Games on: BlueSky | YouTube | LinkedIn | TikTok

Announcements

Obligatory round of announcements for this week. Lots of stuff happening and coming your way!

AI and Games Events

Your weekly reminder of the events we currently have in the calendar!

Gamescom Dev AI Tracks [24th-25th August]

• Tickets are on sale now, with our AI tracks part of your regular Gamescom Dev ticket, complete with access to the Gamescom trade show.

• Sponsorship opportunities for the AI tracks and across Gamescom Dev are also available.

AI and Games Conference 2026 [10th-11th November]

• Early bird tickets will be on sale until end of July.

• Call for speaker submissions is also open until August 2nd.

  • Accepted speakers will receive a free ticket.

  • All other submissions will receive voucher to purchase ticket at early bird rate.

Plus another week, another sponsor, we’re excited to welcome Studio Atelico on board as our Scholarship Sponsor for 2026. Thanks to their support, this helps us ensure that even after early-bird sales close, we will be keeping ticket costs for students under £100, while indie tickets will also be subsidised. As you can imagine these events are expensive propositions to run, but we still want them to be accessible to as wide a range of developers as we can.

Sponsorship opportunities are still available, and feel free to reach out to us for more info, or visit the conference website.

Sponsor Our Events

New Case Study: Forza Horizon 6

We released a new case study episode of AI and Games earlier this week. With the recent release of Forza Horizon 6 I figured why not revisit a topic that has proven quite popular over the years. The big reason for this was the discourse happening online surrounding ‘Bowie Knife99’: one of the built-in AI characters whose behaviour proved so chaotic at launch that they became something of a meme within the Forza community.

So in this latest deep-dive we explore how the Drivatar system has changed in recent years, but also what are the circumstances that led to a bot like Bowie Knife99 arising in the first place. The answer is, unsurprisingly, rather complicated.

Podcast Kicks Off Next Week!

Last week we announced that the AI and Games Podcast is launching this summer! We’re currently putting the finishing touches to the first episode, which is a follow-up to our 2024 overview on AI in the video games industry.

Plus we’re slowly rolling out the feeds so you can subscribe on your chosen platform. You can now find the AI and Games Podcast on:

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube Music | YouTube | PocketCasts

Be sure to check out last week’s issue with a deep-dive into what we have planned with a bunch of guests lined up in the coming months.

Epic Games’s Pulls an Nvidia with Unreal Engine 6

In an effort to try and wrestle back our scheduling to having the newsletter launch on Wednesday’s - I like having it midweek don’t you? It breaks my week up nicely - I was torn over which groan-inducing headline I’ve had the pleasure of reading about in recent weeks that would receive the full force of my ire this week. Despite Sony, Microsoft, Epic Games, Meta, and Valve all having news stories that flirted with the dreaded AI hype conversation, it was Epic that officially took the biscuit. Besides, I started writing this issue on Monday 29th, and I figured Xbox would drop a whole new round of god awful headlines as their end of fiscal wraps on June 30th.

Spoiler alert: Boy is this going to be a tough couple of weeks to report on.

So I figured why not indulge and have a good rant about Epic Games. Well, no not necessarily about the devs at Epic. I think they do a lot of great work. Rather this is about leadership at Epic Games, and how Tim Sweeney and those around him are successfully crossed the Rubicon, in promoting their efforts for Unreal Engine 6 that I do feel will prove to be akin to Nvidia’s hubris with DLSS 5.

Unreal Engine’s Roadmap Revealed

Epic Games hosted Unreal Fest in Chicago from June 16th - 18th and in amongst a whole heap of presentations was details about the next iteration of the Unreal Engine. After we received a tease of the new engine courtesy of the Rocket League Championships in May - which was hilarious to me given Rocket League was still in Unreal Engine 3. The big announcement introduced a number of new and updated features as we transition from UE5 into Unreal Engine 6:

• UE6 = UE5 + UEFN: Unreal Engine 6 is seeking to merge the two currently disparate development tools that Epic Games have built. Notably the Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN) editor. The idea being that any game that can be built in UE6 can be released standalone, or deployed within Fortnite.

• Portable Content: A big push for interoperable content across games. Allowing for assets and other content and code to be able to transition from one project to another seamlessly. So for example, a Fortnite skin can then more readily transition to another game project.

• New Scene Graph Framework: Given the push to merge UE5 and UEFN, this means that the existing ways in which game scenes/levels are modelled in Unreal Engine is being deprecated and removed. No more ‘actors’ for representing objects, and the use of Blueprints for visual scripting. This is all being migrated to the Scene Graph system used in UEFN.

• Native LLM Integration: The big conversation point for many was that starting in UE5.8 there is now a plugin to host an MCP server - a Model Context Protocol server - that allows for you to connect Large Language Models such as Claude, GPT or Gemini into the engine to support design and development of environments. Ranging from placing of library assets to integrating with the existing procedural systems and lighting and modifying values on actors and materials as it goes.

• The Verse Programming Language: Unreal Engine 6 will be transitioning the underlying programming systems from C++ to Verse, which is the language currently used in UEFN and is described as “the programming language of the Metaverse”.

Now the funny thing is, I was busy working when this all went down and couldn’t follow along as it happened. However the reaction across social media has been in outcry over the AI models - which is something Epic have been working on for a while and as I’ll discuss what most developers won’t really use. However, I feel like all the noise on social media and in the gaming press has fundamentally missed the mark.

This whole thing is, in my opinion, an absolute nightmare. For me the issues are numerous, and the last concern I have is with the LLM integration

1. The desire to merge UEFN with UE5, which caters less to the users of Unreal Engine, and more to Epic Games push for metaverses and NFT-like content creation pipelines.

2. Removal of Blueprints is a catastrophic situation for studios that rely on visual scripting tools, and the Scene Graph does not cut it.

3. The push to transition from C++ to Verse isn’t just a problem for games studios that use Unreal, but the games industry at large, and the academic environment that supports it.

4. Oh yeah, that LLM integration means very little in a world where token costs are going to continue to increase.

It speaks to a fundamental assumption that Epic knows better than the industry that surrounds it, and I have yet to speak to anyone I know across the industry who was excited about any of these announcements. It feels like the DLSS5 announcement from Nvidia all over again, where a bunch of ideas are presented that developers in general aren’t jazzed about, and that’s because the provider is running on an assumption that they know best.

The LLM Integration

Now the introduction of the LLM MCP plugin is, as I say, the least of my concerns, and frankly it does what I expected it to do in a way that Unity has pushed for developers to embrace in recent years. Plus we had Gabriel Ware and Juan David Hincapie from Google present at the AI and Games Conference 2025 about their experiences of integrating Gemini into Unreal Engine 5 in ways that will no doubt have influenced this.

While I understand people’s hesitance and resistance to this, I also see benefits from trying to integrate LLMs into workflows to help with specific aspects of their work. Plus given it works directly in-engine, it allows for the opportunity for users to iterate on ideas in the editor, and then pivot to the MCP server call if necessary.

You can see the LLM MCP plugin in action in the video above, and while it’s interesting for sure, there’s a lot of issues hidden courtesy of an obfuscated presentation and corners being cut and questions not being addressed that people need to be wary of:

• It’s a Plugin: The MCP server is currently am experimental plugin, and is not part of the engine by default.

• Time Taken: Note that this video speeds up many of the production times it needs for these generations. The apartment example takes 3-4 minutes to generate each time. The skybox iteration example takes close to 10 minutes. How useful will this be in practice when I’m waiting 5 minutes at a time for scene changes?

• Token Costs: Many of these processes are costing thousands of tokens per call, given the system has to iterate internally on the prompts raised by the developer, and how that cross references against increasing token costs, and what budgets studios can allocate to this is nicely avoided.

• Efficacy for Complex Prompts: A lot of the prompts given here are relatively simple, but have cascading effects - and the big changes in the scenes seem to be driven more by Unreal’s procedural systems than the LLM. Sure let’s reconfigure lighting, manipulate materials etc. But what about larger and more complex changes? I doubt this would work as intended and requires users to work more gradually.

• Context Management: In the demo calls you see a lot of behaviour iterating internally, and it suggests there might be multiple agents running to generate this output? If so, how do they guarantee context is retained over time?

• Mult-User Interoperability: How can multiple users be working in the engine at once and what are the implications of having multiple users interacting in this workflow?

Frankly I never take tech demos like this at face value, it’s already obvious that they cut corners and speed parts of it up to show its impact - I mean that video above would be around 90 minutes long if they didn’t speed up the demos. Plus how Epic present this feature versus how people work in their engine are always very different things. So it’ll be more interesting to see what happens when studios are able to show how or if they found this useful and why.

The Bigger Issues

As mentioned, there are much bigger issues laced throughout this, and it speaks to a desire for Epic Games to effectively fold Unreal Engine into the Unreal Engine Fortnite Editor. In truth it reads much more about Epic’s priorities towards their ambitions with treating Fortnite as their own AAA Roblox platform, rather than putting any thought or consideration into how, where, and why, developers use the Unreal Engine.

It’s worth stating first and foremost the Unreal Engine is a big deal in the premium PC/console video games industry. It’s used by an increasing number of studios around the world or has an influence on how studios operate their own engines or integrate developers into their own ecosystem. It’s important to remember that when Unreal Engine began to become more public courtesy of Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Development Kit (the education edition of UE3) in the mid-2000’s followed by Unreal Engine 4 in the early 2010’s. Sure, not every studio uses Unreal but it has helped shape a lot of how people perceive and engage with engines, and allowing for it to be more accessible means that it has had an impact on the expectations studios have of developer skill. It’s not uncommon for a studio that still runs their own proprietary tools to expect people to have working knowledge of Unreal given it’s ‘closer’ to how they operate when compared to other engines.

Unreal Engine since its inception has been C++ based, and it helps create a conduit of talent. Many studios rely on programmers who can develop in C++ either because of Unreal Engine or their own proprietary engine is built in that language. Sure the likes of Unity and Godot also help proliferate C# as a programming language, but my point being that Unreal has been instrumental in ensuring corners of the industry have knowledge of the programming language, and critically a lot of Higher Education is built to support that as well.

Much the same can be said for visual scripting tools like Blueprints. Not only does this help provide for designers and other technically proficient developers to work within the game engine, but also it’s built such that entire games can be shipped pretty much with little to no coding. A recent example of this is the award-winning Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 which was built almost entirely in Unreal Engine Blueprints, with only around 5% of the game implemented as code.

So to threaten to remove both of these - and notably without much indication on what alternatives there will be to Blueprints strikes me as ridiculous. Transitioning from C++ - a well-known, highly-regarded, regularly iterated up and standardised programming language - to Epic’s own scripting tool largely unknown outside of the UEFN community is ridiculous. I mean sure ‘Unreal C++’ is technically its own beast (notably with a macro-based reflection and metadata exposure functionality, plus reduced memory management), and that creates a lot of confusion and frustration at times, but again there is an established ecosystem where people can learn C++, and then learn how it works in Unreal. The new approach is to work primarily in Verse: a programming language that leans heavily on ideas from functional and logic-based languages (which most aspiring engineers don’t learn) and is built entirely by Epic Games themselves. Sure it has some similarities with say Python, but this is now getting us into the weeds of obfuscating memory management in ways I don’t like the sound of. I mean that’s just hubris at its finest, and sadly some of us still remember how god awful Unreal Script was in practice.

I mean from what I’ve played with it Verse is generally fine as a programming language, but it raises a lot of questions:

• Why the push to move towards your own proprietary language?

• They state that C++ will still exist in UE6, but what breakdown there is between the two is not clear.

• Why do I have to use this when it is going to run via a LLVM compiler that will transcode it into LLVM IR before it then executes?

As I say it sounds like C++ will continue to be a big part of Unreal Engine 6 going forward, but right now none of this sounds particularly appealing for studios with existing expertise and knowledge about the engine. Switching languages, tools, and even entire paradigms takes time. I find it amusing that in the same day when they announce how LLMs are going to help optimise your workflow in Unreal, they also reveal a set of changes that would forcibly delay any production by months should they be foolish enough to migrate to UE6 during development (and no, nobody is going to do that - we’re not mad). With entire production workflows being up-ended by a new feature that doesn’t feel ironed out yet. Meanwhile you have university courses that are built around training students on how to use Unreal Engine - heck their staff get certification for it. Universities can’t just pivot entire degrees on a dime; these are slow-moving beasts that take time to update and address the correct needs of their students.

Perhaps they will address my concerns over time. But for now, I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant proportion of the games industry just keeps their local installs sitting at around Unreal Engine 5.7 or 5.8 as they wait to see where the dust settles. Right now this all seems to pushed towards supporting studios that work in Fortnite, or aspire to make games like Fortnite, or in Fortnite - again Tim Sweeney’s long-term ambition of turning the game into his own personal Roblox. None of these changes strike me as addressing a known problem for developers themselves, or catering to their needs. Rather it’s all about servicing Fortnite, or building games in Fortnite, which represents but a small fraction of the adoption and use cases the engine has. Streamlining with UEFN and creating workflows that cater to this broader ‘Robloxification’ of their platform does nothing but to line the pockets of Epic’s executives. At a time when Fortnite’s numbers aren’t achieving that which allows for Epic to sustain themselves,- which don’t forget led to 1000 developers being laid off but a couple of months ago - I fear they’re throwing Unreal Engine under the guillotine in servicing Fortnite’s needs.

It’s important to remember that despite all the boom and bluster surrounding Fortnite, much of Epic’s longevity has come from providing an engine that studios want to use, and the ecosystem that creates around it. Failing to respect that, or working in ways that contradict it, could prove disastrous for them in the long run.

Wrapping Up

As we wrap up, I wanted to give a big shout-out to fellow AI and Games Conference organiser Matthias Siemonsmeier and his team who have been hard at work on building a new wildlife system into the popular survival game SCUM that allows for all sorts of animals to be found wandering around in the open world for you to hunt or evade! You can see Matthias talking about this new system in the dev diary video below.

I know Matthias has worked very hard on this in recent weeks - he’s been rather sleepy in recent conference meetings - but was driven largely by a passion for making this work and delivering on a feature for a game I know he loves to play. Plus keep an eye out for one of our very own AI and Games plushies hiding in the background.

It looks like a cool new system, and lots of hard work went into it. Maybe we can convince him to talk about it via the various avenues of dissemination we have around here huh?

See you next week!

Since it’s release on PC and Xbox in May of 2026, Forza Horizon 6’s community have been caught in the drama behind ‘Bowie Knife99’: an AI controlled driver (or Drivatar) that has caused chaos for players. It’s been the subject of a lot of online discourse as people share their experience of how they’ve dealt with what seems to be some sort of AI-powered chaos merchant.

Drivatars are a topic I’ve covered previously on AI and Games, and I figured we should come back and revisit it, given we’re now seeing the effects of changes made to the Drivatar system and how a lot of what I discussed in my original video, has now been rendered obsolete.

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The Rise of ‘Bowie Knife99’

Forza Horizon 6 dropped on May 19th and credit to the folks over at Playground Games, they have delivered another banging entry in the series, with this latest edition having you scream through the streets of Tokyo, all the way to cruising around for collectables in Sotoyama. But within a week of the game dropping, the Forza community had found their new nemesis: bowie knife99, a super-aggressive Drivatar bot that would come crashing into you out in the open world if you’re playing offline, or would outsmart and outflank players during races. Even doing crazy things like smashing into opposing traffic or cutting corners so aggressively that it feels like it’s being driven by some 12 year old on a sugar high. Clips of this Drivatar went viral on the socials, and became canonised if you will when the official UK Xbox Twitter account called out bowie knife99 on social media.

So yeah, it’s a super-aggressive Drivatar, and for me that’s pretty freaking cool. Especially given how the games industry is drowning in endless discourse about Generative AI’s perceived value, how nice is it that a game has came out and we’re all talking about an in-game AI in a way that’s turning into something of a virtual watercooler moment? An AI player that has a personality so meme-worthy it becomes part of the discourse of the game.

And this is where it gets interesting to me, because both the appeal and frustration of Bowie Knife99 - and in fact the AI drivers at large in Horizon 6 - is that they are breaking a lot of established rules about how Drivatar’s historically worked in Forza. And this stems from some fundamental changes to how the system has been worked in more recent entries of the series.

A Quick Recap

You might recall we covered how Drivatar’s work way back in episode 60 of AI and Games on YouTube in 2021. That video covers a lot of ground, but I’ll quickly summarise the key points for this conversation.

The Drivatar system since Forza Motorsport 5 has been built by training them in the cloud using deep learning techniques by assimilating data from human players and then training AI models that seek to reproduce how a particular racer approaches the racing line: a perfect path for racing through the ribbon that has crafted by designers. The game has an underlying AI controller that knows how to race against the line perfectly, and then it adjusts its performance based on data it has of how a particular human would approach the same or similar problems. This stems from the same tech they’ve used since the first ever Forza Motorsport on the original Xbox in 2005, in trying to reproduce how a player takes different turn types on race ribbons and ultimately tries to determine how you would drive the car in a given situation - even if you’ve never driven that car or that race track.

Now when the developers at Turn 10 (the creators of Forza Motorsport) originally built this technology it meant they had this capacity to now more readily create AI drivers for players to race against. When you booted up Forza Motorsport and Horizon titles, the built-in Drivatars you could race against - that didn’t have you friends names on above their heads - were actually based on the developers themselves.

Hence they worked to build systems that tweak and adjust the Drivatars so it provided a less rage-inducing experience. They build overrides to prevent Drivatars cutting corners or smashing into other racers. They ignore input from training that would create toxic or unexpected behaviour like driving backwards. But also they worked to address how quickly they adjusted to new information. This ultimately worked to shave off the rough edges so that Drivatars are only really aggressive towards you provided the Drivatar is in your friend list. That way you can psychologically project on a friend’s behaviour, and not feel the rage as a result of a random bot whose origin you don’t know. Plus they then nerf or boost the drivers courtesy of rubber banding, and that’s by messing with the capabilities of the cars themselves, rather than tweaking the AI behaviour.

Shifting Gears

Now since my video in 2021, the developers have gone on to make sweeping changes to the underlying AI systems. 2023 saw the release of Forza Motorsport 8 on PC and Xbox Series S and X - for context, this is the game that they rather awkwardly branded as just ‘Forza Motorsport’ but I’ll be referring to as 8 for the rest of this video. And it was during the development of this game that they started making changes to how the underlying system operates.

Turn 10 explained that for Motorsport 8, they went back and revised how their AI systems work to address a fundamental design problem: in that the system wasn’t proving as effective as they’d hoped in creating an immersive experience that reflected the cleaner approach they wanted for Forza Motorsport. They wanted racers that remained competitive but avoided cutting corners and colliding with other drivers, and to do that they pretty much threw out the Drivatar system as it previously worked. The AI controller is no longer customised to replicate your friends behaviour, instead they’re trained completely independently, and then they simply dress up a Drivatar with your friends name and livery on it to make you think it’s still them in charge.

The big reason for this change was that the AI controller in the existing system was struggling with some of the key aspects of how to race professionaly. They developers sought to create an AI racer that knows how to apply the brake gradually as it approaches a turn, or to take corners with an adjusted amount of throttle and allow for more effective drifting. The problem was that the system as it was implemented treated acceleration and braking in the Drivatar system as binary. They were simply on or off, rather than reflecting how a racer can press the foot on the pedal - or in the case of an Xbox controller the left and right triggers - from zero to max. This meant they were often quite dumb in practice - particularly in the likes of Forza Horizon 4 and 5 - and it meant the rubber banding had to do a lot more work to compensate for their lack of intelligence. This also had a knock-on effect on the online meta, given performance ratings of a player’s custom tuning of a car was determined by having Drivatars race in that config thousands of times in the cloud. Turn 10 stated that in order “to create AI opponents as fast as the fastest human drivers, we had to do it without any cheats, hacks, and rubber banding”.

Rather than try and reconfigure the existing system The solution was to develop a new framework that is rather similar in nature to that seen in Gran Turismo 7’s Sophy AI. We covered this back in 2022, and discussed how Polyphony Digital in collaboration with Sony AI had trained racers entirely using deep reinforcement learning to ensure that they corner, pass, and brake in ways that respect the etiquette of Gran Turismo’s playstyle. So they’re still training neural networks that learn to race the track, but they learn entirely from scratch rather than trying to fit their behaviour to the data of an existing human player.

In previous Forza’s the AI controller had access to one of around 3 racing lines the designers conceived, and then AI controller attempted to follow it. Starting with Motorsport 8, Turn 10 changed the system so that not only does the neural network have access to the throttle, brake and sterring in a more continuous and freeflow fashion, but now the cars are free to find their own racing lines, and then seek to maximise their performance against them. in Forza Motorsport 8 each car configuration had access to around 19 different racing lines on each track, and these are discovered and refined over 26,000 laps on each circuit in the game. This is then tiered based on difficulty as well, where each racer has 8 different difficult settings, which relies on the existing infrastructure of applying boosts (or nerfs) to the cars, be it in grip, acceleration and top speed.

This was subsequently improved over time, with tweaks to the passing so it doesn’t veer off the track, adjusting braking behaviours so they don’t break too harshly. Plus they worked to improve the ways in which cars follow or even veer off of their predetermined tracks, and allow them a bit more freedom. This made sense as more tracks were being released, notably the introduction of NASCAR in November of 2024, given that requires a different approach to building the race lines.

This was further embellished to deal with when cars are caught up in traffic - not open world traffic like in Horizon - but simply when cars get bunched up in Forza Motorsport. At launch it was difficult for a car to continue on its intended race lines - given it will just start bashing into other cars. So it shifts to a dynamic raceline that means it drives more sub-optimally, but it does so in order to create the desired racing etiquette. This was continually tweaked to improve utility of the vehicle, improve defensive positioning and passing and also limit how often they collided with other cars or veered off the track. To optimise it further, the racing line system was also adapted in 2025 to have a custom setup for traffic scenarios, again with multiple racing lines it can follow, and it swaps between them based on the traffic conditions. So the system knows to swtich between different sets of racing lines based on current context.

So What About Forza Horizon 6?

So with this modified Drivatar system in place, what does this mean for Forza Horizon 6? Well, if anything it highlights three interesting talking points:

1. We can debunk any myths that Bowie Knife99 is a human player, because none of the Drivatars are even remotely human anymore.

2. Just like Forza Motorsport 8, the developers will need to continue working on tweaking the AI system such that it operates in the ways the developers intended.

3. We can say with some certainty that Bowie Knife99 is a symptom of this need to continue to tweak and refine the behaviour.

Now this last point is conjecture on my part, but I suspect the transition from the ‘beauty’ of Forza Motorsport etiquette to crashing into each other at 200 miles an hour while flying across a meadow of cherry blossoms. It’s meant a lot of work is needed to adjust the systems. I suspect that tweaking for aggression and all round bullshittery is a little hard to encapsulate and manage than the opposite. And it’s not just Bowie Knife99, players have observed other Drivatars and notably open world cars have been more prone to collide with the player, and generally just mess with your racing.

It speaks to why there was an override layer in the system that we discussed back in our original Forza analysis. Because it’s one thing for aggressive and toxic gameplay from randoms online, but it’s another thing entirely when the call is coming from inside the house. Hence there’s a need to try and mitigate how aggressive the Drivatars can be, because left unchecked they could turn Forza Horizon into Max Max: Fury Road - actually no never mind that sounds amazing.

In fact as I was putting the finishing touches to the video script on June 15th, Playground dropped a patch for Horizon 6 that “Fixed an issue with Drivatar race start behaviour.” and “improvements to the difficulty balancing”. Nice and vague right there. But I suspect this will be an ongoing process, much like in Forza Motorsport 8, as Playground Games seek to get that balance right between fun racing and a wee bit of open world chaos.

Hi everyone and welcome to the final issue of our ‘June announcement’ series here on . I didn’t plan for it to work out like this, but we’ve had several projects all come to the fore in the last couple of weeks, including:

• Announcing the AI and Games Conference 2026 running in London this November.

• Our collaboration with Gamescom Dev happening this August in Cologne.

And now I’m pleased to announce our final announcement!

The AI and Games Podcast: a new fortnightly (biweekly) series which builds and expands on the existing content we’re delivering in the newsletter and our YouTube channel.

Today episode 0 has launched on the website, and you can subscribe right here or in the coming days on other platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music and more as those feeds start updating. So for today’s issue we’ll get into what we have planned, and then in the back half a deeper dive for premium subscribers on all the upcoming podcast guests, and all the other stuff we’re doing.

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AI and Games Events

A quick reminder to point you to all the cool stuff we have happening over the coming months:

Gamescom Dev AI Tracks [24th-25th August]

• As we announced last week, we have two co-curated AI tracks at this year’s Gamescom Dev in Cologne - the largest game developer conference in Europe.

• The first round of talks is live now, including speakers from Electronic Arts, The Multiplayer Group, Tencent, and Wargaming.

• Tickets are on sale now, with our AI tracks part of your regular Gamescom Dev ticket, complete with access to the Gamescom trade show.

Plus we’re working with Gamescom Dev to deliver sponsorship packages that help promote businesses to our audience. Drop us an email via the button below to find out more about how you can partner with us.

Sponsor Gamescom Dev 26 AI Tracks

AI and Games Conference 2026 [10th-11th November]

• Early bird tickets will be on sale until end August 2nd

• Call for speaker submissions is also open until August 2nd.

  • Accepted speakers will receive a free ticket.

  • All other submissions will receive voucher to purchase ticket at early bird rate.

Also I want to take a moment to welcome Mercuna - one of the industry’s leading AI navigation middleware providers - who have joined us as an Associate Sponsor for our 2026 event. We’re very excited to have them come on board and support us going forward. We still have sponsorship and other partnership opportunities available, hit the button to drop us an email!

Sponsor AI and Games Conference 2026

The AI and Games Podcast

Back in August of last year we hosted our first annual subscriber drive, and we set out a bunch of targets for things we would like to do as this publication grows. Right now we’re seeing increased interest in the work that we do, but as you can imagine we’re limited by scope and budget. Despite the amount of content we put out - including a weekly newsletter, monthly YouTube videos, and now a fortnightly podcast - we’re a small outfit, and it’s thanks to the support of our audience that we can dedicate the time and resources to making this stuff.

During our subscriber drive we set a bunch of targets for what we will do in order to progress the site and our content further. Since August we’ve actually crossed two milestones:

• The first is that we passed the 5000 free subscriber mark.

  • This means we will as promised host a small meet-up in London to celebrate.

  • However we’re figuring lets do it later in the year (less risk of being caught in a heatwave).

• We doubled our premium subscribers to hit our first premium goal: launching the podcast!

I’ll publish an updated version of our funding goals later in the year. But for now, given we saw this on the horizon we started planning for it a couple of months ago, and putting things together, so when we hit the target for the goal we could launch within a few weeks of reaching it.

As you’ll notice going forward, this first ‘season’ of the podcast is brought to you in association with AWS for Games. The team at Amazon - who have been supporters of our conference the past couple of years - were very enthusiastic about us launching this new programme and wanted to help support us. This will also factor into what we have planned for this first season.

What to Expect For Our First Season

The podcast will be launched in both audio and video formats, given we know some folks really like to see us in action, and it’s going to act as an extension of the newsletter, with a focus on the following strands:

• Reacting to the news and chatting with our friends in the industry about the impact of these headlines.

• Explaining the big talking points happening in the industry in the moment.

• Interviewing guests from across the sector about their work and their experiences in and around AI for games.

This will adhere to our own editorial principles of discussing meaningful iteration in the sector, challenging hype and misinformation, and continuing to build trust with you, our audience.

To give you a little bit of insight into our prep, we have already conducted several interviews and are editing them up now, and so here’s a sneak peak of our very first guest Dr Mike Cook, who I interviewed about this recently released ‘Next Level’ book that we reviewed on the newsletter not that long ago.

With AWS as our partner sponsor for the first season, we will have some interviews with them both through their development teams and the companies that they are working with. But we’re also working through our address book to chat with people we love and whose work we admire.

What other guests do we have lined up? Well, premium subscribers can find out about all the guests we have in the schedule later in this issue.

Benefits for Premium Subscribers

As always, we’re working away on trying to make this a valuable proposition for the good folks that support us. So we will keep the premium versions ad-free, but we will be looking at providing additional episodes for that audience.

30% Off Premium Subscriptions

On that note, to celebrate the launch we’re offering 30% off subscriptions until August! Click the button to go get it sorted out.

30% Off? Yes Please, Thank You

Premium Subscriber Updates

So with the new podcast announced, what can we come to expect? Well, truth be told we’ve been hard at work on accumulating running interviews with various guests from across the games industry to talk about their new projects, what they’re getting up to, their experiences of the current AI cycle, and more.

So while we’ll also cover a stack of upcoming YouTube projects and newsletter topics we have planned, we’re going to dedicate a good chunk of our premium subscriber update on what to expect from the podcast through the coming months! Onward!

Upcoming Podcast Guests

So while the podcast will have me periodically focus more on the news - be it by myself or with a colleague to talk through it - we have been focussing on getting a strong line-up of guests on board for the first couple of months.

Read more

Building on our existing output of newsletter and YouTube videos, we’re launching a new biweekly/fortnightly programme where we’ll be expanding on all of the content people have come to know and love us for, but in a new nice and digestible podcast format.

We’ll be digging into the headlines, providing explainers on the big talking points in the industry, and running interviews with people across the sector about the successes, failures, challenges, and risks of AI as it becomes an increasingly larger talking point in video games.

This builds on over 10 years of work we’ve produced in AI on video games as part of both our YouTube channel and our weekly newsletter in providing a hype-free and accessible introduction to how artificial intelligence intersects with video games.

Hello one and all and welcome to another edition of . June is most certainly the month of big announcements. Having just announced the AI and Games Conference is returning to London this November, we also have another exciting update which is happening later this summer!

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New AI Tracks @ Gamescom Dev

Game AI Events CIC (our non-profit organisation that runs the AI and Games Conference) are partnering with the organisers of Gamescom Dev - the largest game developer conferences in Europe, and official developer conference of Gamescom - to deliver a great programme of talks, panels, and more on artificial intelligence for the video games industry.

With Gamescom Dev running from August 23rd-25th, our team will be there to help deliver a top-quality programme from developers across Europe and beyond as part of a newly announced set of co-curated AI tracks.

We’ll dig into what all this means, and why you will want to be a part of it in a moment, but first things first: here’s all the info you need.

• When? / Where?

  • August 23rd-25th 2026 / Cologne, Germany
    

• How many AI co-curated tracks are there?

  • We have helped curate two dedicated AI tracks - AI for Gameplay and AI for Production - both of which will be hosted on the day by the AI and Games Conference editorial team.

  • We have a cracking line-up including speakers from Electronic Arts, The Multiplayer Group, Tencent and Wargaming with more to be announced.
    

• Where Can I Learn More About The Tracks?

  • You can see the line-up for both tracks on the Gamescom Dev site:

    • https://dev.gamescom.global/conference/sessions-tracks/#special-tracks

• Are These The Only AI Talks at Gamescom Dev?

  • No, there are other AI-related talks throughout the event.

  • The full programme is still being put together, and we will have more announcements closer to the time.
    

• Can We Partner with You on This?

  • There are sponsorship options for companies interested in being a part of the new co-curated AI tracks. Reach us via email using the button below.

    Get in Touch

• Where do I get my tickets for Gamescom Dev (and Gamescom)?

  • https://dev.gamescom.global/tickets/

  • The AI for Gameplay and AI for Production tracks are part of your regular Gamescom Dev ticket. No add-ons or additional purchases are required.

All in all, we’re very excited to be collaborating with Gamescom Dev to help deliver the best event for the European game development community. I’ll have more to say on that in a moment, but let’s run through some other announcements, including more AI and Games Conference 2025 talks!

Announcements

A couple quick announcements for you that are worth checking out!

‘Power Play’ is Available in Book Stores Now

I wanted to take a moment to give a big shout-out to author and AI and Games Conference co-conspirator on the launch of his book "Power Play: Video Games, Politics, and the Battle for Global Influence".

The book is a deep dive into the exploitation of video games for political gain, and how modern policy is also influenced by the modern gaming landscape. George first told me he had successfully sold the pitch to publisher Hachette back in early 2024, and it felt like a perfect fit for his efforts in exploring the political landscape and its overlap with the video games industry. I know full well how much effort (and stress) this has required of him to get the book out the door.

I'm very proud of him for smashing it out, and hope it proves to be a huge success. It’s a fitting read for our current industry and political climate. Plus I have to say between this and Mike Cook’s recent release of Next Level, the itch for me to write a book on Game AI is continuing to increase… need to free up my schedule a bit first!

‘Power Play’ is out now and available at Amazon, Waterstones and many a big-chain and independent book store. You can find out more about the book here.

AI and Games Conference

Of course today is all about Gamescom Dev, but don’t forget our very own AI and Games Conference is back this November. With early bird tickets on sale now, and our call for speaker submissions is open until August 2nd. We’ve already had a whole bunch of tickets snatched up, and a good number of submissions. We’re very excited for the weeks ahead, and I suspect our talk selection process is going to be a tough one!

Plus we have two 2025 talks going live on the conference YouTube channel today:

• Supporting Thousands of Simulated NPCs in The Open World of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
  Petr Smrček / Warhorse Studios
  Kingdom Come: Deliverance II delivered on a vast open world with thousands of NPCs wandering through it. But how do you maintain these simulations when and ensure the game continues to have stable performance? We welcome Petr Smrček from Warhorse to explain how they made it happen.

• Let the NPCs Fight: Learning Attack Reach from Real Gameplay Data
  Vincent Martineau / Ubisoft Montreal
  One of the biggest games in 2025, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows has a wide variety of enemy archetypes and weapons at their disposal. As the game approached the end of production, this variety created a very real problem: of ensuring all characters are correctly balanced such that their attack reach is configured based on game state and weapon type. As Vincent describes, rather than simply go in and manually tune for the thousands of unique combinations, the team explored use of different AI approaches to help them reach the best possible outcome.

Collaborating with Gamescom Dev

So yes as announced at the top, we’re collaborating with the good folks behind Gamescom Dev. It’s a rather surreal but equally exciting opportunity to be working with one of the largest game developer events in the world. I figured I should dedicate the back half of this newsletter as to why we’re doing this, and how this aligns with our vision on supporting the game development community. The long story short, is that our responsibility and commitment to the games industry extends beyond our own efforts, and by working with Gamescom Dev it reinforces our values of providing education that will deliver a positive impact on the games industry.

Right now we are drowning in headlines about AI and its intersection with the creative industries. However, what many people often lack is the ability to distinguish the signal from the noise. Regular readers of this newsletter will know this all too well, as I editorialise around the big stories to try and give some context to what’s happening. It has also meant that our team that runs the AI and Games Conference has to work hard to ensure we retain the value of what we’ve built: a space that highlights the best work on artificial intelligence in the games industry. A space that ensures a platform is given both to new and experienced voices who share in our pursuit in highlighting AI at its best, but also addressing the risks and problems it creates in creative disciplines.

The real secret to the AI and Games Conferences’ success is that it was founded by Game AI developers, for Game AI developers, and it’s our collective experience in the sector that shapes our vision and values. We believe in providing a space where experience in applying AI to games and problems can be shared. All the while keeping one foot rooted in our past and established techniques, while the other is planted facing towards the future; with an emphasis on sensible and professional practice of emerging technologies. This is never easy - and frankly the industry that pushes Generative AI onto us all does not make it any easier - but we value one another’s expertise, and the community around us that gives us feedback and keeps us honest!

While the AI and Games Conference was founded because we wanted an event for Game AI practitioners in Europe, we are but one of many game developer events on the continent, and many are dealing with these exact same challenges. As AI becomes an increasingly pervasive issue in the creative industries - for both good and ill - event organisers need to wade through large numbers of pitches for talks and determining whether these are a good fit for their audience. It’s a tough balancing act, of ensuring presentations that show meaningful adoption of AI are showcased, while not dismissing traditional AI efforts in favour of the current hotness. All the while being mindful of the implications some of this work presents. This is what has led to me speaking regularly at game developer conferences in recent years across Europe and farther afield as people seek a grounded and level-headed perspective on where all of this is headed, and how studios should be preparing themselves for it.

This is compounded by the fact that AI from the outside-in is often a rather impenetrable subject matter, and it becomes difficult to differentiate between hype and substance. At this point to deliver a high-quality programme, you really need to have people involved in the curation that have a background in AI so as to understand what is being pitched to you.

To that end, this is why we’re collaborating with Gamescom Dev. In the past year or so we’ve got to know their organisational team well - in part thanks to me being invited to present in Cologne in 2025 and at the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit in February. What was evident from the beginning was their commitment not just to deliver a great event for the European community, but cementing their status as one of the premium events in the game development calendar. Given it’s association with the Gamescom trade show - which is literally next door - it brings together a huge number of game devs from across Europe and even farther afield. As such we saw this as a great opportunity to ensure the AI programme on display at Gamescom Dev was top notch, and reinforce Europe’s position as a guiding force in responsible adoption of AI technologies in creative industries.

We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks. But for now I want to give a thank you notably to Nico Balleta and Jay Zhao who are programme and content leads for Gamescom Dev, plus to business development lead Roufina Guenkova and managing director Frederik Hammes. This is uncharted territory for both organisations, and we’re determined to ensure that Gamescom Dev delivers another fantastic event for 2026, and that we can bring the AI and Games community together later this summer in Cologne.

Wrapping Up

Would you believe me if I told you the announcements aren’t over yet? Our conference is back, we’re collaborating with Gamescom Dev, but we still have one more secret up our sleeves that we’ve been cooking up just for you dearest reader!

We’ll be announcing our third and final new project later this month. But for now thank you once again for joining us here at and I hope we’ll see some of you in person this August at Gamescom Dev! Go grab those tickets!

• The first reports from the government’s new ‘AI Champion’ initiative are live.

• Advocacy for an ‘augmentation first’ approach rather than replacement.

• Dare I say it, a government report that actually sounds… sensible?

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Including industry news, innovative research, emerging trends, and our own exclusive editorial and reporting.

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Hello one and all, and welcome back to . I’m back in ol’Blighty once more having spent the start of the week in Berlin. Monday was a very busy day as I started over at the Saftladen Indie Games Collective presenting a 3-hour session on AI in the video games industry on behalf of Medianet Berlin Brandenburg. Then was whisked across town to The Factory for TEDxBerlin where I sat on a panel about AI in the creative industries alongside Maximilian von Perfall (Strategic Partnerships Lead at YouTube), Ben Chimoy (GenAI Director at PROMPTR) and moderated by MediaNet CEO Jeannine Koch. Thanks to everyone for their enthusiasm and some great conversations at both Saftladen and TEDx, plus a shout-out to my friends in Berlin who I had the chance to catch up with and chat all things gamedev.

So yeah, great start to the week. But all that said, I’m fuckin’ knackered. You might recall two weeks ago I was in LA, and in between work trips we went and announced a conference! It’s been an insane schedule since I got back from vacation - and we still haven’t announced the other things we’re working on behind the scenes!

For this week’s edition we’re digging into the news in brief, but the big story is the latest publication out of the UK government on AI for the creative industries and their suggestions for the future. So let’s get cracking!

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AI and Games Conference

Of course last week we dedicated the issue to announcing the launch of the 2026 AI and Games Conference. We’re super excited to be once again hosting the Game AI community in London this November. So here’s some obligatory reminders:

• Early bird tickets are on sale now at AIandGamesConference.com

• Our call for speaker submissions is live and closes in August.

Plus we’re back to publishing videos from last year’s event. Sorry for the delay with that. I’m the bottleneck as I make the final review pass on all the videos. But fret not, we’re back this week with two pretty awesome presentations.

• Press A for Assistance: Making Games Accessible with AI
  Nonika Reingold and Steven Rice / University of Windsor
  As games become more complex, there’s a need to consider how to ensure we provide features that support accessibility, approachability and learnability to support a wide range of players. We welcome Nonika and Steven who present on their perspectives on how we need to move forward in this space, and how various AI techniques ranging from classical Game AI to LLMs can be used to assist players without compromising the experience.

• How to Power-Up Unreal Engine Behaviour Trees: Subnautica 2
  Antonio Muñoz Gallego / Unknown Worlds
  Subnautica 2 has been a huge success since launching in early-access just last month. But we got an inside scoop late last year as Antonio Gallego dropped by to talk about how the studio works with behaviour trees in Unreal Engine to enable for a more modular and designer-friendly implementation
  

News in Brief

Want to focus on the big story, so let’s run through some quick headlines that emerged in and around this weeks Summer Games Fest shenanigans.

• Yes, Alien: Isolation 2 Has a Trailer, Stop Sharing It With Me!
  Congratulations to the team at Creative Assembly on the reveal trailer at Summer Games Fest. It looks fantastic, and I look forward to hearing more about it.

• Internet Erupts in Excitement and Then Turns to Rage Over Crazy Taxi
  Sunday’s announcement of Crazy Taxi: World Tour - the first non-mobile entry in Crazy Taxi in almost 25 years - set the any% speedrun record for ‘excitement over a game announcement followed by outcry over Generative AI usage’.
  

• Asha Sharma Says Xbox Copilot Was Scrapped Because Players Didn’t Care
  In my recent ‘review’ of Xbox’s new strategy I joked that new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma was treating the whole thing like she’s a new head of state: the Prime Minister of the Republic of Xbox (sorry, XBOX). Well I hate being right but she celebrated her first 100 days in office (I mean it’s literally the opening words of the conversation) with an interview over at Bloomberg Tech 26 on her start in the job and the current strategy for the Xbox (XBOX!) empire. During which she commented on - among other things - Xbox’s Copilot project being scrapped because nobody cared.
  
  If you listen carefully in the background you can hear someone aggressively rubbing out PS5 logos from all of the Gears of War: E-Day promotional art. It was always a platform exclusive, honest!

Digging into the UK’s New ‘AI Adoption Plan’ for the Creative Industries

This week saw the release of the latest report from the UK government about their proposals for how to grasp with AI in the creative industries. Both in how to address the reality that AI has had an impact on these sectors, and current and future implications it has for the future of our screen sectors. I’m going to give a brief summary of the report, followed by my own thoughts on the matter.

A Quick Timeline

I’ve written a lot about the UK government’s approach to AI in recent years and the proposals have ranged from the tin-eared to the corrupt. If you’re new to this and want a catch-up on where we are, here’s a quick timeline and some recommended reading from the past year or so:

• December 2024: An open consultation was raised by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) in collaboration with the Department for Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on copyright in an age of artificial intelligence.
  

• January 2025: I dig into this consultation in detail back in January of 2025, the proposals laid out in the consultation seem to be driven solely by the DSIT’s willingness to placate big tech, and essentially throw the UK creative sector under the bus. Allowing for all intellectual property produced in the UK to be given away for free to AI companies unless you opt-out (an impossible system in practice).

• April/May 2025: The consultation closes in February 2025 and receives significantly more responses than expected. Thus delaying the government’s official response. While it’s unclear at this time how many submissions were received (we later find out it was ~11,500), it’s far more than a typical IPO public consultation. Meanwhile Peter Kyle, then the minister in charge of DSIT, was keen to push on with the original proposals though conceded that the consultation raised issues that “haven’t even featured in the debate thus so far.” As was reported at the time Kyle had been seen meeting repeatedly with big tech firms to discuss the proposals (which OpenAI felt weren’t good enough), but had failed to engage at all with creative industry heads. It really did seem like DCMS’ name was on the consultation purely as an afterthought.

Read more

• The AI and Games Conference Returns to London.

• Call for submissions is open now until August 3rd.

• Early-bird tickets are on sale now.

• New venue, new formats, and more to discuss!

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Including industry news, innovative research, emerging trends, and our own exclusive editorial and reporting.

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Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of AI and Games. I’m back in the UK after spending last week in the US working on-site at non other than Riot Games. We have been running a pilot series of AI training for the studio in recent weeks, and wrapped with an on-site workshop at their LA campus. It was a great experience, and one we hope to return to soon. In the meantime, if you and your organisation are interested in the AI training we do, be sure to check out the dedicated site!

So I’m just about over the jetlag, but the work doesn’t stop as I’ll be flying out to Berlin this weekend as I’m presenting both a Game AI Masterclass for MediaNet BerlinBrandenburg - a networking association for creative technologists - followed by participating in a panel on AI in the creative industries at TedxBerlin! Looking forward to participating in both of these events.

But enough of talking about other people’s events, it’s time to talk about our own! The AI and Games Conference is back for 2026, and given we are announcing the event today I decided to hold off on this week’s issue until today so I could use it fill you in on all of the details and what you need to know.

But first and foremost, the key information that you need is right here:

• Dates: Tuesday 10th to Wednesday 11th November 2026

• Venue: Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London

• Submissions: Call for speakers is now live and is open until August 3rd.

• Website: You can follow all the big updates as they happen at: http://www.aiandgamesconference.com

• Tickets: Early bird tickets are on sale now while stocks last!

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AI and Games Conference is Back!

That’s right folks the AI and Games Conference returns to London for 2026. We’re very excited to be announcing this years event after a lot of work behind-the-scenes in getting everything lined up. Once again we welcome the Game AI community for two days of presentations from the leading voices in the sector on artificial intelligence in game development.

In the past two years we’ve welcomed over 600 delegates from more than 250 companies around the world to come together and share their work in AI for the games industry. With presentations from Creative Assembly, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, CD Projekt Red, Sony AI, AWS for Games, Unity, Databricks, Ubisoft, Unknown Worlds, Riot Games, Warhorse Studios, Saber Interactive and more.

No hype. No nonsense. Real insights on AI in the video games industry.

Early Bird Tickets On Sale Now

As always, we provide the first round of tickets with an early bird discount, with subsidised tickets for students and indie devs.

Plus we are once again offering t-shirts for pre-order alongside our extra-special ‘Crit’ plushies. Grab them while stocks last!

Book Your Tickets!

Special Thanks to Our Sponsors

As always we’re grateful to our sponsors who help us putting this event together. This year we’re giving a big shout-out to Havok, Riot Games, Qualcomm, Creative Assembly, Kythera AI, Raw Power Labs, and Bit.Part.ai. We have a few more companies lining up to support us this year that we hope to announce later this summer. In the meantime if your organisation would like to support us, head over to the website to find out how to get in touch!

We Want To Hear From You

As always we have an open call for speaker submissions that is now live! Whether you’re a game dev ranging from indie to AAA, mobile to console, or a researcher or hobbyist, we want to hear from you. Submissions are open until August 3rd, with each talk being reviewed by our editorial team. Be sure to have a read through the guidelines on what we expect, or check out the talks from 2024 and 2025 now live on YouTube which give you an indication of our expectations and quality bar. Last year we had a 35% acceptance rate. So let me stress the competition is fierce (and increasing year-on-year) but we’re open to the weird, the wonderful, and the interesting.

Submit to AI and Games Conference 2026

A Change of Scenery

The big change for 2026 is that we have moved venue! We’re still in London, but decided to pop over to the other side of the Thames. We’re incredibly grateful to the good folks at Goldsmith’s University who have hosted us these past two years; they have been great partners and very accommodating as we tried to figure out what this event is shaping up to be. However, we have reached a point we have sadly outgrown the space. This is largely due to the level of enthusiasm and excitement you have shown for the event. In year one we had to close ticket sales one week out as interest exceeded capacity and we had very real concerns about violating fire safety (yes, that happened), and in year two we moved into the Great Hall to address our need for more floor space, only for us to still have challenges in balancing room sizes.

To that end myself and our event manager Sally Kevan have spent the past few months wandering the streets of London to find a new space to call home. Both to help us find our footing in a space that can accomodate us, but potentially help us grow in sensible ways. To that end we’re glad to be partnering with Here East: London’s campus for entrepreneurs, creatives, and unconventional thinkers.

Based in Hackney in East London, Here East is situated in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and is a part of the post-Olympic regeneration project for the area. The Here East campus itself is a revamp of the former Olympic Media Centre that was built on the site for the 2012 games. On that note, many of the sites originally built for the 2012 Olympics, ranging from the Copper Box Arena, the London Aquatics Club, and famously London Stadium - now home to the (sadly recently relegated) football team West Ham United - are only 10 minutes walk from our new venue.

But it’s not just a venue space. As you can see in the video above there are a variety of coffee shops, restaurants and other amenities right next to where we’re going to be based. In addition there are excellent transport links with Hackney Wick on the Overground only 10 mins walk, and Stratford providing services via Network Rail, London Overground, London Underground and the DLR - which is only 25 minutes walk or a 5-minute (free) shuttle bus away from the venue.

We are hosted at Here East at Plexal, which is an innovation and coworking space. This provides us with a series of rooms that provide both the space we need for hosting talks while also allowing for overflow - where we can now stream the talks locally. This means should a session popular we can then have a video running in a neighbouring area complete with headsets for you to listen along. In addition we’re grateful to the team at University of Staffordshire London whose Digital Institute campus is also based at Here East, and are collaborating with us in delivering this event. The University of Staffordshire is the UK’s #1 rated university for games, with their courses a certified partner for industry tools such as Houdini and Unreal Engine, and winner of the TIGA Games Industry award for best educational institution the past two years running. Supporting and nurturing future generations of the Game AI community is an important mission for us, and so to collaborate with Staffs makes a lot of sense.

A Word From The Lead Organiser

[That’s me by the way…]

Once is luck, twice is a coincidence, but three times is when you build a routine.

In the two and a bit years since we formed Game AI Events CIC - the non-profit organisation that runs the AI and Games Conference - we have not only been blown away by the response we have received from the Game AI community (not to mention the wider industry) but the landscape in which it exists has also shifted.

We exist in an age where the conversation on AI for games is never-ending - I mean we write a weekly newsletter just to help you keep up to date! Now more than ever there is a need for an event that provides high-quality and meaningful discourse on the positive (and negative) impact of these technologies to the sector. To show how game developers are actually using AI to solve their problems, and to shine a light on the best professional practice that will help us thrive as both a creative medium, and a technology-driven sector.

When my friends and I founded this venture, it was to address what we felt was a clear gap in the market. To provide a European event for AI developers in games, be they working with traditional Game AI systems, to the latest innovations in Machine Learning. By providing a space to come together and share their experiences, we can not just cater to an audience in our own neighbourhood who were starved for a local event, but to combat the narratives surrounding AI’s adoption in the industry. We exist in an age where Game AI is largely ignored, and sensible applications of Machine Learning (and even Generative AI) are tarred with the same brush as many of the worst out there. It makes it difficult for people who already work in AI to have meaningful conversation, and for those beginning to understand why and how we use AI in games to get an accurate representation. AI for games is a long-running and storied field, and it’s important that we remain resolute in showcasing best practice and meaningful iteration without playing into the hype, or placating short-sighted and detrimental efforts that masquerade as ‘progress’.

As you can imagine, this is a tough balancing act, and it’s one we don’t just debate internally, but continue to listen to our community such that we try to get it right. But for us the most important thing has been the sense of community and the overall vibe of our events. I’m incredibly proud of what we have delivered in but two short years as we’ve gone from ‘dumb idea conceived in a bar at GDC’ to one of the largest events on AI for the video games industry in the world!

Despite this amazing growth, our ambition is not ever-increasing ticket sales. Rather, it is about stability. We welcomed around 400 developers in 2025, and while this isn’t ‘big’ in comparison to other events last year such as the UK’s Develop (5,500), Poland’s GIC (3,400), Gamescom Dev (5,400) or GDC (25,000) , this now puts us in the space of a ‘small but large’ event in this sector. We’re now larger than a lot of other game developer events that get hosted in the UK and specifically in London - which is insane btw - and that means finding venues that fit and spaces that can accomodate has became a very big problem in a short period of time. Our budgets continue to grow at a time where we’re still finding our feet economically - full disclosure I anticipate our 2026 budget will be 3-4x what it cost us to run the first event in 2024. Meanwhile we’re still a very young endeavour, and it takes time for word to get out about the value our event presents to corporate sponsors. Hence it’s still a lot of work to get on the radar of potential sponsors and convince them to support us. While in some regards things are moving quickly, in others it moves slowly. However I am glad to say we’re getting there and that the word has got out as more companies see what we’re aiming for and align with it. A huge thank you once again to all of our sponsors who support us in what we’ve set out to do.

In addition it’s worth stressing the 5-year plan is not to scale this event to 800 or 1000 attendees. This would run risk of diluting the vibe and sense of community we have established. Rather we have ambitions not to expand in headcount but instead deepen our offerings. It’s too early to state now, but in 2026 we are looking to try some new ideas in our programme, and allow us to enrich the conversations at the event. Some prototypes if you will that will help us prove out ideas as part of our proposed plans for 2027 and beyond. More on that as it comes!

But to return to my opening statement, our ambition is to become a tradition. That we are the venue people serious about AI in game development will visit. The home of meaningful discussions and valued insight. A space where everyone from academia to AAA is welcome and will engage with one another. That means we have to be serious about how we set ourselves up for the future. Today’s announcement is the end of a long couple of months as everything lines up where we want it to be. But is also the start of the real work. Of making this event happen, and ensuring we continue to live up to our own standards, and to deliver for all of you out there.

Thanks once again to everyone out there backing this horse, and I look forward to greeting many of you in person this November.

Discounts as an AI and Games Subscriber

For all of our premium subscribers of this here newsletter, check your inbox for an email from us today which provides a discount code on your ticket! It’s a discount that pays for itself at this point.

• Capcom Sets The Record Straight on AI Adoption

• HoYoverse Announce Massive AI Investment Programme

• Take Two Push Back on the AI Narrative

• We Share the Love for Indie Games While Travelling!

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Including industry news, innovative research, emerging trends, and our own exclusive editorial and reporting.

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Greetings and welcome to this comeback edition of the newsletter. I had a great time off on vacation, but there’s no rest for the wicked! After spending a week or so touring Italy (and speaking once again at Dev\Games in Rome), I am currently in Los Angeles as we wrap up a consultancy project with one of the biggest AAA studios out there (I’ll leave you to guess who that might be). In the meantime I figured I’d quickly round up some of the news that I stumbled upon as I returned to my desk yesterday, plus focus on reviewing some games I have played while I’m travelling!

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AI (and Games) in the News

Too much went down when I was offline. So here’s a round-up of the most interesting headlines.

Genshin Impact Developers Announce $14.6 Billion AI Investment [GameLook]

HoYoverse, creators of the highly popular Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail have announced their intentions to invest 100 billion yuan ($14.6 billion USD) into AI infrastructure and deployment over the next three years. As we’ve reported before Chinese games studios are heavily investing in AI right now, but this story caught my interest because HoYoverse are focussing largely on building their own internal AI infrastructure, and removing the need to work with external providers. This comes at a time when everyone from Anthropic to Uber and everyone in between is realising that the financials of Generative AI are not improving. Token costs of running AI models are increasing, particularly in agentic frameworks. This is compounded by businesses not investing in their own setups, and instead relying on external providers who are now increasing how much they charge to customers - which don’t forget, they have heavily subsidised since day one. This is creating serious liabilities that companies need to address should this wish to continue using AI at this scale.

“AI is not for Creating Art” says Capcom [4Gamer.net]

In a recent interview with 4Gamer.net at the Google Cloud Next event in Las Vegas, Capcom’s VP of Development and AI Solutions Shinichi Inoue spoke of the company’s plans on how they’re exploring Generative AI and Machine Learning in production.

In a telling quote that was also pulled by VGC, Inoue-san states:

“What we in the entertainment industry consider extremely important in contrast to artificial intelligence is human sensibility. Even top-tier AI still cannot match our creators when it comes to sensibility. That’s the current reality. Because of that, concentrating human effort on work requiring this kind of sensibility is more efficient from the standpoint of human capital management, and it’s also important for coexistence with creators.”

Unsurprisingly this means focussing their technology in other areas where production can prove expensive and time-consuming and resolving “intermediate-steps” that lack human authorship and creativity, such as the likes of debugging and testing like shown below.

As Automaton Media points out, this contradicts Capcom’s previous efforts in this space. Notably their collaboration with Google Cloud on Generative AI for ideation of props and other background artefacts - a story we reported on in January of last year. Of course this was but one part of a larger effort to conduct research into the viability of AI in production, and perhaps lessons have since been learned?

For me, I see this as Capcom seeing an opportunity to quietly correct many of the narratives portrayed about their AI adoption in recent months. Be it Google stating Capcom was one of the major studios using their AI tools, to of course the DLSS5 debacle that dragged Resident Evil: Requiem into the firing line without their involvement. They’re aware of the issues arising from this, and the negative PR it can have on what is proving to be another stellar year for the company. So to rather diplomatically correct the narrative being presented and give their own insights makes sense.

I Begrudgingly Agree Once Again With Strauss Zelnick [GI.biz]

I’ve mentioned before that sometimes Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick will express grounded/cynical takes on AI that I am prone to agreeing with. In his recent interview with Jon Hicks over at GI.biz he had the following to say:

“Technology is not going to take people’s jobs,” he says. “The big tech companies who laid off thousands of people and said it was because of AI were not telling the truth. It was because they overhired in the pandemic and they were sloppy about it and they haven’t addressed their headcount issues. And the market believing that all SaaS companies will go out of business because of AI – the market’s completely incorrect, as the market sometimes is. And if the market weren’t incorrect now and then, how could you invest in it? You’d never have an opportunity.”

“So I’m all in on believing that technology will evolve, and I’m all in on believing that it will affect us, and I’m all in on believing it could also create some threats – but I think generally speaking, this new technology is going to be very beneficial for our industry and for our company.” Hence, those hundreds of projects looking at how AI can be used in production, although he says none of them are “existential” bets. “Why would we? We don’t need to. What we’re betting on is creativity.”

Of course these comments come just weeks after the company let go an entire team who have spent years (first at Zynga, then at Take Two) working on exactly the sort of ‘AI for production’ projects that he so posits. So yeah…

Asus Enters the Ram Market in China

In an era where RAM manufacturers are leaving the consumer market for the sunny uplands of high-bandwidth memory for AI datacentres, it’s nice to see a new entry in the consumer market. Asus have announced the ROG Edition 20 48GB dual channel RAM. It’s um…. only around £600. It’s due for release sometime in June.

Ubisoft Pushing Forward with “First Playable Generative AI Experience” [Ubisoft]

While I was on the road Ubisoft was the latest games company to drop their full financial reports for the 25-26 fiscal year. While having a poorer year overall which is largely attributed to a lack of major releases and their ongoing ‘strategic reset’, they expect have more to shout about in the coming years. This summer we have Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, but also the company has promised new entries of Assassin’s Creed, plus the Far Cry and Ghost Recon franchises in the 27/28 and 28/29 fiscal years. In amongst all of this was the acknowledgement of their efforts to double-down on their AI efforts. Notably the ‘Teammates’ Generative AI demo that I was invited to try at an event in Paris last year. To quote the report:

Leveraging AI to enhance player experience and boost teams’ creativity and efficiency Ubisoft is accelerating investments behind Teammates, its first playable Generative AI experience, to enrich player experiences, while teams are making tangible progress organically on AI applications that can help manage the growing complexity of modern game development pipelines. This ranges from more intelligent bots supporting our QC teams, to smarter NPCs and game worlds that can adapt to player behavior and react more dynamically in real time.

The Group is fully leveraging decades of expertise in open worlds, systemic gameplay, and AIdriven systems, combined with years of pioneering AI and machine learning research through its La Forge R&D teams. Together with the many early adopters across its production teams, this gives the Company confidence in Ubisoft’s ability to remain at the forefront of this transformation and provides its teams with tools to enhance their creativity.

As they say, Ubisoft has been in the business of AI R&D for many years, so nothing here is a surprise. But it sounds like they’re doubling down on the Teammates project to see what kind of game can be built from it. If you missed my impressions on Teammates, go and read my report from attending the event last year.

Fireshine Games Won’t Work With Developers “Relying on Generative AI” [GI.biz]

Alex Forbes-Calvin recently sat down for an interview with Jasper Tanner-Barnes and Brian Foote from Fireshine Games who recently published the breakout indie hit Far Far West from Evil Raptor. One thing pointed out by the team was that the use of Generative AI notably for art and similar visual assets is a strict no-go for the company. To quote Foote:

"If AI means code completion or means using Copilot in Word, that's an entirely different set of scenarios. It will be very hard for anybody to say they're not touching AI in some way, shape or form, but in terms of the core game creation, that is not something that we think players are interested in at this point in time, and not something that we think is healthy for the development community."

I like to see when a publisher has a clear(er) line on this - heck, they have built a policy - on how to move forward. I’m inclined to agree with them on this, in that the PC/console market as a whole is not interested in a lot of what Generative AI has offered thus far. Studios still need to make a serious case for what value Generative AI can bring to the gameplay experience beyond chatbots and the removal of human labour.

Reviewing Indie Games on Tour

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been travelling around and to pass the time I loaded up a bunch of indie games onto my Steam Deck and Switch 2 and started working my way through them. So I figured why not report back on what I’ve played through and point you towards them should you find them of interest!

Outhold

Tellus Games / Steam

Released at the tail-end of 2025, Outhold is a tower-defence game with a twist. Rather than have the player go through a large number of levels complete with different map layouts and enemy configurations, Outhold only provides you with 10 levels, but with each significantly more challenging than the last. Through earned currencies either through regular combat or by completing specific challenges in each level, players then build out and expand a skill tree that allows for endless customisation of your playstyle and approach.

The skilltree, which the game gives something of a preview of in the title art, is massive in scale. Allowing not just for the introduction of new towers that have different effects (electric, fire, slowdown), but also to customise each of the towers around specific gameplay styles. Not every unlock is guaranteed to create a net positive effect, but it can prove useful if you merge it with other abilities. So for example you can increase the fire rate of your standard arrow tower while reducing the base damage, but then add the ability for elemental effects to be enhanced. The currencies accrued can be reimbursed at any time, and after you’ve achieved a certain level of success within the game, it allows for you to build multiple different loadouts. Hence you can have completely different loadouts built to handle specific styles of play, as well as particular configurations of enemies.

The enemies themselves are built around simple archetypes, and represented using simple shapes of various colours. Hence you learn quickly the difference between a small red dot and a big purple dot as you observe the damage taken and the speed with which they move towards your home base. While the behaviour is fairly rudimentary - move towards the goal fast or slow - there are a few surprises in there, and ones that will force you to rethink tower deployment strategies once you are aware of them. But the game lets you really relish the process of deciding how to take them on. Currency for building and upgrading towers is earned by eliminating enemies, though you start with a small (but upgradeable) budget at the start. This then leans into the challenge of each round and some of the challenges offered as you can be tasked to eliminate waves using only specific tower types, delivering a certain amount of elemental damage, or within a time limit. Waves can be prematurely triggered for a cash bonus that depletes the closer you are to regular deployment, and gives you the option to consider gambling your current configuration against the intensity of having two or three waves all overlapping at once.

What started out as a small addition to an existing Steam basket - after all it’s the price of a cup of coffee - Outhold has since became one of my Game of the Year contenders. It’s fun, lightweight, easy to play on desktop and Steam Deck (using the touchpads, it has no native controller support), and has a long endgame as more and more challenges open up. I’ve put it on hold for now having seen credits but plan to return to the more challenging corners of it later in the year.

Rainbow Legends

Unpixel Cloud Cedar Studio / Steam

Roguelike deck-builders are all the rage these days, with Slay the Spire 2 dominating the conversation in recent months, and I’ve been spending time playing The Killing Stone which we’ll hopefully run a case study on later this year. But in amongst all this came Rainbow Legends, a game that was blending deckbuilding with tiles. I have a bit of a fondness for tiles, and love me a good strategy game that uses them well. So was curious what this game brings to the table. In truth, it’s an interesting idea of using decks to dominate territory, that is let down by a rather complex and unclear deck system and a rather unforgiving onboarding process.

Cards in a players deck are designed predominantly to take over territory. The goal of a given turn is to play cards such that you take control of more territory than the opposing player. Doing so will result in the difference in score being applied as damage to their health bar. So if you have control of 32 tiles and they have 27, then you score 5 damage against them. Continue this process until you eventually wear their health down and they concede defeat.

The game themes decks around specific characters who each unique abilities, ranging from providing elemental attacks, bolstering defences for later charged aggression, or propagating control over territory over time. Hence it becomes important to learn and understand what each deck does, and how to maximise its utility as well as learn to combat against it. This is both the games biggest strength, but also its largest weakness. It provides a lot of variety in the gameplay and allows you to try out different strategies and approaches over time. But it does little, if anything, to properly train you on how to prepare for a new enemy once introduced. Matches against boss characters have you face off against enemy players with their own decks that odds are you have not seen until that point, and they are incredibly aggressive in utilising them. I was curious how the game’s strategy AI would try and balance between opponents that simply go all-in on the strengths of their decks versus trying to create an experience where they make mistakes and open themselves to being exploited. In truth it is very much the former rather than the latter.

The bigger problem sitting alongside this is that the game doesn’t take the time to explain when new cards are coming into play and what impact that can have on your own strategy. You can figure this out by sitting at the turn stage and examining cards that have came into the opposing player’s hand, but it kills the momentum of the game, and often it’s not clear what a card will do until I see it in action. All of this leads to situations where I am in control for the first half of a battle only for the opponent to start dominating as new cards come into play, and from this point it’s seldom salvageable. I didn’t have many situations where I was losing a fight and then turned it around. Once the enemy AI has the upper hand, odds are you’re going to lose. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game used this to create a learning moment for me, or even gave me the option to restart the fight, but of course this is a roguelike. So I’m defeated, I’m back at the beginning, but I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything from the process.

While I have plenty of gripes with Rainbow Legends I don’t think the game itself is bad, or that the idea doesn’t have merit. But rather the onboarding experience and difficulty curve feel like they need a lot of work to feel engaging. The Steam reviews right now suggest that perhaps my perspective doesn’t quite align with that of others, but I found myself walking away frustrated without any desire to return. The game continues to receive hotfixes and balance changes, and perhaps with a few more patches the game will improve to a point I click with it a little better.

Luna Abyss

Kwalee Labs / Steam [Reviewed], PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X

Luna Abyss is perhaps the one game out of the three reviewed today that you might recognise. It’s getting a lot of buzz and for good reason. A first-person shooter that blends fast mobility with platforming, drip-fed narrative, and combat that leans into bullet hell design with enemies firing off shots in a wide variety of patterns and styles.

Despite my keeping an eye on games coming to market (after all, I’m always keen to find new case studies and interviews with developers) Lunar Abyss was below my radar until the presskit was bouncing around. However I realised upon closer inspection that I had seen the game before, and met a couple of the developers when they showcased at the Epic Games booth at GDC in 2024. The dark brutalist architecture and intense use of colour in the lighting - be it in the environment design or weapon fire - had stuck with me for the past two years. I didn’t play the game at the time but had watched over a friends shoulder, and the art style combined with what felt like an interesting mishmash of ideas from other games made it all the more memorable.

Luna Abyss has players take control of Fawkes, a young woman imprisoned on the dark ‘mimic moon’ of Luna. Sentenced for crimes against the state, you are forced to serve your sentence of roughly 9000 days as a warden who explores the megastructure within this red moon. What you find is a destroyed civilisation and remnants of a once prosperous city filled with a serious of quirky and esoteric characters (all of whom laying it on thick with British accents). As the story progresses you fight your way deeper into the abyss, and ponder how to respond when it starts whipsering in your ear…

The conversation orbiting around this game (no pun intended) has been to proclaim Lunar Abyss as Returnal meets the modern Doom games with a hint of Metroid Prime, and it’s hard to disagree with (some of) that. Players navigate through a series of platforming segments until they reach combat arenas where waves of enemies will spawn. Each enemy archetype has a different attack style, be it in whether they maintain distance to the player, and how they seek to deal damage. Much like Returnal these shots are typically orbs of energy that players must avoid as they are fired off in patterns, ranging from small clusters of shots to larger and more consistent waves and shapes. Locking onto targets just like in Metroid Prime can help you maintain the pressure as you bob and weave around the projectiles being fired, and even execute a Doom-style glory-kill execution that works at range to kill an enemy and give you a little bit of health - plus an upgrade that swaps out the health absorption for turning the enemy into a bomb that damages nearby foes. However if the pressure is too much you can back off and rely on your parkour abilities such as double-jumps and dashes that you unlock gradually throughout the campaign.

Unlocks for movement and combat gradually increase you agency, and the game’s enemies scale up alongside it. Combat starts out as a more static process whereby you stay on one side of the arena, lock-on in a style akin to Metroid Prime, and fire as you weave around projectiles. However, over time it becomes increasingly chaotic as you move around the environment to find the right time to strike. Be it by dealing big damage with the ‘Atom Splitter’ rocket launcher, or being forced to break an enemies shields with the shotgun-coded and appropriately named ‘Shieldbreaker’. That said, sometimes it all becomes simply too overwhelming, and stopping in the moment can prove not so much fatal, provided you find cover, but kill all of your momentum as you hide behind a pillar and are forced to take pot-shots from afar.

The gradual introduction of new mechanics, or expansion on existing ones, is welcomed but also I feel a little too slow. I am picking up these new additions and embracing them fairly quickly, and would like for the game to offer up some more meat to the combat faster than it does. For more seasoned players it takes a little while to start presenting a more intense challenge, but where I am now in the back third I feel like it’s pushing me just the right amount.

The comparisons to Metroid Prime and Returnal do the game something of a disservice, in that they suggest the game is either a Metroidvania or a roguelike, when in truth it is neither. It’s straightforward linear narrative game broken up into six chapters. I have yet to see credits, but the overall story and world design has helped maintain my investment and propulsion towards the end. The art design is pulling from numerous directions, with a mixture of cyberpunk, steampunk, brutalist architecture and a dash of cosmic horror. The world design actually reminded me just as much of Bungie’s Destiny games as it did Metroid Prime, with both an interesting contrast between the brutalism and nature in specific segments, combined with strong use of lighting in the art direction. It looks great even on the Steam Deck - which accounts for around 80% of my playtime thus far - and looks even better when you throw even more graphics power behind it on the big screen.

Right now Lunar Abyss is creeping into my top 10 for the year. I don’t think it excels in any one particular area, and there are faults to be found in some of the combat design, alongside the platforming and pacing, but it does everything at a sufficient level of quality that it elevates the overall presentation. I’m not sure if it will stick it out to the end of the year GOTY list, but it’s certainly one of the best first-person shooters I’ve played in 2026.

Disclosure: Rainbow Legends and Luna Abyss were reviewed courtesy of a pre-release Steam keys provided from the publisher via Keymailer.

Wrapping Up

Alrighty, that’s it for this week. I’ve got more games to report back on when I return to the UK - we might even stream some of them when I’m back at my desk. I’ve got a brief return back to the office next week before I fly out once again on another work trip to Berlin.

But the good news is next week we’re announcing our plans for the AI and Games Conference 2026! Stick around for that. Plus later in June we’re announcing a new project that we’re launching with a bumper line-up of guests and topics, you’re going to love it!

Thanks for reading, and catch you next week.

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In 2019 I published a video all about the GDMC: the Generative Design in Minecraft Competition - an annual event where academic researchers and hobby Minecraft modders are challenged to design procedural generation systems that can build villages and other cityscapes. Here we are in 2026 and the competition is still going strong, and it’s seen a lot of changes in recent years both in the tools used to make it, the types of villages people are building, and even some of the people involved in making it happen.

So I figured why not catch up with the GDMC competition once more as it enters its 9th year. I had a chat with Niels Poldervaart who is part of the organisational team and 2025 winner Isaac Braam about where things stand, what trends have emerged in the scene, and what to expect for this years edition of the event.

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About the GDMC

A quick recap for anyone not familiar, the Generative Design in Minecraft Competition tasks competitors to “[make] an algorithm that can generate, without human supervision, an interesting settlement for an unseen Minecraft map.” As we discussed in the original video, the task of creating a system - be it simple procedural generation or a more complex AI model - to build a Minecraft village without any idea beforehand of the terrain types and overarching landscape, is an incredibly challenging one. With judges assessing the villages based on their functionality but also aspects of aesthetics and storytelling, and how they adapat to the local terrain. I mean they’re still running this thing after 9 years, so it’s clear they still think it’s worth exploring and not a solved problem!

On that note, the GDMC competition started out as an academic project, and to this day they still announce the winners at the annual IEEE Conference on Games - I was sitting in the audience when they were revealed in August last year! Plus academic researchers continue to use it as a platform for procedural generation research. And let me stress for an academic competition to continue to run for close to a decade is no small feat. Competitions such as this don’t tend to get huge numbers of entries, and often the organisers are grad students. So when they move on these events tend to die out, so to have it endure is quite the novelty.

Since the video we published back in 2019 I’ve been checking in on it periodically. I was a judge for a couple of years, and then would livestream some of my time spent judging. In 2024 we had the lead organiser Christoph Salge give us an update for the AI and Games newsletter - which I assume you have all signed up to already over at AIandGames.com - and then he also presented about the competition at the very first AI and Games Conference later that year.

So I figured it was high time we check in again, given a lot has changed in the past year or two, and see what kinds of settlements people are able to generate.

Tommy: I think that’s critically it. It’s like it’s not a solved problem by any I can see Isaac just nodding his head like yes, absolutely not. I guess one of the nice parts of it is the open-endedness of it?

Niels Poldervaart [GDMC Organiser]: Correct, and for me the the power of Minecraft specifically is it’s a very popular game of course [and] that helps with attracting people, but also of course an extremely moddable and extendable game, and the constraints of Minecraft itself. I think that makes it a really good sandbox to play around with for like novel PCG techniques.

Isaac Braam [2025 Winner]: I think we’ll get to this later, but yes, it isn’t solved yet. And I feel like every team is essentially doing an if-statement or a match case. Like this is a cool place for maybe a Viking settlement or a ninja settlement, but because we don’t have this generator solved yet it has to be made on a case-by-case basis. You need to program it out and do all the aesthetics and the little nooks and crannies around the edges.

A New Set of Tools

So how does it continue to thrive? Well for one thing the tools that are available have gradually changed and became more malleable. The competition originally relied on MCEdit, which is a save game editor for Minecraft. While it proved useful, it proved a challenge to keep the competition in line with later version of Minecraft’s Java edition, and after the original MCEdit paused development, the team opted to look for other tools.

While participants can use MCEdit’s spiritual successor Amulet, the competition has moved more towards using their own in-house tooling. A custom HTTP interface was built that allows for reading and writing into a Minecraft world, and this means that through a simple REST API you can now more readily write code that can then quickly start building at a given location - with wrappers written for it in Python and C#. After Niki Gawlik built the original version, Niels ported this into a mod that can be loaded up in Minecraft mod tools, and works to keep it as up to date as possible as new versions of the game are released. Having been involved both in the tooling and as a previous participant, this led to Niels becoming a part of the organisational team.

Niels: Christoph [Salge, GDMC lead organiser] basically asked me because of my involvement with making the tooling that most of the participants use. I also feel that making like a tool that is well documented and easy to get started with is really important to reduce the hurdle to actually get going. Especially if you’re maybe not super familiar with like the inner workings of Minecraft specifically, and want to make something where you don’t really need to have all that knowledge.

The Problem is Not Solved

Looking at the submissions that came along in 2025, it’s clear there’s been significant improvements in the resulting settlements, even though there is still a long way to go. The complexity of the buildings and some of the architecture has improved drastically since the early days. This in part given the collective knowledge of how to start building combined with the improved tooling over the years.

But also it helps that teams continue to come back and try to improve on what they’ve done before. The team Panda_Revival, who scored 3rd in both 2024 and 2025 have continued to experiment with some weird and wonderful panda-themed entries, but often with a lot of code re-use. So they’re building on cool things they figure out year on year. After last years iteration where they had a post-apocalyptic underground Panda colony, this year they moved back up top with a full city full of temples, and apartments complete with sleeping spaces, gardens and kitchens.

While this code re-use is a common occurrence, the actual algorithms being used fluctuates a lot within the community. With the likes of generative grammars - like those we’ve covered in games Unexplored - to constraint systems like wave function collapse that we covered in our episode on Townscaper. Despite the hype surrounding Generative AI - and no doubt some confusion in the name, with people thinking this is an event all about Gen AI systems - it’s had very little impact on the competition thus far. As event co-founder Christoph Salge reported to us on the AI and Games newsletter back in 2024, use of generative and machine learning models have thus far scored rather poorly with judges.

However, the one area that Generative AI has had an impact is in the Chronicle Challenge: where the designers are tasked to find a way to build story and narrative into the space. For 2025 the Chronicle winner was Shadow Wizard Monkey Gang (who also scored #2 overall), given they generate books for the player to read using large language models that provides background and information on each place it builds by feeding biome and geometric features into the prompting.

So chronicle challenge aside, it seems like traditional procedural generation techniques continue to rule the roost. Often with unique geometric features that make them stand out, with walls, roadways, and even small but charming decorations. Or in the case of Niels submission in 2024, an underground library that contains metadata of all academic research papers published on Arxiv, leaning on existing real-world data to support hte level generation process.

Isaac took the crown in 2025 under the moniker Guassianly Filtered, which creates a very rich and nicely arranged cityscape. And um.... a giant UFO and alien skull floating about it? Complete with a functioning lift!

Isaac: What I did was I settled on this method which replicates the way water particles attract each other. So you start with a lot of paths between the houses, by using A* [search algorithm]. So they were very fast paths to each other, but what we humans like to do to save on concrete and building materials is to not have two paths next to each other. Instead we combine them into one path and then branch off. So what I did was every part of the path just became a water molecule with strings to the last water molecule in this path, and they would attract each other. Then you would get very nice natural looking paths.

The part where I cheaped out on you could say is the generation of the buildings: I just made a very nice set of buildings. But I think generation settlement challenge can be split into the two big parts: the buildings and the city planning. And I think the building part is by far the hardest part and the unsolved part of the challenge because a building is really hard to define. You need to have a lot of scenarios and they’re all if-statements [in code]. So this part was very hard where people would put so much time into. So I did that by hand and then concentrated all my energy on the other aspects like city planning and the narrative.

Next to the pathing, I had a very nice algorithm for choosing the optimal locations where I just put gaussian filters - a lot of gaussian filters - to kind of smooth out the height map and see where are the optimal building positions. Then I took those optimal building positions and I put another gaussian filter on the ground to kind of make the ground a bit nicer than it already was.

I think a lot of people were surprised when I watched back the evaluations and I spoke to them. They were like, “Wow, your positioning is so good. It looks so natural.” But I did change it to look more good and more natural. Yeah. And then I added a nice narrative which I sadly couldn’t finish due to time constraints. But my narrative was like you have this idyllic village and then they made this LLM which did all the thinking for them but then it made itself a machine which in the end went up to the sky.

I kind of wanted to make the village more apocalyptic because they were suffering from this LLM making their life ‘easier’. Yes. But all these ashes from this computational power would make the village suffer a bit. Also my buildings were in a nice clear pallet, so it had white concrete and stone, so you could see a nice gradient of ashes, which I will improve on for next year. So, you can have these buildings that are still the same, but they would get changed in a post-processing manner by this natural or not natural AI disaster.

The 2026 Edition is Live Now

So yes at the time of writing the competition is live for 2026, with a deadline of July 1st. It’s open for anyone to participate, and if you’re interested be sure to visit the GDMC website in the description. While we recorded our conversation at the start of the year, it was clear that even then Isaac had an idea of how we planned on retaining his title:

Isaac: I have an idea that might solve it. It’s a very bold statement and I say it might, but it’s um… the only step I need to get right is going from a 3D image to a Minecraft building. So you have 2D image generators, and then you have a 2D image generator to a 3D object which you can put into Blender for instance. Then you have a 3D house maybe for your settlement and then the only step is to translate it to Minecraft blocks. Okay. And then you get a truly adaptive system because then you can be like ‘ah there is a mountain here what should we built on it ChatGPT?’ and then it could be like ‘ah a lighthouse’ or you want a Viking village or a fishing village and an LLM can plan out the city.

Then [we could] make an image of these buildings, these images to 3D objects, and these 3D objects to Minecraft blocks. The only difficulty in this pipeline…

Tommy: The only difficulty? Okay. [laughter]

Isaac: Well, I’ve gotten the other parts working in a demo environment. But the most difficult - not the only difficult, the most difficult - part is the 3D object to the Minecraft build, because you have a scaling problem. These 3D objects, they don’t translate neatly to Minecraft houses because often have straight walls and these generators are not known for making straight walls because they average by design. So, they kind of smooth things out, but buildings have smooth surfaces with bold aesthetics, and it wouldn’t look that good.

So, you need a translator function that smooths out walls, makes the door the size of an actual Minecraft door where you can also have discrepancies. So, there’s this translation step still that needs to be solved, but then you could have a really cool - and really expensive - generator. [laughter]

Closing

Thanks once again to Niels and Isaac for sitting to chat with me. As stated, this years GDMC is happening right now, and you can find out more about it either directly from the GDMC site and Wiki, or via their Itch.io page as well. All the links at the bottom of the page.

Best of luck to all involved, and fingers crossed we get to hear and see more about the GDMC in the future.

Links to The GDMC Competition

• GDMC Site: https://gendesignmc.wikidot.com/

• 2026 Event on Itch.io: https://itch.io/jam/gdmc2026

• 2026 Homepage: https://gendesignmc.wikidot.com/wiki:2026-settlement-generation-competition

• The GDMC Discord: https://discord.com/invite/ueaxuXj

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Including industry news, innovative research, emerging trends, and our own exclusive editorial and reporting.

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Hello one and all and welcome to another edition of . I had a lot of fun last week reviewing Mike Cook’s book all about procedural content generation, Next Level (on sale now). It was a palette cleanser after a few heavy weeks of reporting on Xbox reshuffles, the RAM crisis, and more efforts to punt Generative AI into the market.

Well, it was a short reprieve. For this week we have a mix of news stories, but most of the big talking points came from the quarterly financial reporting from Sony and Nintendo. Including confirmation of price hikes for the Switch 2, PlayStation’s strategy for Generative AI adoption, and how both platforms expect a decline in hardware sales courtesy of price increases and AI’s impact on component costs.

Before we get into it in earnest, a quick mention that we will not have a new issue next week as I’m bouncing between speaking engagements at conferences, and enjoying a much-needed vacation. My plan is to return on May 27th, but this may get pushed back due to a client obligation which will have me fly out to the US that same week.

Either way, we’ll have a short break, and then things will kick off in earnest in June with a bunch of new stuff to share!

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AI (and Games) in the News

Lots of stuff in the news this week, let’s run through it.

EVE Online Developer Returns to Independence, Partners with Google Deepmind [VGC]

CCP Games, the creators of much-beloved EVE Online have been bought back by their management from the current owners Pearl Abyss, who bought them for $225 million back in 2018, and now selling them for $120 million. This reset will have no impact on their current studios and staffing for now.

What is most interesting is that Fenris Creations, the new name for the company, has signed into a research partnership with Google DeepMind, who have acquired a minority stake in the company. With the idea to both provide versions of EVE Online for research purposes, while also with the potential for DeepMind’s work to have an impact on future games.

This is quite an exciting opportunity, and one that DeepMind could use to support both sides of the coin. DeepMind have previously worked on the likes of the SIMA project - which I reported on this time last year - where they work with games studio to develop general purpose AI that learns from playing all of these different titles. It also aligns with conversations I’ve had with some studios, including with DeepMind themselves, about their aspirations to do more interesting work in the games space. More on this as it happens!

Firefight: Gauntlet Announced for Halo Infinite [Halo Studios]

Y’know it’s nice when studios ship new Game AI features. The criminally underrated Halo Infinite has announced Firefight: Gauntlet, a modified version of the long-running Firefight mode but it pivots to new encounters on new maps between waves. Considering Halo Studios said they were done with updating this game, this makes me rather happy!

Hitman’s Season of the Royal Runs Until End of May [IOI]

With 007: First Light due out at the end of the month, what better time to bring back the Le Chiffre, Mads Mikkelsen’s James Bond villain, as an elusive target in Hitman: World of Assassination. Season of the Royal Ace offers a bunch of fun challenges and bonus cosmetics for both Hitman and Bond should you play it this month. I need to check this out before flying off at the weekend.

Nintendo Announces Price Increases for Switch 2 Thanks to “Market Conditions” [Nintendo]

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Alongside their most recent fiscal results, Nintendo have announced price increases for the Switch, the Switch 2, and the Nintendo Switch Online service in Japan that kick in over the summer. Plus the Switch 2 will also see a price hike for the US, Canada and Europe in the fall. Starting September 1st, a Switch 2 will set you back $499.99 in the US (up $50) and €499.99 (up €30) in Europe. No price change for the UK has been confirmed yet, but you can expect it to be somewhere between the £30-£50 mark. The Switch 2 RRP in the UK is £395.99, so I would expect it to be somewhere in the region of £429.99-£449.99 - aligning it with the cost of previous and current game bundles such as the Mario Kart World and Pokémon Pokpopia sets.

While this is mentioned as being the result of “market conditions”, one doesn’t need to think too hard about those conditions might be. The ongoing chip shortages brought by AI hyperscalers is continuing to cause problems and will continue to do so for the rest of 2026 at least. After all Sony are in a similar position and as we’ll discuss in a moment they’re far more open as to why this is.

This is the first price increase for the console itself after rising the cost of peripherals in the US last year. I suspect Nintendo were able to hold this off until now thanks to a significant proportion of their original Switch 2 stock being manufactured and shipped in late 2025. So they manage to stave it off for over a year.

If you missed our deep-dive into why AI is causing price increases for RAM, GPUs, CPUs, SSDs and more, be sure to check it out. We received some great feedback on this one. In the meantime, if you’ve been on the fence about getting a Switch 2 hoping for a price drop, now’s the time to go all-in frankly. I wouldn’t expect any meaningful price drop until 2028 at the earliest.

Darkest Dungeon Devs Will Not Use Gen AI to Reproduce Narrator’s Voice [Reddit]

Using Generative AI for voice work is a hot topic, and one that I’ve discussed in the past with regards to Arc Raiders. One argument given is its a useful way to reproduce the voice of those that have sadly passed away. I’m sure James Earl Jones would have been thrilled his voice was used for all sorts of racist and sexist comments when Darth Vader dropped in Fortnite huh?

Well Darkest Dungeon developers Red Hook Studios have came out and stated that despite being offered the rights to reproduce the voice of Wayne June - who sadly died at age of 77 last year - they refused them and have no intention of doing so. Responding to a thread on r/darkestdungeon, the series creative director Chris Bourassa had this to say on the issue:

“In one of his last emails to me, Wayne gave us permission to train an AI on his voice, something he’d staunchly opposed prior to the end. We’d never asked to do it. I think he was trying to put the game/team/fans first - offer us a ‘way forward’. I declined, and we donated to his family anyway.

I would never, ever erode his incredible and timeless performances by teaching a machine to sound like him. His voice and delivery was *human, and I’m forever grateful I got to write for him.”

Y’know this makes me want to boot up Darkest Dungeon. Despite trying to start that game three times, I am still none the wiser at to how to play it. Maybe I should livestream it sometime and get support from the audience?

Sony’s Plans for AI ‘Empowerment’

Nintendo wasn’t the only Japanese gaming giant to announce fiscal results last week. The Sony Group dropped their financial results for the 2025/26 fiscal year, including a bunch of information related to the performance of various parts of their business. This led to some interesting tidbits on the Gaming & Network Services (G&NS) division, i.e. PlayStation. While things continue to perform fairly well, some areas are not exactly rosy, and AI is both the root cause and apparently, the solution?

RAM Prices Are Impacting PS5 Sales

Given the past year in which everything is becoming more expensive thanks to AI hogging the RAM - this is the third time we’ve brought this up in this issue alone - Sony was one of the first to up the price of all SKUs of their consoles. Now with this data we’re seeing the reality this is having on their overall sales figures.

While the overall FY results look pretty solid, Q4 saw significant downturn in sales and operating income. While operating income is down due to a significant write-down of the assessed worth of Bungie (which was bought in July 2022 for a frankly ridiculous $3.6 billion), the real concern is in sales. Sales of both software and hardware is largely flat year-on-year, but most notable is the depreciation of PS5 sales.

PS5 sales appear to be slowing down and appears to be causing a drift between like-for-like sales of the PS4 during the same period of its lifecycle. As noted in the slide above, this is a “decrease in sales of hardware due to a decrease in unit sales”, which as noted in the following slide is driven by the AI RAM crisis. In their 2026 forecast they expect an overall decrease in sales due to more first-party titles, but also that they “plan to base PS5 hardware sales in FY26 on the volume of memory we can procure at reasonable prices”. So in short, they hope to sell relative to the amount they have to manufacture, but are wary of sales numbers given they are tightly correlated with the going price of memory.

AI is the Future of PlayStation(?)

Meanwhile in the accompanying Corporate Strategy presentation, AI was very much at the heart of Sony’s longterm plans. They see it as an opportunity as a tool not to replace artists or creators (their words), but to ‘amplify’ human imagination. In fact they double down on this by insisting “memorably experiences will always be created by humans and enjoyed by people.”

It’s all very flowery language to say they expect (Generative) AI will help with value creation and growth by minimising costs for various parts of the business. So nothing new there, it’s the same thing we hear again and again, but what substance is there to this argument?

Now before I continue, it’s worth stressing that Sony AI - their dedicated R&D division - has been around for some time now and has done some really interesting work. A lot of is largely behind the scenes, though two examples I can point to is first the ‘Sophy’ AI in Gran Turismo 7 which I’ve written about before, but also we had Jaden Travnik from Sony AI present at our 2025 conference on their workflow and processes in training agents using reinforcement learning.

During the first breakdown of this AI strategy delivered by Sony Group President and CEO Hiroki Totoki, details of how this works in practice is unsurprisingly thin. Only that Sony Pictures have invested more than $50 million in AI in recent years, including tooling for production planning, content production, data analytics and 3D conversion. Plus Sony Music is pushing for industry-wide standards for labelling AI content as means to ensure transparency for customers - after all AI slop has rushed to infect platforms such as Spotify in recent years. Plus they discuss how they’re working on an initiative alongside Bandai Namco on how to use Generative AI in ways that grapple with the “lack of consistency and controllability” they have seen in previous years. It strikes me this is to address issues of style in specific domains, given Bandai Namco often works with Sony on adaptations of their manga and anime properties.

What I find interesting about the presentation up to this point is how… guarded it is. There’s both a push towards showcasing their efforts for innovation while also giving recognition to the frustration, distrust and apathy that people have towards Generative AI. At a time where Japan’s government is really pushing for companies to show they’re embracing AI - a point we discussed in a previous issue - it’s interesting the tightrope they walk in the messaging.

AI @ PlayStation

With the presentation passed over to Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino, we get into a lot more detail on where AI is being used in their game productions. A big point they hammer home is how (Generative) AI will help in “lowering barriers”, meaning they hope it will mean games come out faster. But also they acknowledge that it will also mean more content is coming to market. Nishino makes mention of how PlayStation as a platform must help “players find the right content in an increasingly crowded landscape”. So not only will PlayStation be using AI to get content out faster, but they need to then mitigate against the wave of slop they expect will hit their storefront - and they state they expect this means that people will double down more on established IP and franchises.

Again with this whiplash of messaging… it’s fascinating!

They get into the weeds on some of the AI tech they’ve been using, notably ‘Mockingbird’ which helps animate facial models based on motion capture data. A project that’s been used in work by Naughty Dog and San Diego Studio, with it being part of Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. Now this makes sense, because mapping mocap data to facial models is a fiddly and awkward job that requires animators to iron out all of the edge cases that crop up. It’s a repetitive and labour-intensive workload that lacks any creative spark for the most part. Sure when the mocap is aligned then additional work might be done to add more variety or personality to the performance, but the process of just getting it running error-free is not where the creativity lies. So it makes sense!

Plus some mention is given to the above slide where an AI tool has been built for the modelling of hair such that it is successfully animated. This addresses the issue that animating hair in games is really difficult, and making it look natural is a real challenge. Here the emphasis is to help accelerate the process of getting the hair to look and behaviour correctly in-engine. For me this is somewhere in the middle, in that I’m curious how much flexibility or control an artist has in making the hair they want and then getting that quality in the animation. After all, I’m not a character artist, I can’t speak to that experience, but again we’re dealing with complex processes to fix technical issues that emerge in the final product.

GT Sophy also gets a bit of lip service, but largely to hammer home how their AI teams are working with studios across PlayStation Studios to support NPC development. Plus how AI curation and support on the store has enabled for ongoing incremental revenue.

The last thing they mention is how their AI-upscaling tech built into the PS5 Pro - PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) - is helping deliver on high-quality visuals both for in-house titles such as recently-released Saros by Housemarque, but also third-party titles such as Resident Evil: Requiem. This is something they’re highly committed to and keen to move forward.

Does this AI Initiative Stack Up?

Having read/listened to all of this, what do I make of it all? Does this make sense? Are they heading in the right direction? For one thing I do feel what they delivered at least had some substance, and not like that god-awful EA presentation from 2024 which was not only incredibly vague and vapid but also sported a number of tech demos that I genuinely believe were fake. There was nothing about it that struck me that Andrew Wilson and the rest of the executive pack had any clear idea of what they were going to utilise Generative AI for beyond placating investors. Despite the very well and fantastic work that EA’s studios and their R&D division SEED do in deploying cutting-edge AI into their worflows.

The thing that really helps support Sony’s case is that they actually have something of substance to show, and that it has been deployed already in commercial projects. We knew about things like GT Sophy and PSSR of course, and I had heard about what is now called Mockingbird a while back, but it’s good that they show things that deliver material value for them. That said, the evidence of technology being adopted that they’re willing to share and doesn’t upset the wider world is still rather thin, and I think it’s important in this modern climate to continue to engage with users about what this tech does and make a case for why it helps.

Considering a lot of the conversation of late about how Sony is doubling-down on first-party titles solely on PlayStation and cementing their existing position in the market, the AI strategy seems very much to reinforce that. First-party studios getting access to tools to support high-quality, high-fidelity graphics and gameplay. Hair systems and mocap alignment tools very much fall into the bid-budget AAA work that Sony is known for, and then having that all get a boost courtesy of PSSR. Then of course having curation systems that point you towards ‘trusted’ IP and franchises. It’s all about delivering the best for PlayStation and keeping you on PlayStation.

But overall, the thing that I really took away from this was the level of caution being explored courtesy of the language used. Just a few weeks ago we had Microsoft state they’re rethinking how AI is deployed at Xbox (then filled their management with AI product people, so y’know, take that for what it’s worth), and now Sony dancing around the issue. I’ve been quite vocal about how tone-deaf some companies have been on these issues in the past (see EA and Krafton) so it’s interesting to see this slightly more reserved use of language to express their enthusiasm. Especially when you consider most of these companies make these gross faux-pas because they’re presenting to investors, and are happy to say stuff that will have be scrutinised by every consumer-aligned publication out there (including this one).

I guess when AI is the reason PlayStation is struggling to shift hardware, you don’t want to run the risk of it also putting people off buying the software too!

Wrapping Up

One last thing, I saw a trailer dropped for the Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, with a proposed launch date of sometime around this summer. Fireteam Elite is a PVE title where you squad up and face off against hordes of xenomorphs to reach your objective.

While far from perfect, the first game back in 2021 was rather limited, but still a good blast to play with a couple friends. Well worth a discount purchase to burn through over a weekend. But it felt like it needed a bit more work to elevate to something more substantial. Fingers crossed Cold Iron Studios and Daybreak can deliver!

Okay, I’m off to enjoy get some chill time and rest. We’ll be back later in the month with a new video, hopefully some 2026 conference announcements, and a new project we’re excited to share with you over the summer!

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Including industry news, innovative research, emerging trends, and our own exclusive editorial and reporting.

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Greetings one and all and welcome to this week’s edition of . For this week we’re digging into the world of procedural content generation with the release of Next Level by prominent games researcher Mike Cook. But before we do that we have more conference talks, and a round-up of last weeks news!

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More AI and Games Conference 2025

A catchup on the latest talks dropping from last years conference, courtesy of our presenting partners Xsolla!

Design for Everything in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Vadim Petrov, Warhorse Studios

Winner of the 2026 BAFTA for best narrative, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is home to a highly complex simulation of non-player characters living their lives in 15th century Bohemia. In the first of two talks on the subject from developers Warhorse Studios, we dig into the challenges of building complex sensory systems for characters expected to react within complex agent simulations.

No API, No Problem: Deploying Tiny, Fast, Fine-Tuned Models Offline
Keith Lia, Kristian Dam Pedersen, Raw Power Labs

The second talk for this week comes courtesy of our associate sponsors Raw Power Labs. Deploying small large language models has become a huge talking point in the industry, but building something bespoke for a particular problem and then deploying it locally on-device is a huge challenge. Keith and Kristian dig into how to build these systems and the challenges faced in fine-tuning, finding appropriate datasets, and working around expected performance budgets.

AI (and Games) in the News

A round-up of some of the headlines from the past week that caught my attention:

Xbox Staffs Up From CoreAI Team and Ditches Copilot in Refresh [CNBC]

Our main story last issue was the internal memo sent around Xbox by new head Asha Sharma that read more like an effort to score brownie points from low hanging fruit than any meaningful assessment of the direction of the platform. As I pointed out at the time, right now the sentiment towards Xbox is poor, and whatever steps taken to mitigate the impact AI will have on that needs to be taken carefully - though most of their issues stem from the parent company developing tools and services nobody wants.

Well this led to two stories this week that sort of exist on either side of the coin. First we have [via Kotaku] that Microsoft Copilot for Xbox is being discontinued. I’ve talked about this in previous issues, but the idea was for it to be a companion app you can engage with to help you with how to configure and play your games. You may have missed it that the PC version of Xbox Copilot launched last year - nobody cared. Now they’re ceasing development on the mobile and console versions. The only surprise here is that it’s been discontinued so soon. It was a tool that never struck me as meaningful for players, and existed largely to regurgitate information available within Xbox API’s, or simply cannibalise the hard work of the audience behind these games for their own gain. Scraping information from guides, reddit posts, news articles and much more besides to deliver it in a sub-optimal fashion.

So hey, another low-hanging fruit grabbed by Sharma and her team, and it’s the team that’s the other story. As reported from an internal memo later shared by CNBC Sharma is stacking the deck with four members of the leadership team from Microsoft’s CoreAI among others. With four promotions from within Xbox and two resignations.

Is this a power grab for the Xbox division from CoreAI? This reads to me from the top that we’re going to see a pivot in the design, growth and delivery of management of Xbox by trying to treat the games pipeline like AI product development. You have decades of experience entering a sector with zero experience of game development, like Sharma herself.

Once again, lots of changes, yet right now nothing that convinces me this is going to prove effective.

Blender Backpedal on Anthropic Partnership, But Keep The Money [Blender]

Last week we highlighted that Blender were receiving a lot of flack from users after they opted to have AI company Anthropic join the Blender Development Fund as a corporate donor. This suggests all sorts of sketchy things given an AI company is investing in a 3D modelling tool - a great opportunity to get insight into training and a potential avenue to explore their own work in the space. Unsurprisingly - and it’s never a surprise, let’s be honest - users of Blender were far from amused. In a statement put out at the weekend Blender have announced that they were very surprised by this (uh-huh), and that they need to do more to address how AI intersects with the organisation.

They’re keeping the money though. It’s now a one-off donation. Yeah, I suspect little has changed behind the scenes.

Warhorse Studios Reddit AMA Comes Under Fire Over AI Policies [Reddit]

In a recent issue we reported on the how the English voiceover director for Warhorse Studios, Max Hejtmánek, was reportedly let go as it was made clear to him his role was now redundant in an age of Generative AI. Well, the studio’s discipline leads took to r/gaming for an AMA on Reddit and they got appropriately rinsed for this decision. The questions about AI disrupting the studios processes began to derail the QnA as people asked whether their “Gemini premium subscription will translate the next game”, or if they planned to replace the creative directors with AI. It concluded with the following statement from the studio:

”We hear you and your concerns. Hopefully this explains the situation a bit. We do not see AI as a substitute for human work, and we are currently looking to expand the company, including our translation team. Some team members find AI useful during early stages of production. However, we do not use AI-generated content in the final game and we have no plans to change this in the future. Thanks for being with us today”

This rather flies in the face of the situation we raised from the end of March. No clarification was given to the firing of Hejtmánek, and I doubt anyone was convinced by their responses.

Roblox’s New GenAI Stack is Stadia and DLSS5 Smashed Into One [Roblox]

Last week Roblox showcased the latest bit of Generative AI work coming out of their research labs. After all as we’ve reported before Roblix does A LOT of stuff in and around the AI space. But this one well… it would be a fresh new layer of horrid were it not for the fact that Stadia suggested the same bad idea years ago.

As reported in an blog post by Senior VP of Engineering Anupam Singh, ‘Roblox Reality’ is a hybrid architecture where a video generation layer attempts to re-render the existing game by gathering geometric data from the game engine and then using that to re-render the existing game. Allowing for game developers to access “unprecedented visual fidelity and motion on top of traditional persistence and structure, without increasing development costs”.

Now they say it doesn’t increase development costs, but then later in the same post acknowledge that maintaining this architecture - which is rendering video directly to the player from the ‘video world model’ that they’ve built “is currently cost-intensive, and achieving high-fidelity, real-time performance, such as 2K resolution at 60 Hz, remains a development challenge.” Never mind the fact that it wouldn’t guarantee visual coherence over long play sessions or in multiplayer.

I mean, look… wearing my AI hat this is an impressive bit of work. But for a game it’s a rather pointless exercise, unless your Roblox. In theory this could lead to a future where Roblox games are streamed as a video rather than as games running on the platform - thus fully transitioning Roblox into a cloud distribution system. But also it means once again that developers have less control of the visuals of the game given it’s now in control of an AI model that frankly looks awful. Bear in mind in the video above, the top left is what it actually looks like in Roblox, whereas the bottom-left is what their AI is achieving - the bottom-right is a visualisation of what they hope it will look like. Either way, it’s rough.

And yeah, Stadia already pitched AI rendering for an online game platform in what… 2019? Back then they were suggesting style transfer via deep learning to change how your game rendered, and then nothing came of it because, well… Stadia.

Well, at least it isn’t DLSS5. Oh yeah…

RE: Requiem Director Dumps on That DLSS5 Demo [Eurogamer]

In a sitdown interview with Matt Wales at Eurogamer, Resident Evil: Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi was asked about the debacle courtesy of the DLSS5 demo that portrayed Requiem’s protagonist Grace Ashcroft as an Instagram model. While Nakanishi-san avoided commenting specifically on their partnership with Nvidia, or the fact they apparently didn’t know it was going to happen, he did comment on the audience reaction, and how they’re rather vindicated in their original design:

"the fact a lot of players commented they really liked the original design of Grace and didn't want to see it changed was a positive... It meant we got the design right [and] points to the fact that Grace quickly established herself as a fan favourite, that people had such strong opinions on her design."

Something something, artistic direction is key, something something…

Unity Announces Their New AI Features, Again [Unity]

For the third time in as many years, Unity has announced their new suite of AI assistance features. Advertised around the principles of ‘Ask’, ‘Agent’ and ‘Plan’: ask for help with the built-in assistant, have an agent create assets, make changes or update settings, or use an agent to generate plans to support you in your game development process. Long story short, it’s a a new collection of Generative AI models designed to support users in building their games.

This is a paid-for service, with 1000 monthly credits for Unity AI agents provided as part of a Unity Personal license, you can double that to 2,000 if you’re happy to pay the eye-watering $210 per-month pro license. It was announced on Monday with a promotional video that shows absolutely none of it in action.

We’ve had Unity drop new features like this on the regular only to abandon or reshape them. This is the latest version essentially of what was Unity Muse, first launched in 2023 and then bundled into Unity AI in 2025. Though now more of an effort has been made to integrate it into the engine as a package (it doesn’t come pre-installed as part of Unity 2026).

Unsurprisingly the AI dude-bro fans on LinkedIn and Twitter are excited about finally executing on “that game idea” they’ve had for several years and somehow are unable to execute. Meanwhile the regular Unity game developers out there have been far from thrilled. If you thought Steam had a slop problem before, oh boy… lets give it six months.

NEXT LEVEL: Making Games that Make Themselves

Mike Cook / Bloomsbury / Out May 7th

In 2026, if I were to say we’re going to review a book about ‘generative design in video games’, your first instinct would be to think Generative AI. It has become such a dominating conversation in the industry, and of course this here publication, that it’s easy to forget that the vast majority of game development is simply uninterested. For many designers when we are thinking about generative design, it’s of algorithm design, and of how specific formalisms and phenomena can be used to translate ideas into gameplay. Procedural content generation, of making things that make other things, continues to be a prominent and powerful aspect in the game development community. Most notably in hobbyist and indie spaces as people build everything from eclectic demos to fully-fledged commercial titles. Or in the case of many of the games in this book such as Spelunky, Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, and Caves of Qud: an eclectic demo that became a genre-defining breakout success.

‘Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves’ is a new book by Dr Mike Cook - a senior lecturer in computer science at King’s College London, and researcher in procedural content generation and automated game design. Published by Bloomsbury’s pop-science Sigma imprint, the book aims to provide an accessible overview to procedural generation as a concept, and how it has been employed in a variety of games in the industry.

Now of course it’s important I contextualise this review by stating I have known Mike both professionally and personally for over 10 years, and we have collaborated on a variety of projects over the years. But this book took me by surprise. I didn’t know he was working on it and was excited to discover it was launching but a month before another friend of the newsletter George Osborn releases ‘Power Play’, his book on politics within video games. It’s a good time to read my friends books it seems!

Cook sets out to take on a rather ambitious task: to conceptualise and define procedural design for the newcomer, but without an emphasis on mathematics and code. Sure, there’s a bit of math in there given there’s a need to discuss how randomness in generative design is achieved, corralled, and to an extent controlled. But the ambition is to provide a more accessible entry point for people without a background in computer science and game design, and highlight how many of the themes and concepts that emerge in the field are cyclical, reinforcing one another as new algorithms and design philosophies take shape.

For around 70% of the book, the focus is on introducing ideas, and reinforcing them with real world context - something that resonates strongly with my work for sure. Cook introduces ideas such as the random sampling of numbers and events and how this translates into video game design. How dice and tarot decks provide structure and form to randomness, and how these ideas translate into the galaxy generation of Elite or the dungeon generation of Rogue. But far from sticking to the PCG heyday of the 1980s, it doubles down on how generative grammars and template-driven algorithms are the crux of the level construction of indie-darling Spelunky. That game that really kickstarted the modern roguelike trend in contemporary indie gaming.

It’s a difficult needle to thread as the book weaves from die-rolls to Perlin noise in Minecraft and fully-fledged randomly-generated simulations in the likes of Dwarf Fortress. But with a combination of grounded explanations and Cook’s self-effacing sense of humour helps maintain the momentum as you get a crash course in generative design in its many shapes. It’s also been a staunch reminder to me that I had half of these games in the backlog for my Artifacts video series, and I really need to get around to making them at some point…

The closing chapters of the book reflect a little more on the present and the future of the field. After all, a book on generative design in 2026 that makes no mention of Generative AI might seem strange. But much like my work in exploring how AI is typically used in games, Generative AI once again provides little of substance. Cook does a good job of breaking down that while many Generative AI advocates insist LLMs and image generators are the solution to many of the challenges faced in game design, in truth they rob creators of the very structured randomness that all of the previous games explored in the book benefitted from. An unwieldy solution to a series of problems more effectively achieved through a concise and reliable set of algorithms. This is followed with a bit more of an insight into the academic world of PCG and how research has evolved in the space in the past 20 years into something that has formed its own community. As a former researcher who published at these events, and even helped run a couple of them, it was a nice to be able to revisit many of these ideas in a publication that hopefully receive a lot more attention in the public eye than the research papers it references.

As it came to a close it sits as both an interesting overview of many of the techniques used in PCG in games, but also gives insight into Cook as an educator. I have come to know the author more for his research - and late night chats at conferences - rather than as a teacher. So to see him take charge to try and explain the world of generative design from first principles for newcomers was rather exciting. The book also provides references to key texts, source code, research papers, developer talks and more to help give you further avenues to explore once you’ve reached the end. Selfishly I’ll admit that I was also taking notes on how to pull this off, given I’ve had aspirations to write my own book having penned the 60+ page Brief History of Game AI for the upcoming Goal State: Game AI 101 course. One day… gotta finish the course first.

As with any subject matter of this depth, the end of the book is but the start of the journey. If you’ve ever wondered how procedural generation works in games but lack the background to understand much of its underpinnings, Next Level is a great introduction to a subject matter with no clear throughline. But even for the more seasoned of us, it casts a fun path through the space where you’re still bound to learn something new.

Next Level is available from Bloomsbury, Amazon, and other book retailers from May 7th. A review copy was provided courtesy of Bloomsbury.

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Alien: Rogue Incursion is the first VR game based on the popular horror franchise. First released as a VR title for Steam and PSVR2 in December 2024, followed by the Meta Quest 3 in February 2025 and a non-VR ‘Evolved’ Edition on PC, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series S and X in the following September. Given it’s one of the latest examples of the xenomorph in games, it’s a great opportunity to discuss an interesting technical challenge: how to get non-player characters pathfinding across multiple surfaces.

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The Perfect Organism

Alien: Rogue Incursion has players take control of Zula Hendricks in a claustrophobic first person shooter where you have to balance your resources and use all the tools at your disposal in order to survive the latest encounter with the perfect organism.

Trapped in the Castor’s Cradle research facility on LV-354 owned by Gemini Exoplanet Solutions, Hendricks fights to uncover the truth of what the corporation has really been up to as she arrives at the now empty and damaged facility, and yeah... you can see where this is going. Lots of xenomorphs, lots of close encounters, and hugging that motion tracker very tightly.

Developed over a period of around 3 years, the goal of the Rogue Incursion was to deliver the tension of the alien franchise but within the VR viewport. Players should feel that danger lurks not just around every corner, but in the vents be it in the walls, or the ceilings. To maximise the VR experience, the goal was to have xenomorphs be able to spawn anywhere in the game world, and then use the environment to maximum effect: sneaking up on the player, and catching you off guard and ensuring no two playthroughs felt the same.

A big part of this is the navigation system, whereby the aliens climb along the walls, along the ceilings and through the vents to sneak up on the player. But also that they can jump down onto nearby geometry, and use different surfaces to close the distance as swiftly as possible. It’s the one thing Alien: Isolation did not do given it wasn’t part of the original movies’ lore, and when we have seen it in other Alien games, ranging from Aliens: Fireteam Elite to Aliens vs Predator (1999) and... Aliens vs Predator (2010), it’s often been far less complex in its implementation.

But what made this all the more interesting, was that the game was originally for VR headsets. While we’ve seen significant gains in performance over in the past 10 years in the likes of the Quest, there are still significant hardware constraints. VR games carry a heavier graphical overhead given the need to render out two separate images at higher frame rates than usual, and these devices still have limitations in areas such as memory bandwidth. Sure this is mitigated if you’re playing the game on Steam or PSVR2 given your PC or console is running the game, but those limitations still exist - and are exacerbated when you then play on a Meta Quest 3 which is a completely standalone device. This meant not just that there is a limit to the number of aliens the game can have actively fighting the player at once, but also a need to ensure ensuring that pathfinding is fast, and efficient.

Walking on Walls

Now you might be thinking “Tommy, what’s so special about xenos crawling on the walls? Surely you just use a navigation mesh?”. First of all, brownie points for you, what a clever cookie and yes, nav meshes are the standard for movement in 3D game engines, given they allow us to take the irregular geometry formed from 3D game worlds and compile it down to a 2D data structure which we can pathfind on. But, there are a lot of situations where navmeshes simply don’t work well, if at all. They’re not great for objects that move through volumes of 3D space, hence the Horizon games use custom pathfinding tools for enemies that fly or swim. Plus navmeshes often struggle with pathfinding on moving surfaces - which we talked about in part 3 of our series on the AI of Sea of Thieves.

But given that walls and other surfaces don’t move, and we simply move along those surfaces, surely what we could do instead is simply slap nav-meshes on all of the surfaces in the game world? And then use links between them so that an alien can shift from one surface to the other?

Well, as explained by Eugene Elkin and Curt Perry in their talk at 2025 GDC Game AI Summit, that’s exactly what Survios did. But it had a lot of problems. For one it required rewriting a lot of Recast - which is the navigation mesh library developed by Mikko Mononen that has been integrated into Unreal Engine - because navmeshes as a concept are designed to work on floors only. But on top of this it was limited in the ways in which an alien would traverse from one surface to another. It worked great when you put it in an empty square room, but as soon as level designers wanted to use more complex shapes for walls and ceilings, or filled the room with props and clutter then available space, as well as how to connect between traversable locations, became increasingly limited and after six months of having one developer work on this, it was abandoned for a different approach.

But it wasn’t just the issue of building the navigation mesh, it was also the resulting paths that the aliens were moving on. The dev team wanted the xenomorphs to move in ways that felt unpredictable, playful even. Sort of like a giant extra-terrestrial cat from hell, and the team worked on a pre-vis animatic to help visualise what they wanted the aliens to do, rather than what they did. This highlighted that the default navmesh actor in Unreal would prove insufficient, given it will aim to take the optimal route to the player. You could try and attach a navmesh modifier to the player, meaning the costs might shift, but that won’t guarantee the aliens prioritise using the ceiling, or sneaking through an air vent that leads to a more engaging experience. It really needed a different approach.

So the solution was to write a completely custom graph-based navigation system that worked alongside the navigation mesh on the floor. Each graph point dictates where an alien could crawl that would take it off of the floor, and then the paths they could take while on that surface, be it the ceiling or a wall. But these graph layouts required significant work on by level designers to respect each area so that the aliens are only attempting to crawl on specific surfaces that make sense for gameplay, but also having to work with the AI programmers to build custom waypoint types so aliens could interact with gameplay features and objects like railings and vents, but also custom jump points ranging from precise positioning to allowing NPCs to land within a radius of a geometric feature.

The next step was to figure out how to navigate, and address all the weird edge cases that would arise as they move between rooms, jump onto and off of the navmesh, and even get into situations where they’re pathing near other aliens. Running the A* search algorithm the idea was for aliens to figure out when they spawn their closest navigation position, be it on the navmesh or in the graph network, and then search for a target location that is generated either on the navmesh near the player, or is at a position close enough on the graph network it can then jump from that surface and attack you.

As a reminder for anyone not familiar, with A* we evaluate each node in the graph based on the equation f(s) = g(s) + h(s) where:

• g(s): The cost to reach the node along the currently built path

• h(s): The estimated distance to the goal from that point - which in this case would just be a straight line from the location to the player.

This is a fairly rudimentary AI algorithm, and anyone who knows their AI basics will tell you that A* is designed to always find the cheapest path - and typically when we say cheapest in pathfinding, we mean the shortest. However, what the devs did for Rogue Incursion, was allow for the paths to dynamically change their cost values so that the cheapest wasn’t guaranteed to be the shortest, but it would ensure that it would at least be interesting.

So after establishing a bunch of possible pairs of start and end points, the game runs a worker thread in the background that evaluates them against a bunch of criteria. First it checks whether they’re valid, because the alien might have trouble reaching the start point on the navmesh. But it also checks whether existing xenos were using that part of that graph network in their own paths, and it would make it more expensive so as to dissuade another alien following it and going the exact same route.

Aliens are prioritised so those that are already moving or close to the player always guaranteed valid paths while those farther away wait for something to free up for them to use. Plus there’s an effort to mess with the cost values to make them diversify their strategies. Level designers set the cost of parts of the graph network as they built it, and often encourage aliens to traverse on the walls or the ceiling by making it cheaper than simply moving across the floor. Meanwhile there’s a custom modifier that kicks in that makes paths that are occluded from the players view less expensive, hence it encourages the aliens to flank and move around in paths that are harder for the player to spot.

This then still has to handle a variety of edge cases, like aliens accidentally bunching up during execution, or reacting to the player moving or doing something like closing a door. If xenos get bunched up they run a deconflict algorithm where often they’ll either try to jump onto a nearby wall or ceiling, or even back off briefly to let their ally push up on you. Meanwhile repathing occurs at any time the player does something that blocks them, or if your movement leads to their target destination diverging from the players location by more than one meter. All of this combined with a bunch of smoothing behaviours for the movement, and efforts to maximise the approach vectors as they attack the player, helps ensure that the aliens can approach from a variety of angles, keep you on edge, and can result in you being caught off guard.

Designing Encounters

So with the aliens able to move around the world, the next step is to handle encounter design. Bearing in mind the game was built to run on the Meta Quest 3, and with each alien running a combination of a Behaviour Tree and Finite State Machines for its logic, there’s a risk that what little CPU resource available per frame would get choked up by having too many NPCs active at once. But conversely, if there’s only one single active alien in the game, then we’re back playing Alien: Isolation - only I now have lots of guns.

So there’s a trade-off built into the game whereby a director system manages the active xenomorphs in the map, and how they respond to the player, and ensures they keep their overall CPU costs lower. One of the biggest tricks that helps with this process is the tension that players feel courtesy of the motion tracker, it’s very rare to see several aliens on the motion tracker, while they’re also standing in front of you. In truth most of the time when you see an alien on the motion tracker, it isn’t actually in the level as a fully-fledged xenomorph. Rather it’s what is known as a Sim Entity, a lightweight invisible NPC that floats around the map, and when it decides to start hunting you - either because it heard a noise, it enters your area of proximity, or through scripted events, it then reaches a spawn point in the map - typically somewhere in a vent - where it then turns into a fully-fledged Behaviour-Tree executing xenomorph.

Rather than manually place aliens throughout the game, designers place what are known as Sim Regions, which are places from which a number of Sim Entities can spawn. These regions dictate the number of entities it can spawn, how long between spawning them, and their range. Since there are no loading screens in Rogue Incursion, the game is always paying attention to where you are and starts turning these Sim Regions on and off as you walk through the various buildings of Castor’s Cradle. These then are customised by designers who can change their configuration at various times throughout the game to dictate the pacing. Hence you can go through an area and its desolate early on only for it to be teeming with xenomorphs towards the end of the game. There’s even a condition for the number of resurrections allowed for Sim Region. Hence if you wipe out all of the aliens spawning out of it, it can still keep throwing more at you should the current story beat of the campaign require it.

Closing

Alien: Rogue Incursion touches on many of the same ideas we’ve seen in other alien games, and while constrained by the technical budget available to it, it still creates something unique that feels all the more tense when played through a VR headset. Though all that said it I kind of like having a bit of separation between me and a facehugger as it tries to get intimate with my airways.

References

• “Simulating the Perfect Organism in Alien: Rogue Incursion”, Eugene Elkin and Curtis Perry, GDC Game AI Summit 2025.

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Including industry news, innovative research, emerging trends, and our own exclusive editorial and reporting.

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Greetings all and welcome to this week’s edition of . This week we’re covering some headlines, some new talks and case studies from us, and chat a little bit about the latest Xbox reset (or reset of the reset?) and what it might mean.

Follow AI and Games on: BlueSky | YouTube | LinkedIn | TikTok

Announcements

A couple of quick announcements coming your way.

New Case Study: Alien - Rogue Incursion

Live now on YouTube, and coming to the website tomorrow is our latest case study. To celebrate Alien Day - April 26th given the perfect organism is discovered on the planet LV426 - I dig into the pathfinding and encounter design systems in Servio’s Alien: Rogue Incursion - the first VR title based on the popular sci-fi franchise.

AI and Games Conference 2025 Talks

Plus your weekly dose of new talks going live on YouTube from the 2025 AI and Games Conference! Once again with thanks to our recording partners Xsolla!

From Cloud to Edge: Optimizing Small Language Models for Game Applications on AWS
Patrick Palmer & Andrei Muratov / Amazon Web Services

Patrick and Andrei showcase how developers can leverage AWS to prepare small language models that run directly on phones and desktop computers. Demonstrating practical approaches for fine-tuning open-source models for specific gaming needs, enhancing them through distillation techniques, and optimizing for edge performance.

Use Cases and Practical Methodologies for Reinforcement Learning for Learning at Agents at Scale
Huntting Buckley, Duncan Davis & Kyra Wulffert / Databricks

As games continue to build diverse and dynamic gaming experiences, there is constant pressure to be able to iterate quickly, adjust NPC behavior and create more and more dynamic content. The team from Databricks, including Huntting Buckley (Databricks Global Games Strategy Leader), Duncan Davis (Lead Solutions Architect for Games) and Kyra Wulffert (ML Specialist) dive deeper into these topics.

AI (and Games) in the News

A quick round up of some of the headlines from the past week or so. We have not one but two headlines related to AI consuming compute hardware again, so I’d recommend checking out last week’s overview on the subject if you fancy a primer!

• The Steam Controller Won’t Be Delayed Due to AI [Kotaku]

  In a move that isn’t all that unexpected, Valve are moving forward with releasing the Steam Controller next week after delaying their 2026 hardware line-up. The big reason? Well, there’s no RAM in the controllers…

  • I think that’s going to be my new reaction when I see the price of things: “What’s it made out of? RAM???”
    

• Your CPUs Aren’t Safe from the AI Goldursh [Tom’s Hardware]
  Another not entirely unexpected headline courtesy of Intel that having gouged the market of RAM, SSDs and GPUs, the AI industry is going to go after CPUs next. The reason for this is that while much of Machine Learning and Generative AI training is conducted on GPUs with high-bandwidth memory, the deployment of the trained models later on can transition towards CPUs - and notably CPUs with AI compute cores in them, that Intel now specialise in! A big reason for this is also the surge in interest (and promotion) of Agentic AI: systems where you glue multiple AI agents together to work on larger and more complex tasks.
  

• Blender Takes Money From Anthropic, Chaos Ensues [Blender]
  A story that kicked up a lot of online furore just last night, 3D modelling company Blender announced a partnership with AI company Anthropic - largely known for the Claude LLM and Claude Code tools. In the announcement Blender declared Anthropic are signing up to a be a corporate patron of the Blender Development Fund. There was little to be said in the official announcement, but people were kick to point out Anthropic no doubt want to pump money into Blender in pursuit of their tools, their audience, and their market so they have a new industry to pilfer. Given Blender has largely build a positive reputation among game developers over the past decade as a champion of free and open-source 3D creation tools, this has unsurprisingly pissed off a large proportion of their userbase.
  
  As of this morning, the press release has been updated to include the following: “This announcement is causing a lot of feedback. We are actively evaluating it. Reach out to Blender Foundation directly if you wish to share more feedback.”
  
  Since they didn’t do the write thing and point out how to contact the Blender Foundation, you can do so at foundation (at) blender (dot) org

Does Xbox’s New Vision Align with Microsoft’s AI Ambition?

The story that certainly caught the most attention last week was the new Xbox head Asha Sharma’s message sent to Xbox employees. This memo sought to establish the philosophy that Sharma and president of game content Matt Booty will bring to their tenure as leaders of Xbox. The memo, entitled “We Are Xbox” was bound to be leaked within minutes of it being published - and true enough it popped up on the Verge not long after. Though it seems the Xbox team figured they should just publish it on the Xbox Wire and aim for some easy wins.

It’s a very safe announcement that lacks in any major commitments, but with enough platitudes and immediate changes to low-hanging fruit that seem designed to garner favour with the online masses. This includes:

• Renaming Microsoft Gaming back to Xbox: A change of business stationary that ultimately means very little. After all, it’s not like people were lining up to buy the ‘Microsoft Gaming Series X’ were they? The PlayStation division seems quite happy to continue to be called Sony Interactive Entertainment.
  

• Game Pass Pricing Changes: The Microsoft Game Pass Ultimate subscription has dropped from $29.99 a month to $22.99: that’s a drop from £22.99 to £16.99 for us over here paying with the King’s pounds. Now for £2 more a month than what you were paying six months ago, you now get the pleasure of the Game Pass library without the joys of day-one access to Call of Duty. After the rather lacklustre Black Ops VII it seems an extra £2 a month to avoid it is reasonable.

The rest of the piece is very much about transforming Xbox as they seek to re-establish what the publisher is under new leadership with some strategy areas focussed on new hardware (the upcoming Project Helix), expanding into China, focussing on live-service products (ugh), and ‘fixing the fundamentals’ to restore trust with Xbox players.

We Are Xbox - Again

Now this has certainly caught my attention because you might recall that back in January I had ‘The Death of Xbox’ as #9 on my 10 predictions for the year. To quote the issue from January 14th:

By the end of 2026 there will still be Xbox consoles on the shelves - assuming stores keep selling them. But unless efforts are made to improve the public image of Xbox and the value it is bringing to players as a platform, the console space they operate in will be largely a net loss, and the brand would be best served as a games publisher on PC, PlayStation and Nintendo.

I argued that Microsoft’s aggressive push to become an AI company that sells tools nobody wants to buy has proven to be a significant detriment to the handful of things it does right. Xbox players - myself included - have little to be happy about, as studios are shutdown, games are cancelled, and prices increase as Microsoft reportedly aimed for a 30% profit margin - a rather unrealistic target for a games publisher and platform holder.

As we’ll get into momentarily I’m incredibly cynical about all of this, but credit to Sharma and the rest of the leadership in showcasing there’s an effort to do something. As I said in January, something needed to be done, and this seems like a step forward in that regard. Sure, it reads like it was written in Copilot, but it speaks to a collective understanding of a malaise that sits across Xbox as a brand that needs to be addressed.

Sharma addresses this directly in one of the opening lines of the memo, stating that “players are frustrated” at the state of Xbox and the games industry as a whole. That the old model pushed by Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond was no longer working, so they need to move in a different direction.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before

All that said, it’s interesting how you can repackage the same ideas again and again under a corporate reset. Sharma is treating this like taking on a position in government. I mean, she openly says that at the time of the memo she was 62 days into the job. Expect a big PR stunt in a months time when we hit the 100 day mark.

But then half of it is stuff Phil Spencer was pushing for: engaging with 3rd party developers (notably those in Asia), strengthening the portfolio of franchises, reinforcing the slate of titles coming to the platform, cloud play, Game Pass, supporting ongoing live-service games like Sea of Thieves, Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76 and Minecraft (yeah, Minecraft is a live-service game).

In fact right now the things that are going well for Xbox are largely down to a lot of initiatives that Spencer and his team fought for years to put in place. The Xbox line-up has been consistently strong over the past two years:

• 2024: Senua’s Saga, Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Ara: History Untold, Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred

• 2025: Outer Worlds 2, Ninja Gaiden 4, DOOM: The Dark Ages, South of Midnight, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, Gears of War: Reloaded, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.

Meanwhile 2026 is shaping up well with Kiln out now, Forza Horizon 6 next month, plus Halo: Campaign Evolved, Fable, Minecraft Dungeons II and Gears of War: E-Day planned for the rest of year. Though many projects have subsequently been cancelled given Spencer’s push to purchase Activision. He’s certainly made many of his own mistakes over the years.

Killing the ‘Everything is an Xbox’ PR push will help to consolidate the brand a little. But I find this press release interesting in that while I stifle a yawn it also reads like two separate stories published in the same post.

A Reset to Business As Usual?

So one of the lines that stuck out to me was as follows:

Along the way, we will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing, and AI, and share more as we learn and decide.

Now of course, yes, AI is mentioned here. But it’s just one part of a larger meta-narrative going on, and how that fits into the broader eco-system of Microsoft as a whole. After all the real emphasis of where Xbox is going can be seen just a few paragraphs earlier - emphasis mine:

Xbox will be built to be affordable, personal, and open. We will offer flexible pricing so it’s easy to get started and keep playing. The experience will adapt to you, letting you customize how you play, helping you find what you’ll love, and connecting you with the right people. And we will be open to all creators, from individuals to the largest studios, giving anyone the tools to reach a global audience and keep their games growing over time.

Our new north star will be daily active players.

Now when you take the latter in context of the former, the math doesn’t really add up. If we’re keen on maximising and stabilising daily active players, then exclusivity makes little sense - plus they’re still trying to justify that Activision Blizzard purchase after all. Sure, windows might shift, but then having delayed releases on non-Xbox platforms may prove more harmful than otherwise. In the past year Xbox’s titles have proven quite successful on PlayStation, but then Sony are returning to exclusivity given their PC ports don’t really sell that well - admittedly how much of that is down to the fact that by the time they hit the market, they’re often 2-3 years late? If you’re interested in maximising DAU, going back to hardcore console exclusivity is simply implausible.

Besides, I sincerely doubt the next Call of Duty will be removed from or released later to PlayStation. Not just because it’s the game’s largest market, but it runs risk of exacerbating the opposition against Game Pass that the FTC argued just a couple years prior.

Then of course everything about maximising experience, given players options, and opening up to creators very much plays into the entire AI playbook that Microsoft have been playing from. At present, we’ve yet to see much of what Microsoft hopes to bring to Xbox with AI. At best there’s been the Gaming Copilot announcement? Right what little dialogue there’s been about AI impacting Xbox has largely came from elsewhere in the company as they make a lot of noise about things like Microsoft Muse - with CEO Satya Nadella highlighting how little he understands video games and the work his own researchers do by proclaiming it was the future of game development (sigh, no…). Not to mention that of course their Xbox hardware is now significantly more expensive than it was at launch because the parent company is in amongst the data centre hardcore that’s causing prices to increase.

Right now it seems like the easy wins Sharma can achieve in AI is just to keep quiet for a while. But then it’s her bosses that are the bigger problem with player’s perceptions of how AI will affect Xbox right now. Though I doubt she can send the big boss-man a Teams message asking him to pipe down…

Pushing all of my tired cynicism aside, I do hope for the best. I want Xbox to succeed and the more competition we have in the sector the better off the industry is, and I hope Booty and Sharma can execute on their vision. Just don’t be surprised if we’re sitting here at the end of the year and nothing’s really changed.

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Including industry news, innovative research, emerging trends, and our own exclusive editorial and reporting.

Subscribe now

You can subscribe to and support AI and Games, with weekly editions appearing in your inbox. If you’d like to work with us on your own games projects, please check out our consulting services. To sponsor, please visit the dedicated sponsorship page.

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of . For this issue, I wanted to pick up on a reader-voted topic from earlier in the year, and start taking a crack at it. We’ve seen a lot of news stories of late about the impact that AI is having on gaming hardware, with everything from the PC components to games consoles and even the impending Steam Machine seeing price increases as a result.

This week it’s a high-level overview as to why this is happening, but going into it in a little more detail than most other outlets. I wanted to paint a more accurate picture of why this is happening, how it was foreseeable, and why it is not an easy fix.

Follow AI and Games on: BlueSky | YouTube | LinkedIn | TikTok

More AI and Games Conference 2025 Recordings

Before we get into the meat of the issue, we have more conference talks for you! Following the release of presentations from BitPart.ai and Havok last week, two more talks from last year’s event just dropped on our conference YouTube channel this morning.

Predicting Combat Outcomes in Total War
James Kwan and Miguel Lopez-Bachiller, Creative Assembly

One of the features of Total War games is the ability to auto-resolve combat: rather than have two players fight it out, the system can simulate the outcome. This is a useful feature both for players, as well as the in-game AI, given they can use the outcome of the simulation to decide whether to even engage in conflict. In this talk we hear about a new approach to improving the auto-resolver using machine learning. By collating a large amount of data by having armies battle it out, it helps create a more accurate prediction model based on how they actually performed across a variety of conditions.

When Research Meets Release Dates: Production-Grade Reinforcement Learning for Games
Wes Kerr, Riot Games

We hear a lot about how to use machine learning, notably reinforcement learning, as a means to enhance gameplay. But the reality is it’s quite difficult to do that during the ongoing development of a game. We hear from Wes Kerr, who leads the Tech Research team at Riot Games as he highlights the lessons learned from working at the intersection of research and live games. How safety, evaluation, and reliability are paramount when you’re working on ever-evolving and player-facing content. Plus we get some insight into lessons learned in this approach as the team opted to try a different approach for the creation of bots for Riot’s fighting game 2XKO.

The AI Ram Crisis Part I: How Did We Get Here?

In recent months we’ve seen much discussion online, be it on this newsletter or elsewhere about AI’s impact on the cost of computing, and what this is doing to the production and retail costs of consumer products. This surge in pricing, which has been nicknamed the RAMpocalypse, RAMmageddon, and much-more besides, stems by-and-large from the surge in business activity surrounding (Generative) AI.

This have seen significant impact across the gaming space. Consoles such as the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox Series S|X have seen prices increase first in late 2025 and again in 2026 as a combination of both component costs and previously the US tariffs. The Nintendo Switch 2 has not seen a price increase yet, but peripherals did receive a price adjustment in the United States at launch as a result of the tariffs issued at the time. Valve’s Steam Machines have been delayed given the price tag has been hard for them to nail down. Meanwhile just last week, the Meta Quest 3S and Quest 3 VR headsets saw an increase of $50USD and $100USD, with the “the global surge in the price of critical components - specifically memory chips” being the root cause.

But it’s not just the consoles that are suffering, if anything it looks much worse when you look elsewhere. The same chip shortages are resulting in price increases for memory in your computer, combined with GPUs and solid-state-drives (SSDs). Leading not just to inflated costs for upgrading your computer, but also it has a trickle-effect for other consumer products such as laptops, smartphones, and virtually every consumer-grade product that needs chips for core functions. It’s so bad that Nvidia are planning to re-release old GPUs because they’re cheaper and easier to manufacture in the current climate.

As is well-known, the surge in pricing is largely being triggered by the significant amount of investment into Generative AI. However, it might not be obvious why exactly this is happening.

So for this edition, it’s the first of a beginner’s deep-dive into the issue, we’re going to talk about:

• What are the shortages that are actually occurring?

• Why is this happening?

• How did this situation even come to pass?

Then in a follow-up issue we’ll dig deeper into what the future looks like, and how this may potentially resolve itself, and the bigger industry challenges this presents going forward.

The Problem Statement

So let’s start by getting into what the issue is, and how this manifests. It all starts with the chips used in the manufacturing of specific computing components, and then it’s the AI industry’s interest in them that has caused the supply chain issue.

What Exactly is in Short Supply?

As we explained a moment ago, the issue is appearing in a variety of consumer products, and most notably in PC and gaming hardware, but it all stems from a single resource: the manufacture of memory chips for computers.

If you’re not familiar, memory for computers comes in two forms: volatile and non-volatile. The former is memory that only maintains information when an electrical current is passed through it, while the latter will persist over time. So volatile memory covers things like Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) that used in a computer or games console to allow us to store information about the game temporarily so it can then be used thereafter. Meanwhile non-volatile memory is typically NAND or ‘flash’ memory, which is used in the likes of SD cards, solid-state hard drives, and the memory on devices like smartphones.

Both DRAM and NAND memory come in all different shapes and sizes, and over the years chip designers have built a variety of permutations with different storage capacities, data transference rates, and other costs. You’ll find forms of both types of memory built to support the likes of mobile devices, consumer-grade PCs and games consoles, but also cloud computing and server infrastructures. Plus it’s worth mentioning that even the likes of CPUs and GPUs used for both core logic processing and graphics rendering on these devices use smaller numbers of these memory types to handle specific aspects of their execution such as Cache Memory, which is very short-term memory that is very fast and connected right to the CPU for when it is doing any type of calculation.

However for the most part, the average person will have noticed the discussion around memory is usually focussed on consumer-grade PC specifications and games consoles. Over the past 15+ years the big ongoing development in consumer memory is what is known as Double Data Rate or DDR RAM. Throughout much of the past decade DDR4 was the dominant memory on PCs throughout the mid-2010s, with the Xbox Series S|X using GDDR6 (a variation used to support GPU processes) and the PlayStation 5 uses a mixture of DDR4 and GDDR6 - with the PS5 Pro also having a smidge of DDR5 in there. At the time of writing it is still rather common for computers to use DDR4 or 5 for ‘traditional’ compute processes , while GDDR7 is the hot commodity, and is commonly used for graphics rendering and, oh yeah… AI.

What Does AI Have to Do With It?

So yes first and foremost GDDR7 is something of use to AI, given it’s designed to allow for fast data processing. But the real issue isn’t in GDDR7 but what we call High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is designed for use in data centres, or in things like Nvidia’s dedicated AI compute devices such as the H100 where it’s integrated into the chip alongside a GPU.

Now the thing is, HBM essentially re-uses traditional DRAM technology, but it’s just built differently. It sticks DRAM into a vertical stacking setup that allows for - as the name implies - incredibly high bandwidth of data processing. A traditional HBM3, which has around 8-12 stacks of DRAM in it might have a smaller raw capacity than DDR5, but it will 10x-15x the throughput, and this allows for it to be used in processing for Generative AI models, which pump through hundreds of GB of data very quickly during both training and real-time execution (aka inferencing).

Right now everyone from OpenAI to Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle and more are pushing for the investment in AI data centres that help with their rolling out of their tools and services. There are even concerns from these companies that data centres are not being built fast enough. Though what market actually exists for these data centres has yet to be properly defined, and is rather unclear.

I’ll refrain from editorialising at this stage as to the worth or need for these data centres, and the shady financing going on to get these projects off the group. But for now let’s just deal with the reality that this is happening, whether we like it, or want it.

The WHAT: TLDR

So what is happening really boils down to the following:

• As the hype for Generative AI continues, so too is the demand for large-scale AI datacentres.

• As more and more datacentres are built to host large-scale AI models, it needs a lot of HBM to function at the scale suggested by Generative AI such as GPT

• The increased need for HBM memory consumes the available DDR memory in the market.

In the past year we’ve seen the cost of traditional hard drives, SSDs, GPUs, and DDR RAM increase significantly as a result of this bottleneck that is emerging, with DDR5 RAM in particular shooting up by more than 400%.

Why Is This Happening?

Having covered the what, let’s get into the why. Why is HBM consuming the supply chain market? Well in order to do that, we need to spend a little bit of time discussing the how. How semiconductors, the micro-level components used in the likes of DRAM and HBM, are actually built.

Semiconductors are built courtesy of what are known as fabrication plants or ‘fabs’. These plants are incredibly complex and expensive facilities designed to etch electronic circuits onto semiconductor wafers - typically made from silicon - at an unbelievably small scale. For context most wafers are millimetres in size, with circuiting etched into them at microscopic levels. Since the boom of semiconductor manufacturing began in earnest in the 1960s, we have seen the size of individual transistors used as part of circuitry reduce from the micrometres (i.e. thousandths of a millimetre), to nanometres (i.e. thousandths of micrometres), with contemporary transistors manufactured at around 7 nanometres and smaller. By comparison, nucleotides that compose DNA in organic life are around 1.5 nanometres. That’s how small we’re dealing with here.

Now I bring this up because as you can imagine, this is a highly complex and expensive proposition. Etching silicon - the part of using lasers at precise microscopic sizes to create the circuits - is but one of many steps taken to ensure the final chips are going to work and are of suitable quality. On average it takes 10-15 weeks for a chip to be made depending on the size of the etching as necessary cleaning and preparation of the silicon is required. Plus there is extensive testing of individual transistors before stitching them into more complex chips. The subsequent creation of the complete product, which often is sticking dozens of fully manufactured chips together, can take months if not longer. All of this requires a huge amount of resources, both in terms of human expertise, but the amount of hardware required to manufacture at this level of precision. The number of companies that manufacture specific components needed for a particular process, notably in areas of photolithography (the lasers that draw circuits onto the silicon), are often in the single-digits - and cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a result, the number of places that can actually manufacture chips at different wafer sizes is incredibly small. From data produced back in 2023, there are just over 1000 chip fabs worldwide, though they are often specialised against specific wafer size and composition. As we can see in the table above, there are less than 100 fabs in the world that can manufacture chips on wafers that are 2 inches in size. So if you’re seeking to manufacture these chips, your options are even more limited than operating on larger sizes. Though it’s worth stressing the most common wafer sizes for contemporary PC chips for the likes of CPUs and GPUs are in the 8inch/200mm - 12inch/300mm region.

In addition, the vast majority of these fabs - regardless of wafer production size - are based in Asia. While the concept of the semiconductor and much of its initial development and manufacturing started in Silicon Valley in the United States - which is how it got its name - much of fabrication was offloaded to Asian markets in the 1970s. This has led to Taiwan becoming a global powerhouse in semiconductor manufacturing. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is not just the largest non-US company in the world (worth ~25% of Taiwan’s GDP), but it controls around 70% of the global market share for semiconductor chips.

Fabrication is the Bottleneck

TSMC has developed a leading edge in the space given it doesn’t design chips, it’s sole focus is in fabricating them. This helps cement TSMC’s position as the world’s leading chip fabricator, because they’re not in competition with chip designers, they’re simply helping them achieve their ambitions.

As I mentioned, most US-based companies offloaded their fabs between the 1970s and 1990s as a means to cut costs, given they knew it was more cost effective to outsource to factories in Asia rather than maintain them in the United States. The prospect of a significantly cheaper yet equally skilled labour force was all too alluring. Hence in the modern day, many have focussed solely on becoming chip designers - referred to as ‘fabless manufacturers’. This means that the vast majority of major chip companies you associate with computing don’t actually make their own chips. This includes the likes of:

• Nvidia: Famous for their gaming GPUs and more recently their AI NPUs like the H100.

• AMD: Nvidia’s competitor who are increasingly involved in designing chips for games consoles such as as the PlayStation and Xbox.

• Apple: The chips made for the Macbook, iPhone and iPad are designed by the tech giant, but manufactured by TSMC.

• Arm: Creators of CPUs for mobile devices that are used in Raspberry Pi’s, Samsung Galaxy smartphones, and even the Nintendo Switch 2.

• Qualcomm: The designers of the Snapdragon chipset, used in the likes of the Meta Quest 3 VR headset.

At the time of writing, Intel is the only major computer/gaming chip manufacturer that actually owns chip fabs, and runs around 15 different sites around the world. Decades ago this was frowned upon as a huge cost for them, and has since proven to be less of a liability and more of a strength.

The same can’t be said for memory. While there are only a handful of companies in the world that produce commercial-grade NAND memory, the big difference is that almost all of them operate their own fabs:

• Samsung: While many will know them for their consumer grade products, Samsung is one of the largest and most successful (Arm-based) CPU and NAND fabricators in South Korea (with sites in United States too).

• Kioxia: A spin-off from Toshiba (where it was originally called Toshiba Memory), it was the company that created NAND memory in the 1980s, and is one of if the largest producers of RAM and solid-state drives in Japan.

• Western Digital: While they have a handful of sites in the US, the bulk of their manufacturing occurs in Asia, but they don’t run their own fabs. They collaborate with Kioxia in Japan instead.

• Micron Technology: Hosts a variety of fab sites across the US, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and China.

• SK Hynix: Another major South Korean NAND manufacturer with fab sites in their home country, plus in China and the US.

Now to give you an idea of the scale of manufacturing, as far back as 2021 it was suggested semiconductor sales reached 1.15 trillion units, with over $570 billion in sales. Yet the whole thing is largely driven by a comparatively small number of businesses.

One critical aspect to raise here, is that the distribution of fabs predominantly in Asia has become a huge sticking point both in terms of international logistics, but in political motivations and action. Many western governments, notably the US, are concerned that their tech industries - and especially their military - are heavily reliant on foreign agencies in constructing these vital resources. This has had an impact notably in the United States fiscal policies and military strategy. While there has been much bluster from the Trump administration about the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, it was the Biden administration that signed the ‘Chips and Science Act’ in 2022 to make it happen. This bill introduced $280 billion of investment that helped to, among other things, build fabs in the United States. TSMC then jumped on this bandwagon, having initially declared a desire to build a fab site in Arizona in 2020, and then broken ground in 2022 having received financial support from the bill. This new fab kicked into production in 2025, and before the first production line was even assembled, Apple had signed up to become its largest customer. Meanwhile, the US Navy continues to have the Seventh Fleet primed and ready from its operating base in Japan in the event that China could attempt to take the Taiwan Strait. It is recognised by the US government and military that Taiwan is a critical US asset, and there are very real fears that China could starve the western world of chip manufacturing capabilities should they invade and assimilate the country. This is still to this day an issue that influences their actions within the Pacific theatre.

The WHY: TLDR

The important thing to takeaway from this segment is that:

• Fabrication of the components needed for DDRAM and HBM is incredibly expensive and time-consuming.

• The lead times on this are staggering, with weeks taken to manufacture the silicon, complete chips can take months at a time.

• The number of available fabs in the world is frighteningly small for the amount of chips being manufactured.

How Did This Happen?

So bringing it all together, what do we have?

• A consumer market that requires specific types of memory for electronic products, especially in PC and gaming.

• An AI industry whose memory requirements consumes consumer-grade memory resources during manufacturing.

• Large-scale industry investment in AI datacentres, thus increasing demand for HBM memory.

• A fabrication market that has significant supply chain bottlenecks given how few companies can actually built the memory needed.

And all of this then brings us to the all important fact: AI companies pay a premium for the HBM memory.

This creates a dynamic where it is more financially lucrative for the fabrication companies to divert their resources towards manufacturing HBM rather than DRAM. Thus creating a situation where consumer grade memory reduces in supply, and therefore manufacturers either charge their existing supply at higher prices for pure profit, or have to absorb costs of competing for limited fab space, which also increases the price.

This has led to a number of DRAM manufacturers, notably Micron, to declare that they’re divesting from the consumer market. They can make significantly more money by building HBM for AI companies than bother with the little people. All in pursuit of profits based around manufacturing of datacentres we still don’t really know if we’ll even need.

Meanwhile there are additional factors that could further increase cost. For one there is the cost of resources, be it precious materials used in chip manufacturing, but also in fuel. There has already been issues with precious metal acquisition that combined with COVID lockdowns heavily affected chip production in the early 2020’s. Meanwhile in the present day the ongoing conflict across the Middle-East is a significant cause for concern in the chip industry. The ongoing air and missile strikes by the United States and Israel on Iran and neighbouring countries leading to the closing of Strait of Hormuz, and the transit of fuel, is only adding to these complexities. While most countries driven heavily by fab-based industries, especially Taiwan, retain stockpiles of key materials, they typically have limited fuel reserves. TSMC accounts for up to 10% of all of Taiwan’s energy consumption, and as an island nation it relies heavily on imported fuel, typically with only a week or twos supply at best. Hence should the Strait of Hormuz continue to remain shut through the summer, things could get even worse as fuel prices raise and scarcity impacts their production lines.

A Manufactured Failure

With the facts laid out as they are, the one thing to really take away from this is how this was entirely foreseeable by the people that caused it. As we mentioned already chip fabrication has a long lead time, and companies engage with the fabs early to ensure supply chain will not be disrupted as they seek to execute on new projects. Hence many of the companies involved knew that their heavy investment in HBM would starve the consumer market as far back as late 2024.

Meanwhile companies are only going to starve the remaining market until the HBM boom dies down. Most recently news came of Apple seeking to swallow up as much of the mobile DRAM market - even potentially at a loss - so as to avoid letting competitors impact their market share. By comparison, the likes of Qualcomm are slashing production budgets for specific chips, while Samsung are increasing prices for devices (even in South Korea).

In Part 2…

So with part one in the bag where we explain how we get here, we’ll dig a little more into the future of the situation in a later issue. In part 2 we will discuss:

• What efforts are being made to mitigate this, if any?

• How soon could this turnaround, if at all?

• The status of the AI data centre rollouts.

• What about the building of new fabs in the US?

• New research in AI developments that could upend the situation.

Wrapping Up

Wooft, well… that was upbeat! But hopefully you have slightly clearer idea of a lot of the realities behind why this is all happening. We’ll get back to a slightly more fun and cheery topic next week, I hope, before returning to part 2.

Thanks for reading and catch you all soon.