• 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 one and all, and welcome back to this week’s edition of . For this week’s edition I’m picking up a thread from a recent interview over on ’s on the need for AI governance and strategy. This is something I spend a lot of time discussing with studios in our consulting work, and figured I should share some of that here in the newsletter.

But first, some headlines, and the first talks from AI and Games Conference 2025 hitting YouTube!

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AI and Games Conference 2025 on YouTube

After many hours of editing, colour correction and approvals, I’m pleased to announce that for the next couple of months we will be slowly releasing the the recordings from last years AI and Games Conference.

As always we’re committed to making information as accessible as possible for those interested in the Game AI space. Hence we’re releasing these videos for free on the conference YouTube channel. With special thanks to Xsolla who join us as our presenting partner for the video releases!

To kick things off we have two talks that delivered on some really interesting subject matter.

Debugging Across Time and Platforms: The Power of Determinism
Richard Kogelnig / Havok

First up we welcome Richard Kogelnig from our 2025 sponsor Havok who digs into the complexities of debugging AI behaviours across different gaming platforms. The challenges faced in dealing with an issue that isn’t guaranteed to be reproduced the same way on Xbox as it is PlayStation. And how Havok have developed a fool-proof philosophy to meet these challenges in cross-platform determinism.

One Trillion Parameters and No Plans
Jeff Orkin / Bitpart AI

Our second release for this week is one that feels very relevant to the current climate. In an age of Large Language Models being proposed as the solution to many a Game AI problem, is there still a need for traditional planning systems? Jeff Orkin, the creator of the GOAP planner using in 2005’s F.E.A.R., argues not just yes, but maybe more now than ever. This talk digs into the work that Orkin’s team at Bitpart.ai are doing that explores how LLMs can add real value in traditional planning domains, and the that can opportunities from hybrid solutions. Turn up for the insights, and then stick around for the great real-time demo which turns into a meta-joke about all things AI and Games. It was a pretty surreal moment to be there when it happened.

AI (and Games) in the News

Let’s take a quick run through of the headlines before we dig into our story of the week.

• Paper’s Please Creator Wary of AI Plagiarism (VGC):
  Beloved indie developer, creator of Papers Please and Return of the Obra Dinn mentioned in an interview on Mike Rose and Rami Ismail’s ‘Mike & Rami Are Still Here’ podcast that he’s reticent about discussing his future projects because of AI. While he loves talking about the stuff he’s doing, he has a - rather justified - concern that if we posts about it online, then some grifter will attempt to clone it with Generative AI tools.
  
  I mean, not only did I raise this as an issue specifically with the UK’s (now cancelled) copyright plans, but also we talked about how this exact thing happened just two weeks ago. I get it. It sucks.
  

• Lenovo’s New Gaming Headheld DoA Thanks to RAM Prices (Kotaku):
  The Legion Go 2 released in 2025 with a hefty price tag of up to $1300. Now thanks to, you guessed it, Generative AI hype, the base model is now $1500, and the top-end device (which as double the RAM) has increased $700 to a whopping $2000. Just in case you needed a reminder that video games are becoming a luxury hobby.
  

• Black & White - 25 Years Later (Eurogamer): Lewis Gordon published a piece on Eurogamer last week celebrating 25 years of Lionhead’s beloved god sim Black & White. It’s a decent overview, with comments from various members of the development team. Plus it has some insight into how the AI works in the game, but having researched it myself I feel it works too hard to draw parallels between what the game did, and the AI of today. Yes DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis worked on the game, and yes DeepMind made StarCraft bots using the same methodologies, but there’s a big difference between the two.
  
  And yes, I have finished researching Black & White. I hope to have a case study on it sometime this summer. Stay tuned!
  

• How Upcoming RPG Bellwright Simulates NPCs at Scale (80.lvl):

  Sticking with the Game AI theme - oh how nice it is to briefly write about something other than Generative AI hype - developers Donkey Crew were interviewed by 80LV to discuss how they have thousands of NPCs active in the game. A fun chat and worth checking out. It has a lot of parallels with games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which I’m also working on for a case study later this year!
  

• Phantom Blade Zero Devs Reject DLSS5 (Kotaku):
  Short and sweet, but after S-Game Studio’s upcoming title Phantom Blade Zero was listed as one of the upcoming games that support DLSS5 - which as you’ll recall had a reveal that went down like a lead balloon - wrote a lengthy post over on Twitter/X/Whatever to communicate how they’re not using “AI visual tech that could alter our artists’ original creative intent”.
  
  When studios are having to defend their projects because they were planning to use the arguably useful features of DLSS, it only further highlights how badly Nvidia has messed up.
  

• Sony Doubles-Down on AI Rendering with Cinemersive (80.lvl):
  A small story beat that most didn’t pick up on. Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired UK AI company Cinemersive Labs: a company that specialises in volumetric 3D imaging. Meaning it takes 2D images and turns them into 3D volumes. Sort of a mishmash of existing efforts in photogrammetry but applying it to creating interactive real-time renders using machine learning. While Cinemersive’s work has been predominantly in VR, it does align with Sony’s increasing interests in using AI for rendering, as seen with the PSSR technology on PS5 Pro.
  

While Most AI Tools are Hot Garbage, Studios Need Solid Governance and Strategy

Last week I saw some headlines off the back of ’s interview with Jon Gibson, the head of transformation at Keywords Studios. When the conversation surrounding AI tools came up, Gibson had this to say:

“AI feels like it’s in the chaos phase right now. And we need to move to the usable phase. How do we use AI in live production environments? How do we use AI in a way where it complements teams rather than potentially threatens teams? And also how do we use it in a context where it’s governed, it’s controlled, it’s IP safe, it’s legally safe, it’s ethically and morally safe? The gulf between cool AI demos where you put in a prompt and you get something amazing, to actually AI in production where you get consistent, high-quality results steered and directed by humans, is quite a big leap.”

You can hear the full comment over on the The Game Business, but for me it was refreshing - and not too unsurprising - to hear this coming from Keywords. After all they’ve done a lot of work in exploring the efficacy of AI tools. I have previously written up on the work they have done on the likes of Project AVA in 2024, an effort to build an entire visual novel game using AI tools. Plus in Project Kara in 2025 which took the same idea but instead sought to remaster an existing 3D game they had already built.

As reported in Gibson’s interview, the company has “tested about 500 different AI tools”, with only about half a dozen ready to be used in production right now. This came up during the original Project AVA report by Stephen Peacock and Lionel Wood in that many of the tools they found were poorly built, lacked enterprise costing structures and licenses, had operational security concerns, or had “laughable” legal terms associated with them. Never mind the actual efficacy of the tools in practice, which as was discussed in both projects were mixed at best.

While this was the main headline for a few news outlets, it wasn’t the main takeaway for me. I have been paying close attention to what Keywords have been up to for a while now, and it makes sense that as a co-development studio they want to show they’re aware of the current state of these technologies - be they positive or negative. However, I wanted to talk about what was for me a more crucial point. When Dring brought up on the current sentiment surrounding AI adoption as has been reported in the likes of the GDC State of the Industry reports, Gibson said, emphasis mine:

“I think not having controls and governance around AI is part of that issue… A lot of companies are not really explaining to their people why they’re using AI, and why it’s a good thing, and what the strategy is. They’re going into using AI models without that clarity. And it concerns developers.”

Governance is Crucial for Studios on AI Use

This was interesting because I don’t hear a lot of people talking meaningfully about building AI governance publicly. On how to ensure there is clear guidance within an organisation on what is considered use of AI tools and technologies, what impact it can have on the development pipelines, and also understanding from stakeholders across an organisation as to what value - if any - it presents.

It’s referred to as an “uncomfortable truth” in the title of the article, in that there’s too much focus on the power and capabilities of what AI can do, rather than meaningful discussion of how and if it should be adopted. And I would agree with that, it’s a topic raised frequently in talks I present at games industry conferences: studios need to take this seriously, and not simply ignore it. This means we need to consider:

1. What tools are considered acceptable in a games studio?

2. Who is allowed to utilise these tools and in what business capacities?

3. How does this extend to vendors, contractors, and other third parties?

4. Ensuring policy reflects the values of the organisation.

5. Recognising the sentiment among stakeholders across the organisation - from management right down to juniors - on how AI is impacting the business and what lessons are to be taken away from that.

6. Appropriate communication within the studio and beyond on what the policy is and how it influences decision making.

Now this isn’t an easy process, and I can speak to it given it is something that we help studios address. We run training and consult with studios on putting this governance in place - more on that later. But there’s a real net benefit in having this in place. It helps developers understand what the studio’s stance is on AI, on what is acceptable usage, and helps give clarity to both the use of these tools, but also to whether a developer’s work and livelihood runs risk of being affected by it. In an age where image generators are being sold left and right, it’s important that art teams feel like they can continue to do their best work without risk of their role being automated.

As Gibson states in the article, the culture that emerges off the back of good governance is one that encourages learning. While there’s no guarantee that someone is going to use AI, it’s useful for them to feel they’re in a space where they can ask questions.

In fact one of my regular activities I do when running a consultancy - where I’m in the studio for a couple of days - is I bake in a couple of hours where I’m at a desk (be it in the office or online), working on my thing, but anyone from across the company is welcome to DM me, jump on a call, or sit with me to ask questions. We get into every topic you imagine, because regardless of people’s enthusiasm for AI they’re curious about it - how it works, its efficacy, whether a tool exists for a specific problem, or even could we theorise how to use AI in specific scenarios. Ultimately people are curious whether AI can be used in responsible ways to deliver value.

These conversations are kept in confidence, but I do summarise the themes of what I hear to leadership. This works on two levels: it helps me educate and empower the individual, while also gathering an idea of the sentiment that is potentially affecting morale such that more effective governance and policy can be constructed.

Even If You Don’t Use AI, Leadership Must Take Charge

Now it’s worth stressing that even if you studio has no intention to use AI at all, policy and governance should still be in place. It’s important that teams feel that the leadership understand the state of this technology, what it does, and also how its evolving.

I often ask the audience in my industry talks as to whether their studio as even a basic policy in place for AI usage, and many still fail to put up their hand. Regardless of the intent, every game studio needs to have AI policies in place. Leadership needs to be able to show they have a grasp of the situation, of how their position reflects the current status quo, and but more importantly, and give clarity to their teams as to what that stance is.

But more critically, a non-AI policy once it is put in place is enforceable. If it’s in writing and clearly communicated, then this becomes a foundational component of what is considered good practice. You don’t wind up with a situation arising because someone has secretly been using AI tools as part of their role, and then it causes a headache because there’s no clear indication of whether this was acceptable, and how it will be acted upon when discovered.

Unsurprisingly, to me at least, a lot of the work on governance we do comes from indie studios who have zero interest in using tools.

Shameless Plug: Work With Us on AI Governance

So yeah, as I’ve expressed more than once, this is something we cover in our client work with games studios. I hadn’t planned on turning the end of this issue into a commercial for our work with games studios, but it’s clearly a talking point right now and worth raising more publicly.

We host a variety of training sessions on these issues. Not just on a technical level, but also the likes of ethical issues, legal considerations, and broader challenges studios faced in constructing and reinforcing AI policy. We also run dedicated consultancy on AI policy adoption, working with all corners of the industry to ensure guidance is in place.

If you’re interested, simply click the image above or the button below, fill in the form and we’ll get back to you!

AI and Games Training Modules

Wrapping Up

That’s it for this week, thank you for sticking with us to the end. Next week we’ll begin the reader-voted piece on the RAM crisis and a deeper dive into how this all came together. Plus we’ll have more conference talks, and all the other jazz you’ve come to love from this here publication.

In the meantime, my one more thing for this week is our quicklook livestream from last week for indie game Aether & Iron by Seismic Squirrel. A ‘decopunk narrative RPG’ that also has a turn-based car combat system. It’s came out to very positive reviews on Steam and is sort of the antithesis of a lot of the Generative AI hype, with fully hand-drawn art and over 200 human-voiced characters. I had accepted the press key for the game given I was interested in the car combat aspect, but If you’re a fan of games like Disco Elysium and Dispatch this is definitely going to be up your alley.

• When a story breaks and every games outlet misreports on it.

• Tommy has a right good rant about poor AI reporting, again.

• An update on the conference, Goal State, and upcoming case studies.

• Plus a brand new project coming your way later this year.

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 one and all and welcome to this week’s edition of . Hope you had a (un)healthy amount of easter eggs for those of you who celebrate the chocolate bunny gods. This week we have big behind-the-scenes update for premium subscribers. But before that, I have a bone to pick with a news headline.

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Announcements

Final Reminder: CoG Industry Day Submissions Close April 10th

Last chance for submissions for talks and demos to the industry track of the IEEE Conference on Games 2026 in Madrid with deadline this Friday on April 10th.

Visit the website for more info.

The One News Story That Annoyed Me This Week

Sadly news come down last week that a central AI team at Take-Two Interactive was being let go. An undisclosed number of individuals who worked under the head of AI Luke Dicken are out of a job as he reported on LinkedIn. Dicken had been in a leadership position on the subject for seven years, first at Zynga and then Take-Two.

This is a sad outcome for sure, and I wish the team the very best in finding new positions. Now full disclosure I’ve known Dicken for close to 20 years (good grief, has it been that long?) and have met staff that reported to him in recent years at GDC. I am not pointing this out to make more of a story of how this group of people lost their job versus everybody else, or to go to bat for these people disproportionately.

Rather, I raise it because I’m annoyed at how badly this story has been reported on.

Everyone from Kotaku, to Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Engadget, TweakTown, PCGamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and TheGamer all reported on this story, and all built a narrative around it that doesn’t reflect reality.

It doesn’t help that most of this stems outlets simply reporting off the back of the articles by Kotaku (see Eurogamer, GI.biz and Engadget) and PCGamer (I mean the RPS and TheGamer articles are just copies of it), but also that it is then presented with zero context. Given this is not a particularly big event on its own in context of the industry (sad as it may be), every publication then pivots to making unrelated points on AI in the games industry to make it sound like it’s part of a bigger developing narrative. More often than not falling back onto former comments on AI by Take Two. Such as President Karl Slatoff’s recent musings on Google’s Genie 3 to CEO Strauss Zelnick’s opinions on Generative AI that range from intrigued to ambivalent.

All of this helps add substance to an argument in these stories that suggests the turning of the tide against an aggressive pursuit of Generative AI at Take Two, or the industry as a whole. That two months ago Zelnick suddenly changed his mind about AI and so a team that had been sprung up to do Generative AI ‘stuff’ is now fired. When in truth the reality is probably much more benign: budgets being cut as the need for a central AI team is no longer needed? The team was no longer necessary in an age where generative AI fills the gaps? They didn’t fit the generative skillset needed for a broader push by the publisher?

Now I’m not saying any of this is the actual story. I just suspect the truth is far less sensational than has been reported. Plus I don’t have any inside baseball as to what happened here. I did reach out to Luke to express my sympathies but I didn’t do so in pursuit of an inside scoop for the newsletter (also I had no plan to write this story). For me that’s both unprofessional and frankly icky. I have no interest in exploiting my personal and professional network in pursuit of clicks. Besides I doubt Luke can even comment on at this time given whatever severance package will no doubt have some non-disclosures involved.

All that said, I got annoyed at this for two reasons:

1. Any effort to do a surface-level analysis of the situation can tell the headlines don’t match up.

2. This feeds into uninformed anti-AI sentiment that causes people who actually work in the AI corner of games more harm than good.

First up, this team isn’t some Generative AI start-up, they were a central AI team previously at Zynga and then folded into Take-Two when they were acquired. The bulk of their work is not Generative AI based. They’re a team that’s been focussed on procedural content generation tooling and machine learning. Supporting deployment of ML in broader DevOps in aspects of automation and tooling for developers. What they’ve been doing in Generative AI is relatively minimal and also more recent, given they’ve been a team that’s been focussed on supporting game projects.

All of this is pointed out in Dicken’s LinkedIn post, but most news outlets conveniently forgot to mention it, given it contradicts their narratives.

Now the reason this annoys me is that it feeds back into a lack of nuanced conversation about what’s happening on AI in the sector. Misreporting like this, or at least tying it into narratives that are unsubstantiated is an evergreen issue of the games industry. It’s how you get narratives ranging from the benign to the damaging to manifest.

On one hand it’s all fun and games that people still seem to think that Nintendo are going to drop a fully-fledged 3D Mario game this year - despite zero evidence to support the theory other than a new movie is out. But then you have this same approach used for targeted hate campaigns that masquerade as advocates of the industry under dog-whistle politics around issues of ‘ethics in game journalism’ and ‘DEI in games’. I can’t help but fear being an ‘AI programmer’ at a games studio is going to be the next angle for gamers ire.

I mean just look at the comments section of most of those news stories, or even this random Reddit thread, where but a handful of people are actually speaking sense. Everyone is feeding off of the anti-Generative AI sentiment. And while I understand it, and to an extent am all for it, this team is being roasted for no other reason than they work in a sector that has been demonised by the very nonsense they didn’t embrace.

Heck, the one bit of inside baseball I’d suggest is if you’ve ever followed Luke on social media, you’d know full well how dismissive he is of much of the Generative AI hype. The man does not mince his words…

I’m sorry I have a lot of respect for the publications involved and many of the writers, but it would help if you actually reported on the story as it stands rather than misreport on these events to make them more than they are - a point I raised just recently in the final part of the Game AI Existential Crisis essay. I’ve complained about this before be it with the Microsoft Muse project, with Google Genie, the Google Cloud AI survey, and many more besides. The willingness to be anti-AI on everything is frankly a little too easy, and efforts should be made to better understand where all of these things actually sit within the sector.

My apologies to Luke and his team for making this the focus of the issue. I wish the team all the best and hope you find new positions soon. Be sure to check out Dicken’s LinkedIn for info on the folks who lost their roles if you’re in a position to help.

Behind-the-Scenes Updates

Okay here we go. There’s a lot of stuff happening for us right now in the background, be it the 2026 conference, new case studies, Goal State, newsletter issues and more. So let’s dig into where we are with all of these and what to expect as a regular reader and fan of our work. It’s important to me that our audience can get a bit of an insight into what we’re doing, plus how we’re investing the funds we raise from our premium subscriptions. For this edition we’ll cover:

• The case studies we’ll be presenting over the next 2-3 months.

• What we have planned for newsletter topics.

• A new AI and Games project coming your way in the next few months.

Read more

• Game AI’s Existential Crisis is Now on YouTube

• Japanese Indie Dev Gets Ripped Off Thanks to Gen AI

• Warhorse Studios Replace Translators with AI Tools?

• Tommy’s Take on the DLSS5 Debacle

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 everyone, welcome to this week’s edition of AI and Games. I’ve been busy these past two weeks reporting on the AI situation from GDC, as well as completing the Game AI Existential Crisis essay, so I figured let’s do a shorter edition this week catching up on the news, and then spend a few minutes giving my own take on the long-lasting damage that will stem from that god-awful DLSS5 reveal.

Don’t worry, no April’s fools around here. We’re all about consistency around here.

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Announcements

Couple of quick things to get in you

Reminder: CoG Industry Day Submissions Close April 10th

As mentioned last week, the submissions for talks and demos to the industry track of the IEEE Conference on Games 2026 in Madrid close April 10th.

Visit the website for more info.

New on YouTube

Having just finished writing the series in the newsletter, I figured it was time I started translating it across to our video channels. Part 1 of Game AI’s Existential Crisis is now live on YouTube as video essay. It’s a shorter and slightly re-written version of the original shared in the newsletter, but still comes in at a whopping 50 minutes in length.

AI (and Games) in the News

A quick round-up of a bunch of news stories that have cropped up in the past two weeks.

Remember When We Trained AI to Play Games? Well LLM’s Suck At It [IEEE Spectrum]

I wanted to give a shout-out to my academic friends as Georgios Yannakakis and Julian Togelius whose recently published paper on LLMs trying - and failing - to play video games successfully is an interesting regression in AI research versus some of the work happening in games-based artificial general intelligence (AGI) around 10 years ago. Perhaps an issue of the researchers digest on this paper? Let me know if you fancy it.

Sony AI Develops AI Models That Protect Copyright? [Automaton]

The long and short here is Sony AI have tried to develop a generative model that can create AI-generated outputs that respects copyrighted material. Protective AI (PA) as they call it is essentially an AI model that is still trained on the copyrighted material, but it has it baked into the training process that it needs to avoid generating outputs that look like it. While still in development, it suggests the solution to having stopping AI creators sticking artists work into their model so it can reproduce it, is to stick the artists work into the model so it does not reproduce it.

This reads like a sensible idea from a research perspective, but I doubt it will have much traction in the real world.

Unity Shuts Down IronSource To Pursue AI-Powered User Acquisition [GamesIndustry.biz]

Remember back in 2023 when Unity merged with the ad network IronSource? No? Well nobody liked it. Everyone was unhappy about it at the time given it lumped the Unity game engine with a the rather annoying and predatory practices of a mobile-ads company. So good news, they’re shutting the whole thing down later this month.

Why? Well as Jon Hicks reports over on GI.biz, the real real revenue growth is coming not from ads but AI-driven user acquisition. This is achieved courtesy of the ‘Vector’ platform that Unity launched back in 2025.

Japanese Indie Dev Has Work Ripped Off Thanks to Generative AI [Automata]

So here’s something I’ve been warning about for years: if developers are continually sharing their work online as they develop their projects, what’s to stop some shitty individual from taking your work and cloning it using generative AI?

Well this was proven right for me last month after Japanese indie developer and YouTuber Kamaboko had been caught out after their work on their game ‘Typing Magician’ was cloned and reproduced by another user. Having shared their work on the Unityroom site, another user then posted their own version of the same game achieved using AI tooling.

I mean the person who did even shared how they did on YouTube. One for all of you out there that have some experience in Japanese!

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Language Editor Replaced by AI? [PCGamer]

Warhorse Studios Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a beast of an RPG, and it requires a lot of effort to get all of the dialogue written up and translated into various languages. So it’s rather disheartening to see this post emerge on r/kingdomcome on reddit in which Max Hejtmánek, who was previously hired to as a Czech to English translator for the game was fired last week since the studio felt using AI for translation would “make the company more effective”.

Sadly translation is one of the areas most heavily hit by AI in many business and creative sectors, even though it’s nowhere near as good in practice as a human expert. You would think a games studio that focusses heavily on delivering a high quality RPG experience would know that?

Crimson Desert Team Convinces Nobody in Saying AI Art Was Placeholder [IGN]

That TikTok game you’ve never heard of until two weeks ago Crimson Desert has came under fire for being full of AI-generated art assets despite having no AI disclosure on Steam at the time of launch. Since then developers Pearl Abyss came out with a waffling and unconvincing statement that suggested these were placeholders from early AI experimentation, convincing absolutely nobody. Oh and the Steam disclosure was adapted, thanks guys!

Brief Op/Ed: Nvidia Completely Misses the Mark with DLSS5

It’s been over two weeks now since the unveiling of DLSS5 at Nvidia’s GTC event, and naturally I’ve been busy writing other things, but also I had refrained from getting involved into I’d heard and seen more of what’s going on here.

If you’ve somehow missed all this furore since it was announced - first of all lucky you - Nvidia announced the latest version of their AI-upscaling technology DLSS was showcased at their GTC event in San Jose and it has been widely condemned - and rightfully so - for fundamentally failing to grasp what value this technology has within the games industry. The new version has introduced a new lighting rendering pass, plus the controversial neural face renderer - that we reported on when it was announced in January of 2025 - that received a lot of criticism when it was first announced given it was prone to beautifying faces akin to an Instagram filter (i.e. yassified), as well lightening darker skin tones.

As you can see from the video above, the attempts to use both aspects of this updated tech look awful in that video. The faces aren’t consistent, the lighting is washed out, the faces look waxy and overly lit, and of course it also fundamentally changes how the game looks versus how it was intended. It has rightfully been trolled on social media, with the video above sitting at over 2.3 million views, with only ~16% likes compared to more than 100k dislikes. Not to mention the comment section eviscerating this idea. But hey, Nvidia’s stock only dropped a mere 0.3% on announcement, so that must mean it’s good right?

I have a sneaking suspicion someone’s been drinking their own Kool-Aid.

The Unspoken Agreement on DLSS

DLSS has since its inception been focussed on increasing the overall rendering quality of a game, and this is where DLSS5 not only drops the ball but highlights Nvidia’s arrogance over the issue. DLSS 1 and 2 were focussed on trying to increase resolution of rendered games by taking in lower-quality versions of the rendered frame and then outputting a higher quality version. So in essence, you feed in a 720p image to get a 1080p one, or a 1080p frame for a 2160p render. Ultimately you get the graphics card to do the rendering work, then the AI upscaler works to increase the size and pixel density of the image. This was then enhanced in DLSS3 with frame generation, meaning it would also attempt to figure out intermediate frames akin to how video rendering works. I actually made a video about this in collaboration with Nvidia when it was announced back in 2022.

Since then DLSS has worked to continue to optimise the overall quality of the underlying technology. In fact in the past year or so we’ve seen two iterations of DLSS4 hit the market which includes optimisations to overall image quality, reducing the requirements of the underlying in-engine render, plus an increase to the number of intermediate frames that the Frame Generation technology can provide.

Now all of this stems from a fundamental alignment between the industry and the provider. The games industry continues to push increased graphical fidelity as means to showcase the biggest and best games, but to render at higher resolutions with equally high framerates is computationally expensive, and often beyond the capacity of many end-users GPUs. Hence DLSS was a workaround: allow players to experience the game by instead using an AI supported upscaling process rather than through native rendering. This is particularly useful when running the likes of raytracing for dynamic lighting which significantly increases the workload of the renderer.

And for the most part, the games industry has signed into this unspoken agreement, that AI upscaling was an acceptable workaround for ever increasing hardware costs necessary for big-budget high-fidelity games.

Now while I have problems with the games industry’s obsession with graphics rendering, even I see some of the benefits of using the likes of DLSS in games. It helps enable players with lower power devices to engage with the latest games. It helps titles get ported to the Switch 2 which has an Nvidia GPU. In fact I wrote about this at the time of the Switch 2 launch heralding how important it was both for the future of AI tech used in rendering, but also that it was of sufficient quality that it would be used now as the sole primary means for certain games to be deployed on Nintendo hardware.

But I also have issue with how the industry is beginning to rely on it even more now as means to achieve base performance. The debacle surrounding Borderlands 4’s launch last year - where virtually every base setting required DLSS to be enabled, speaks to an over-reliance on the technology as means to work around the necessary optimisations for a game at launch. Sure, a balance must be struck here, and yes some players hate DLSS - referring to it as ‘fake frames’ - but games like Borderlands 4 are a shining example of going too far in the wrong direction.

Fundamental Misalignment Between Product and Consumer

DLSS5 has broken that unspoken agreement, and it has put Nvidia in an awkward position as they attempt to sell a technology that nobody wants. Never mind that Jensen Huang says players “are completely wrong” about the technology (they’re not). Never mind that they won’t admit to what the tech does (it’s a post-render AI pass). Never mind that it’s currently not even feasible to run it on a single GPU. The most important thing here is that Nvidia has overstepped. Nvidia assumed that they knew better than developers what AI rendering should be doing to support the experience, and they have been burned by it.

It’s a considerable shot in the foot what with DLSS4.5 coming and going without much grief. An overstep as Nvidia now showcases technology that seeks to replace the original artistic intent of a game, running under the assumption that those games simply couldn’t achieve their original vision without Nvidia’s help. Now I know a few people who tried out the demos behind closed doors at GTC, and while some of them felt that the lighting features in DLSS5 could be useful if actually controlled by environment artists, they were universal in saying the faces were awful. Yassification aside, there are significant problems with the eyes being prone to not lining up, or even looking in the same direction. Plus an awkward jitter in the facial movements, and the lighting on the faces often making them look waxy and dirty, or to a point they sometimes have different lighting versus the rest of the scene.

But again we’re still in a space where the big issue is the game is being re-rendered to something that arguably does not fit the original artistic vision. The Grace Ashcroft example in Resident Evil: Requiem is an ever bigger problem when you realise that she’s based on a real person. Grace’s face is based on that of Polish/American model Julia Pratt. While there is naturally going to be some artistic license applied, the face will still be expected to behave in a manner much like Pratt’s given they will use her for expression capture. The whole point of this process is to have a consistent baseline of physical appearance you can build Grace from. It’s not going to help if you then have an AI render sit atop it that won’t guarantee that consistency lest you can actually train the face renderer. But even then, in the game she’s not meant to look like Pratt, but Grace. So even in the best case example it’s a lot of effort that still results in the same problem of a lack of consistency.

Consistency is paramount for these sorts of things. Not just in the game itself, but all of the marketing building off of that. Both Leon and Grace need to be clearly identifiable and consistent so you can run billboards and all sorts of digital advertising such that people begin to recognise them. Marketing 101 here.

Plus, there’s an interesting line here in whether the likeness rights in the contract between Pratt’s agency and Capcom would extend as far as Nvidia fucking around with the face after the fact without either party’s permission?

To add insult to injury, Capcom stepped up to be one of the studios who acknowledged they didn’t know about the DLSS reveal until it happened. Now I do want to slap some cold water on this, given I highly doubt big companies are completely in the dark about Nvidia using their games without permission. Though I suspect they didn’t expect all of this to happen with their games front and centre. They figured Requiem was going to be used to showcase a DLSS demo, not that they would wind up in the centre of a war between AI bros and gamers.

Players Suddenly Realise DLSS is Generative AI (and are not happy)

So I mused about this in part 3 of the Existential Crisis, but it amuses me how Nvidia have dodged many a bullet in recent years surrounding the ‘AI slop’ problem in that DLSS came to be before the term 'Generative AI’ was normalised. The acronym - Deep Learning Super Sampling - highlighted the use of super-resolution convolutional neural networks for interpretation and reconstruction of images. It is essentially using the precursor to modern Generative AI techniques.

Now considering DLSS has, since version 4, used transformer networks - which are the standard for Generative AI - it is without a doubt a Generative AI technology, and has been since inception. But it felt like it snuck under the radar of consumer ire for the most part until this DLSS5 debacle, because it highlights all the problems and issues consumers have with AI slop.

And boy did they pick the wrong franchise to throw under the bus in the process. Resident Evil at this point is an institution. It has gone through highs and lows for sure, but one could argue it’s never been more popular than now, and this 30 year old franchise has unwittingly victim that ‘the gamers’ will rally behind.

I mean sure, none of this is going to impact Nvidia’s bottom line right now, but to me this is a pretty fundamental misstep that the gaming audiences will remember. The point where Nvidia truly showed their colours as an AI company that will flog their slop-building tech to the detriment of the artistry of games. I mean, this has been true for at least a year or so now, but at this point people might be thinking more about how AMD’s GPUs are a more viable alternative in their next PC build - especially given those are the GPUs being used in current and next generation consoles by Xbox and PlayStation.

And on that note, my open thought is what impact this will have on everyone else? Be it AMD’s FSR4, to PlayStation’s PSSR - both of which are often described as ‘Machine Learning-based upscaling’. Isn’t it interesting that they avoid referring to it as Generative AI? Even though that’s exactly what both of them are, for fear of consumer backlash?

Either way, this is not going to help in the long run with growing apathy and downturn in gaming spend at this time. If it’s becoming all the more obvious that the hobby they have enjoyed as it stands is going to be messed with as means to promote slop engines.

This will all blow over in the coming weeks, but it won’t be forgotten. I genuinely think this is will prove to be an inflection point that we will return to in the coming years.

Wrapping Up

Short and sweet this week - I mean it’s about 1/4 of last week’s edition so yeah, I figured we should keep this one tight.

Next week, we should start having 2025’s conference talks online, plus a few other details for our premium subscribers! So I’ll see you then.

The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Plus summarising all of our content released across various channels, like our YouTube videos and in-person events like the AI and Games Conference.

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Hello one and all and welcome to this (slightly delayed) edition of . I wanted to spend this week wrapping up the Game AI Existential Crisis series I started writing last year. Admittedly this was tough to commit to given so much has happened in the past week news-wise, but we’ll come back and summarise all of that next week.

Announcement: Participate in the Industry Day at IEEE CoG 2026

A quick announcement before we get into the meat of things. The IEEE Conference on Games - the largest academic conference dedicated to research in games - is hosting a dedicated industry day as part of a four-day event running from September 1st to 4th at Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. You may recall I wrote about attending in 2025 as a keynote speaker. This year I have joined the organisational committee as industry chair.

Naturally for my academic friends this will be something they’re already aware of, given it is a highlight of the event calendar. But I wanted to raise this for our folks out in the games industry who fancy taking part. As we’ll have a day full of keynotes, presentations, plus a demo exhibition.

We currently have an open call for talks, demos, and sponsorship for the event. Full details can be found at the site. Participants do not need to submit a research paper like their academic colleagues. Just a short abstract and takeaways is all that is required. Whether you’re indie or AAA, if you have some interesting work you’d like to present to a captive audience, this is a great opportunity.

Also, let me stress, this is not a solely AI-focussed event. So you don’t need to be working on AI for games to submit.

Deadline is on April 10th. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

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Game AI’s Existential Crisis Part III: On Building Community

At the end of October last year I wrote the first part of my essay on Game AI’s existential crisis. A longform breakdown of the challenges facing in Game AI: the discipline of artificial intelligence used for gameplay in the current video game industry.

Please note: this series is focussed exclusively on Game AI, and I am not discussing broader AI applications in production be it machine learning or generative AI.

I believe that Game AI as a field has three distinct challenges it needs to address as a community in the coming years.

In part one I gave a broader introduction to the subject matter for those new to game AI, and discussed the first challenge in that Game AI is struggling on a technical and design level in the current climate. In particular discussing the ever-increasing demands of contemporary game design and development, and how generative AI is often incorrectly hailed as the solution to our problems.

Then in part two just before the winter break, I expanded on this thesis to discuss the challenges faced in education and access to knowledge. How so many of our institutions have been lost over the years, how our knowledge is fractured, and the realisation that my work AI and Games is now the longest-running venue for information on AI in the games industry, and Game AI in practice. While this is something I am very proud of, I am equally horrified that this has come to pass.

For this third part I want to talk about community. There is a community of developers who have been in and around the space of Game AI for some time now. Some of you might be just joining us by finding my work online (welcome), while others have been in this space for decades. It is important that we continue to find ways to connect with one another, and foster that community as priorities shift in various aspects within the industry.

So for this edition, I want to focus on the following:

• The importance of building, retaining, and supporting our community.

• Recognising the generational shift that is happening in the games industry today.

• Understanding how an increasingly toxic environment makes our work harder.

• How we need to navigate and work around changes in industry priority and geopolitical lines.

In addition, I will be ending this piece with a discussion of where we go next. How do we address these challenges. Now I have already been making suggestions throughout these articles, but I want to make sure they’re consolidated and summarised such that we can foster further discussion and turn that into action.

The ‘AI and Games’ Community

One of the biggest challenges I have faced in the decade-plus I have spent creating content under the banner, was not just understanding who is the audience I have cultivated, but what is the community that I seek to serve?

As I discussed back in part two, this whole thing started with me making YouTube videos as a hobby. I was trying to find a way to connect the material I covered in class as a university lecturer with the realities of how games actually ship. I figured why not build an archive of resources I can point to as extra-curricular viewing/reading that could help, and from the beginning I made them public because why not? Let anyone else who is interested check them out and get some value from them.

Over time it’s then lead to pretty much what is now my day job:

• I write this here weekly newsletter to try and help give guidance and perspective on the current AI conversations.

• I work to produce case studies - essentially an excuse to keep making YouTube videos - while also building up my own online courses with Goal State.

• I provide professional training and consultancy to everyone from indie, AA, and AAA studios, to big tech companies, trade representatives, government agencies, universities, and much more besides. Whether that’s in consulting on active games to bringing people up to speed in current and emerging trends in AI for games that they should be aware of.

• I manage the non-profit that runs the AI and Games Conference.

While I started out on the outside looking in, I’m now very much in the middle of much of what happens in AI for game development. I don’t just work with games companies and can influence product, but I have built a platform that I try to use to bring value - and dare I say it we are actually making an impact in the sector slowly, but steadily. But it has also built a community. We have thousands of people in our Discord server (though it’s the same 50 people chatting most of the time - hey guys!), hundreds of developers attend our conference, thousands of people watching our videos, and I’m grateful that when most game devs and researchers come over to say hi at an event that we have a positive interaction.

AI and Games as a brand (ugh) has become one of the means through which we bring the Game AI community together. But this only really occurred because I’ve spent a long time thinking about the message that AI and Games is trying to say - or rather what I am trying to say - and then try to communicate that in a way that people align with it.

In many respects the message hasn’t changed, but in others, it’s had to deliver a lot more nuance. If you were to ask me when I started AI and Games on YouTube back in 2014 what values or themes represent it, it would probably be something like this:

• Game AI is a vital, specialised, and often misunderstood field of game development.

• AI research highlights the potential to change how we make games, as well as how games influence the state of the art AI.

• Both of these are poorly misunderstood fields, and AI and Games will work to communicate them more broadly.

For a time this was more than sufficient - especially given I was just making YouTube videos to an audience of maybe a couple of hundred people. Plus at that time AI in game development was very much a niche, and had not yet come to consume most of the discourse surrounding the games industry. Not to mention that we already had established communities. However the situation in 2026 is a very different one, AI is everywhere, many of those older communities dissolved, and as such I’ve had to really think about what are the values that drive my work:

• Education First: Everything we do should have a net benefit to people currently working, or aspiring to enter the space of AI for video games, be it from a scholarly/academic perspective, or to work in the industry itself. We share knowledge on good practice, we report on emerging trends, and give context to current events, and work to get the messages out to the people that want (or need) to hear them.

• Maintaining Integrity: AI should not be adopted in the games industry for the sake of it, and we must be critical of whether new developments are truly innovative, and address whether they may prove to be unethical and/or exploitative in practice. Our criticisms are constructive, and driven from evidence rather than emotion. This is how we foster and maintain trust.

• Accessibility and Inclusion: Every article/video/talk/event presented by is someone’s first. We must ensure people feel welcome, that information is accessible, and that we provide means to drive their own curiosities. We welcome new members of our community regardless of their background and experience in the field and work to promote new voices where we can.

• Protect and Archive Knowledge: As the mists of time form, we run risk of organisations collapsing, which in turn results in knowledge being lost. AI and Games will work to support archiving the history of AI for games.

Now this all reads with a little bit of corporate ‘bleh’ to it, and I personally find it a little groan inducing, but it’s important to have this in place because we’re a business. Dare I say it, this is a little bit more grown-up than when it first started! These values drive the decisions being made at my company and whether a business decision makes us feel comfortable with it. But it also highlights how community is the lynchpin of it all. Everything should service the community, and I have to figure out how to balance between doing what I think everyone will benefit from, and at the end of the day I need to make sure me and my team are being paid and able to enjoy life. Because sadly as much as we love doing this, good vibes does not put food on the table or a roof over our heads. So yeah, it has to remain sustainable for us.

So hey, as a reminder: your support is a huge boost in helping us to continue to do what we do! And we’re close to executing our next stage of plans for what we want to do in the future.

These values also address a more subtle issue. As I discussed in Part 2, a lot of the audience we now have are students and AI professionals working in games-related fields. When the YouTube was launched we had no real community, and our audience was effectively anyone interested in the subject. In more recent years I’d argue my focus has been on cultivating a community of people invested or interested in AI for games, while still seeking to provide material accessible to anyone.

Now you may think I overinflate our importance here - and contrary to what you may think I am not one for blowing my own trumpet - but I see first-hand the impact we’ve had. I’ve met developers who watch our videos, or read our newsletter, and thank us for it. Heck I’ve met developers whose work we have turned into videos and they tell me of the excitement among their teams as they sat and watched the video together. I’ve met developers who tell me they use some of our YouTube episodes as a onboarding material for new AI programmers. I meet developers who tell me they started watching as a student and it drove them to work in Game AI - be it in the industry, or as a researcher. Hell we’ve had not just attendees, but speakers, at our conference tell me how excited they are to be there because of what the brand represents to them.

That means the fucking world to me, but it also acts as a constant reminder of the need to uphold ourselves to these standards as we continue to try and figure out how pay for all of this, and navigate a world of AI in game development that has become significantly more complex.

Plus of course we are but one community that exists. Off the top of my head I can think of:

• The AI Summit crowd at GDC that Steve Rabin, Rez Graham and others have done a great job of keeping together this year what with the pivot towards the ‘Festival of Gaming’.

• The Game AI Uncovered crew that Paul Roberts has cultivated thanks to his book series.

• The Artificial Intelligence and Games Summer School by Julian Togelius and Georgios Yannakakis, plus David Melhart and Antonios Liapis.

• Plus the academic spaces like the AIIDE, FDG, and IEEE CoG conferences.

I’d be the first to admit all of the above are more expert spaces for professionals to congregate. However by comparison, is the largest, and loudest, of all of them. So for me, it’s all about how do we use our voice to and momentum to build bridges between these spaces, and drive more people to them when appropriate.

All of this is to say that I spend a lot of time thinking about the issues of not just fostering community that I want, but also how do we reinforce and support the Game AI community more broadly as issues come our way.

Weathering the Storms

Now more than ever it’s important that we bring this community together, ensure that we don’t just have an opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas, but can build our own momentum and message to weather the many storms that we face as a sub-discipline in a highly volatile sector.

I’ve stated before that games, and the broader creative sector is currently being besieged by the AI industry. While there are a lot of new ideas, teams, and tech emerging that are interesting, and exploring how to use generative AI responsibly, I’ll be frank in saying the bulk of what I see is ill-conceived, stupidly expensive, and poorly-built junk. The signal-to-noise ratio when it comes to talking about artificial intelligence in the games industry is really messed up right now.

This has made the reality of being someone in the Game AI space that much harder, given as we discussed in part 1, most AI programmers in the games industry often work very little in machine learning, much less generative AI.

As I posited, there are several storms we are weathering at once right now, and we need to be mindful how we approach them both individually and collectively:

• The generational shift that’s happening in the games industry as old talent phases out, and new talent struggles to get in.

• An already toxic audience base whose lack of knowledge of game development is already a tremendous burden, is now amplified by the state of AI discourse.

• The changes in priority as publications and venues focus on their own interests.

• How political and linguistic lines draw divides between us, and the efforts we need to take to mitigate that.

A Generational Shift

One of the most critical and impactful issues the games industry as a whole is both creating, and trying to address right now is several generational shifts in talent. This is evident in a number of ways:

• People who have been in the industry a long time are retiring.

• People are being forced out the sector by layoffs and deciding not to come back.

  • Let’s not forget that between 2022 and 2025, just shy of 50,000 lost their jobs in the sector.

• People coming into the industry as juniors are struggling to find jobs.

  • This is due to a mixture of a larger market of available talent due to layoffs, AI tools absorbing traditional junior tasks, university graduates lacking the sufficient skills for entry roles, and fewer available positions in the sector.

• On average, people are staying in the industry for longer than before.

  • The average age of game developers has increased towards 40 years old over the past 10 years. While this is great given it addresses a known issue of talent burning out and leaving in their 30’s and 40’s, it’s compounding the existing problems for juniors.

So there’s a lot of different threads here to pick at, but the narrative I want to gleam from all of this is about the transference of knowledge and experience. Starting at the top end, the people phasing out of the industry in their 50’s worked in this sector during the real boom of the video games industry. A 21 year old junior working on a SNES or Mega Drive game in 1992 is 54 years old today. I’ve met and worked with developers who joined the sector in their late teens/early twenties sometime in the early 90s and there’s a generation of knowledge there that’s important to retain.

Now yes you run risk of chatting with them only to have old men yell at clouds, that’s an occupational hazard - plus I shouldn’t throw stones, I’m in my early 40s. But there’s a lot of expertise and experience that has been cultivated that should naturally filter down. Sure, we don’t make games like we did 30 years ago, but those little bits of genius in there that helped ship a feature are still useful to us in 2026. I speak with indie devs who tell me about the case studies/videos I’ve made on games from 20 years ago are very informative and practical for them, given they use them as means to build their own systems. Their skills and the resources available to them are often equivalent to a AA or AAA studio of 20 years ago. Take last year’s example of chatting with the team behind Trepang2 who created their very own homage to F.E.A.R. with a team of only four people.

There is always a desire even from other experts to hear about how they did it back in the day. The amount of enthusiasm and hype we had at the 2025 conference for Ian Shaw’s Dungeon Keeper post-mortem was so heart-warming. Developers who shipped games in the 2000’s cramming into the auditorium because that’s the game they were playing in college, or even at lunch breaks!

I was in high school, and Dungeon Keeper 2 was very much my jam.

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?!?!

Now on the flip side, we also have new talent coming into the sector. We need new talent to continue to come in with new perspectives, new skills, and new ideas. We don’t just need to ensure these new developers can find likeminded individuals, but they get the mentorship and support of those that have been in this space for most of their career. As clinical as it may sound, we have to look at this whole process more abstractly as a conveyor belt on a production line. As talent leaves production, we need to be bringing in new faces to replace them, and all that experience needs to trickle back down the line. Plus we need to be looking at it not just within individual studios, but more broadly at regional, national, and international levels.

This of course sits alongside issues where juniors are struggling for entry level roles, and in an age where studios are either repeatedly in hiring freezes, replacing juniors with AI tooling, or forcing the juniors to work predominantly with AI tooling to get more out of them faster. Naturally the issues with the first two cases are highly evident: we’re not bringing new talent into the sector, and as the average age of developers continues to increase, we will create a talent crisis that will manifest in the next 10 years. But the latter issue is also a huge problem.

As any experienced developer knows, you gain so much experience from shadowing your leads. Be it working on features, having them review your code, or just sitting and chatting with them for weeks on end. The first 5-10 years of my career I spent surrounded by very smart engineers and college professors who knew their subject areas well, and the best of them know to take those juniors under their wing and mould them into future leads. I was incredibly fortunate to work with some fantastic people through grad school and then in my early career that shaped so many of the decisions and skills that drive my work today, and we need to work to enable that.

This is already a challenge for a number of reasons, but office dynamics and remote working aside, the games industry needs to consider the implications of AI-tooling entering our spaces. Given these are subsuming the roles of traditional juniors, it not only runs risk of increasing the talent gap as we don’t have new developers coming in to replace seniors as they progress, but it also means those juniors are not getting the appropriate mentorship they need and effectively exist in a lower class of professional as their expertise and career development are considered secondary to the broader need to ‘get shit done’. This is a process that media and cultural studies professors have been observing in games for some time now as we rely on an increasing range of automation courtesy of everything from procedural generation tools, to photogrammetry and ‘metahuman’ workflows. There is a risk not just that we don’t hire new talent, but that they are not giving the care and attention the deserve to thrive in the future.

I have even heard from some corners of the industry that they “don’t hire juniors”. It takes too much time and energy to do it. So it’s somebody else’s problem. They can hire them once they get a few years under their belt. But if everyone is going in the same direction, there won’t be any juniors to hire after they’ve got that initial experience. Classic short-termism.

Every time we look to promote people into senior and leadership positions, we should equally be looking at how we’re going to ensure they can eventually be replaced. As I say I feel this is an issue that is universal to all disciplines within the games industry, but given my previous points on education in Game AI back in part 2, this it feels like this is an ever bigger concern for our necks of the woods.

An Angry and Often Toxic Audience

It’s safe to say in 2026 that the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ carries a very negative weight to it. What was once rather vague and potentially mysterious, that existed in most minds in the realm of science fiction, has since become something people are increasingly consciously aware of, and - in many instances - outright despise.

After all in 2025 the term ‘Slop’ was word of the year for both the Merriam-Webster (American English) and Macquarie (Australian English) dictionaries. Meanwhile both the Cambridge Dictionary updated to acknowledge the use of the term to refer to:

Content on the internet that is of very low quality, especially when it is created by artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile the Wikipedia article on AI slop has exploded since the first version of it was published in October of 2024 as the use of generative AI for creative outputs such as writing, images, and video has infected everything from social media to advertising, film and television production, music, books, and of course video games.

Now of course Game AI has nothing to do with this - for the most part. We’re making NPCs, combat management systems and all that jazz. 99% of Game AI uses zero machine learning whatsoever, never mind Generative AI. But it’s not like Game AI was a well understood subject matter to begin with, and now that Generative AI has become conflated to mean all of AI, it’s making what was already a difficult conversation with players all that much worse.

“Fuck AI”

Now there’s a phrase I see a lot in my day-to-day.

Running a company with numerous social media strands called in 2026 means a lot of curation of our replies. While I’m not on social media all that often - given I generally loathe it - I feel it’s important as a ‘voice’ to get out there and try to challenge narratives out there, and depending on where you post, and what you’re posting about, you get a lot of ire. On average I either hide, delete, or report 10-20 comments a week on our YouTube videos from people who write very nasty messages that more often than not have very little to do with the subject matter - even more when we release any video that isn’t about classic Game AI.

I mean fortunately I’ve been publishing content on YouTube for a decade; I’ve built very thick skin. Not to mention I’m from Glasgow; some random keyboard warrior thinking they’re a wee hardman in my comment section doesn’t bother me. But it speaks to a shift that’s occurred in any and all discourse related to AI in game development. And let’s face it, the games-playing masses know very little about how games are made. It’s been an issue that the industry has created for itself only to bite them in the ass - a point I wrote up as a video a long time ago. So I do clean up our comment section in the videos a lot because I want it to show some actual meaningful discourse. Constructive criticisms are totally fine, but when we it’s just “fuck AI” or attacks on me or our guests than I draw the line.

Heck the new trend on the YouTube channel is having people tell me I should change the name of the channel so as to get more views, because ‘calling NPC stuff AI isn’t going to help your reach’, and while they might have a point, it’s not something I’m going to act upon, because making concessions like this is detrimental as a whole.

Now yes, all of this is having an impact on the YouTube side of things. Our viewing numbers have plateaued the past 2 years, and subscriber growth has reduced drastically (percentage growth year-on-year is higher in the newsletter than the YouTube channel). But I don’t believe in making drastic change to suit these trends. I’d rather stand by my own principles and continue to do what we do because I know in the broader industry we’re respected for this output.

So while I’m not terribly worried about the YouTube side of things - I mean it’s never been a sustainable channel to run as a full-time job even when it was popular - I do worry about the broader implications the things we’re seeing are having elsewhere. After all, people are quick to conflate that any discussion about AI in game development is now Generative AI. Or that features implemented in games that exhibit traits of intelligence and procedural construction are now Generative AI.

It’s bad enough that - per my comments in part I - that quite often we’re now being told to re-invent Game AI wheels using Generative AI when we really don’t need to, but now you have a player base primed to assume any meaningful development in Game AI is now tarred with the slop brush. What if a new AAA game comes along and starts crafting really cool and intelligent NPCs? Are we going to have people breathing down our neck assuming we used GPT to do it? Hang on, the goalkeepers in EA Sports FC 26 use machine learning? Does that mean gamedevs are being lazy now?

Plus, as I stated in a previous entry I still think there is value in trying to figure out how to use small-scale, finely-tuned ML models to help address very specific Game AI problems, and some of those ML models could very well be generative in nature. But heaven forbid we ever disclose that publicly if you don’t want people jumping into your social media feeds or Steam reviews. Episodes we’ve made this past year such as MLMove and Snowcap, where I’m looking at what I think are interesting attempts to utilise ML and Generative AI in game development, have had all sorts of bile in the comments that I had to clean them up quite a bit - plus we got shit for it in our social media posts. Now clearly the people shouting below the line are not actually watching or reading the work, given if they did, they’d know none of the issues people have with Generative AI as a whole are evident in these projects - and credit to the folks in our audience who actually responded to some of these comments and called them out on this, thank you all.

But it doesn’t matter. The kneejerk reaction is just to shout online.

If anything it reinforces to me that as a sector we need to continue to be vocal. To push back against the narrative set by the Generative AI Industry that has set about commercialising the very technology people broadly despise. I wrote a op/ed piece on this for GamesIndustry.biz which was released the very same week that DLSS5 blew up in Nvidia’s face, only helping to prove my point. The signal-to-noise ratio in discussing AI in game development is overwhelming skewed towards the noise. We made to have more signal out there to combat it.

It seems like the language needed to engage with players is going to be a major concern if we’re going to try and keep communicating the efforts taken here. I’ve noticed somewhat anecdotally that ‘Machine Learning’ is now often being used to describe any ML-based approach, including Generative AI, that isn’t considered icky. This cropped up a lot in recent weeks what with the DLSS5 debacle, where I see people talking about how old DLSS is just an example of Machine Learning being useful for different parts of games, including upscaling. Meanwhile DLSS5 is now just Generative AI slop - despite the fact that any and all forms of DLSS - and AI upscaling as a whole - are Generative AI by virtue of their function.

I have wondered in the past year how much Nvidia dodged a bullet in their branding and messaging in that they commercialised DLSS long before Generative AI became mainstream. It seems like only now are people catching on to what that tech really does.

But of course this is just the conversation between the developer and the player, which has never been all that fun anyway, and in many larger studios isn’t an issue for us day-today. But this same thing is happening right across the games industry.

“I Work in AI, But Not Like That”

How many of you who work in game AI and adjacent fields have had to defend your job title in recent years? Now that’s not even an issue of engaging with the general public or our players, this is an issue happening within the industry itself. The term ‘AI’ has become so loaded within the industry as the ongoing anxiety surrounding Generative AI’s push into the industry means we’re having to re-affirm to our colleagues in the sector what it is we actually do.

All of this reinforces the need for us to fight our corner, and continue to educate people on what this stuff really does. Sure, we won’t change everyone’s minds - especially those in trapped in social media bubbles - but much like our efforts in education it’s important to hold our ground and continue to talk about the work that’s happening in this corner of the sector so that those wanting to learn more find that material out there to consume.

Changes in Priority

So thus far in this edition we’ve got the challenges of bringing in and retaining our talent, and then trying to defend against the anxiety within the industry as to our work as well as the general noise coming from social media. But we still have our own little corners within the sector within which to engage and collaborate? Sure, we have meetups, Discord servers, mailing lists (that’s still a thing right?), plus of course book publications, and events. But these last two are for me a larger concern, given we’re seeing the trends surrounding AI that are also affecting the likes of education potentially impact these avenues for dissemination and networking.

As I discussed in part two, the shifting trends in what is considered in vogue in the world of AI means we have to keep fighting to justify what Game AI is and why it deserves its own space. It’s a challenge we face in our editorial for the AI and Games Conference because while we recognise that machine learning is a useful tool in production, and there are 101 people wanting to get on stage to talk about Generative AI, we still need and want to curate a space for the Game AI community that most of our founding team built their careers in.

Now we’re something of an outlier: we’re a small organisation built by people who work in this space, who know this space, and want to serve the community. The rest of the sector doesn’t really think about Game AI in the same way we do, because most of them have never worked in it!

So what happens when they decide to follow the AI hype? What impact does this have on those community spaces? I mean they are few and far between as it is, and all of this is very much a veiled description of GDC’s 2026 “Festival of Gaming”. An event that emerged courtesy of a panic in declining numbers and marketing spend across 2024 and 2025, combined with the impending termination of the (highly beneficial) deal that Informa has with running the event at the Moscone centre in San Francisco.

While my point extends far beyond GDC, this past year is a shining example of what happens when the bigger players who manage community spaces have a change of heart…

How the ‘Festival of Gaming’ Came to Be

Contrary to the narrative bouncing around the internet that states GDC dropped 10,000 attendees in a year, it actually dropped around 5,000 each of the last two consecutive years. You may note that in 2025 they stated they had “nearly 30,000 registered attendees” versus the 30,000 attendees the year before. The subtle messaging in 2025 was to obscure the fact that a lot of speakers, exhibitors, and regular attendees cancelled in the closing months courtesy of the changes happening at border control at the US. When I enquired about this particular choice of words at the GDC AI Summit post-mortem in the summer of 2025, it was explained to me the number was much closer to 25,000.

Now I raise this not to try and soften the blow GDC has had this year in the attendance data - frankly they should have been more honest about it because there was no way it was going to go up this year. Rather, I highlight it because it gives context as to why the whole “Festival of Gaming” pivot even happened. They brought in consultants in early 2025 to examine the data they had from the event, ranging from ticket purchases to consumer spend and overall footfall, and the thing that was made clear was that people value the GDC Summits; the first two days of the week where people converged on topics focussed on specific disciplines.

The data highlighted that a not-so-insignificant proportion of attendees bought the ‘Summit pass’, which entitled you to access the two days of summit talks, the expo floor and some of the other talks and roundtables that happen throughout the ‘core’ conference from Wednesday to Friday. The summit pass was also significantly cheaper than the ‘Core’ pass - around $1,950 for Core versus £1300 for Summits - and this meant three key pieces of data:

• Attendees were paying for the ‘cheaper’ pass that delivers value.

• A larger proportion of attendees attended the Summit talks versus Core conference talks.

• Attendance would trail off towards the end of the week because a lot of people only really attended for the Summits and would leave before the end of the event.

So what this tells me, is that the Summits were delivering value for the audience in a way that Core does not - and I’ll be honest outside of the AI roundtables and some of the main stage talks I seldom attended the main conference given there were too many sponsored sessions and stuff that just didn’t interest me. It also highlights to me what the value of the Summits are to attendees:

• Programmes curated by subject experts for subject experts.

• A place for likeminded individuals to attend, connect, and network.

So it’s clear the Summits are of value to attendees, and to GDC given people are spending money on the passes to attend. So perhaps there’s a way to utilise this in a way that works for Informa? Get people to attend for the summits, but keep them around throughout the week? Maybe even reschedule the event so that the summits are a week-long affair with different ones running on different days? Run the summits in the back half of the week rather than the start?

What was the conclusion they reached? Remove the Summits.

The Death of GDC’s Community Spaces is a Warning

While this segment is about the broader impact of AI trends influencing our decisions making, I refer to the GDC situation over the past two years given it is emblematic of this very problem. As AI hype continues to trend, GDC has sought to capitalise on it. Often with a larger number of sponsored talks on the subject that - based on my time attending a handful across 2023 and 2024 - are certainly not the value for money Informa thinks they are.

Meanwhile back when the Summits still suited them, they tried to force more and more Generative AI into the AI Summit in 2023 and 2024, including a Roblox talk in 2023 that at the time none of us really wanted but the organisers pushed to be added. Plus in 2024 there was a Google talk advertised as an AI Summit talk when it wasn’t part of our programme - in fact it was double booked with another AI Summit talk, and in a different room from where our community got together.

Plus, there was GDC’s mini ‘AI Summit’ as part of ‘The AI Summit New York’ (an event ran by GDC’s owners Informa) in 2024, where they were reaching out to previous speakers to present, only for me to get emails from said speakers asking if this was legit? Or if we had any information because it was poorly communicated. I then had to ask GDC what was going on, because the messaging was confusing. Admittedly, they’re free to do that if they want, but for the community surrounding the summit when they see ‘the AI Summit’, they think the advisory board will be involved. So being left in the dark, even if there was no intention to have us involved, struck me as rather disrespectful.

On top of all this, in 2024 I spent two weeks in a daily email correspondence with some of the GDC organisers who simply assumed the AI Summit was a perfect place for all of the Generative AI content to go. After all, if this summit was about AI, then surely it made sense to start pushing for Generative AI content to just go in there? This lead to a lengthy correspondence in which I had to explain to GDC what the AI Summit is actually about, to try and prevent them burning it all down.

Admittedly the name of the summit was out of date, given when it was founded some 15 years ago, ‘AI’ for games simply meant Game AI - NPCs, gameplay systems, and virtually none of it used Machine Learning. Now of course we had a Machine Learning summit that muddied those waters a little, in that while both the AI and ML summits had clear agendas and goals, the purpose to anyone outside of the field might prove confusing based solely on their names.

So yeah, if you wondered why in 2024 GDC suddenly renamed it to the ‘Game AI Summit’, that was my doing. I convinced them to do that to reinforce the need to our community we still had a dedicated space at this event despite the ever-increasing hype surrounding AI in the industry.

In fact I even offered to help them kickstart a Generative AI Summit in 2025 if need be, just to ensure we preserve the Game AI Summit for what it was. Only for them to remove the summits from the format a year later.

I have since spoken to a bunch of people who attended GDC 2026 and while disappointed about the Summits not existing, they could still get by given they knew other community members were in attendance. But me, I’m still angry about it.

These Summits made sense as dedicated community spaces. Whether you were a seasoned veteran of the field, or someone new to the space, for two days of GDC you knew where your peers were. Where likeminded individuals would attend. That’s a great place for people to network, to meet respected voices in the field, and foster a sense of community. That’s a responsibility that the advisory board took very seriously. We curated the talks, we mentored the speakers, we ensured they received an introduction and applause as they took the stage, we helped them with tech issues, and moderated their QnA. All to make sure that when someone gets up and presents in that hall that it’s a celebration of them and their work.

The Game AI Summit was the longest-serving community space that this field had, and for all its problems, I know how important it was to a lot of people for them to get up there and present to that audience.

Sure, there was still a Game AI presence at GDC this year, but like every other community who lost their summit, the fundamental lack of a dedicated space for a fixed period of time was detrimental for those communities. Over the past six months I have spoken with people involved in many of the other summits at GDC, and none of them are happy about the decisions being made - and in some cases led to them deciding not to attend this year.

Now there’s a chance that Informa changes their mind after they saw another decline in attendance numbers this year and bring the Summits back. But the issue here is two fold:

1. It highlights how all too quickly an institution that has come to hold some sway or impact in our field can be brought down despite our best efforts.

2. All of this is not just a reflection on how priorities can change and impact the communities that we cultivate, but not necessarily control, but also how broader political factors can also prove detrimental.

The Political and Linguistic Lines

GDC in the past two years is a great example of socio-economic and geo-political factors impact the game development community. After all attending GDC is an expensive proposition, and frankly it has only increased in cost the past couple of years as flights, accommodation and other expenses continue to increase. But also people are concerned about entering the United States as a result of its border control and immigration policies. All of this culminating in a situation that attendance is down by a third in the space of two years.

But this is not an issue that is unique to GDC, nor is it even the first time that this criticism has been held aloft against the event. GDC has for as long as I can remember had a negative reputation given the significant cost to attend, and the US not being an easy country for people to enter if they don’t arrive from very specific corners of the world.

Of course I’m Scottish - so technically British (ugh) - and that opens doors for me in ways that others simply lack (and I am highly aware of it), but then our own border control has proven problematic in recent years.

“The British? Problematic as a result of socio-economic and geo-political policy?” I hear you say. I know, what a surprise…

We’ve dealt with this first-hand with Brexit impacting travel for people to enter the UK for the AI and Games Conference. We provide support where we can, notably in letters of support for visa entry for speakers and partner delegates. But we have people who want to attend our event in London and can’t given they won’t be granted the visa they need to enter the country for even a couple of days - and as event organisers we cannot support for attendees given there’s no legal basis on which we could argue why we should vouch for them (especially if we don’t know them).

All of this reinforces the need for us to branch out and try and run events in other spaces. To try and find ways to bring ourselves together. By providing more options it at least helps foster community at smaller levels and then we can work to build the bridges internationally.

I mean full disclosure we’ve been blown away by the level of enthusiasm for our conference. We hoped in 2024 to maybe get 100-150 people together, and by end of 2025 we had recorded attendance of just shy of 400. Our estimates in attendance data for 2025 suggest that we’re seeing increasing numbers of attendees from Europe and North America. So now we have the two (great) problems of ensuring we have a space big enough, but also try to ensure we don’t grow to a point where we become part of the problem! I look forward to somebody complaining about me in the same way that I have moaned about GDC for much of this piece.

I am curious how things will play out for events in Europe this year. Whether it be Develop, Devcom/Gamescom, and even our own AI and Games Conference. The sentiment is clear that people are avoiding GDC and US-related events. Does this translate into increased attendance at events over here? I wouldn’t be surprised if most major UK and EU events record increased attendance this year.

I do feel there is a space for more Game AI events, and having opportunities for our community to converge a couple of times a year would be great. They can exist in various sizes, cater to specific disciplines, and don’t need to be huge developer conferences to have value. Just having something helps support pockets of our community in the long run is always great - like all the regional indie game dev events I have attended over the years. As I mentioned at the top, I try to use AI and Games to filter people into other relevant communities. I am big on building bridges versus burning them. It’s why I go speaking at industry events all over the world, because we need to be bringing ourselves together more readily.

Don’t Forget Linguistic/Cultural Barriers Too

Plus it’s worth mentioning as I begin to bring this to a close, that there are also the linguistic barriers as well. We’re still exist in a world where game development practices, cultures, and success stories are seldom shared beyond the global east/west divide.

We still exist in an age where there is a lot of mystery about how games made in China, South Korea, and Japan. Yes part of this is the aforementioned political aspects, but there are also linguistic and cultural barriers. It’s not common for ‘western’ studios to present at say a Japanese game developer event or vice versa. In all the years I’ve been involved in disseminating knowledge about Game AI, it’s incredibly rare to find studios from Japan share their work with European and American audiences. We’ve never had Capcom come and present at GDC about the AI of Resident Evil or Monster Hunter. The only studio I can think of who does this with any sort of regular cadence in Square Enix, and that’s largely courtesy of Youichiro Miyake being a strong advocate for building bridges and sharing knowledge.

Heck, did you know that back in 2019 that Miyake-san wrote an entire book just about the Game AI in Final Fantasy XV? A complete, 250-page book on the subject? Miyake-san has published several books not just on specific games, but anthologies designed to communicate to the broader Japanese game-playing community on how Game AI works in some of the most beloved games made by the publisher.

I have contemplated more than once to try and crowdfund getting these translated and either re-published in English or turn them into content on our site: I even spoke with Miyake-san about this more than once in recent years and he was up for it. Like, this is a treasure trove of material locked off from us. And I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I mean first of all, if that’s something you’re interested in, let me know in the Discord or in the comments. Goal State will launch later this year and I’d be up for crowdfunding some more projects, and I would love to find a way to bring this information to the west somehow.

But more importantly, it once again highlights that we need to find ways to build bridges between different corners of the game development community. I mean did you know that a lot of mobile games coming out of China and South Korea almost exclusively use Machine Learning now for Game AI? I mean I do because this is the stuff I spend hours of my day researching (ha, nerd). But what are they learning over there that we could benefit from (and vice versa)? What is it about their games, their development cultures and practices that lead to different philosophies in how they build Game AI? I’d love for us to work to build those connections even further if we could.

No, this doesn’t mean we’re planning to run like AI and Games Conference: Tokyo or something. God that sounds stressful, but also, cool?

Facing the Challenge

So I think, having reached this point, I’ve got most of the big issues to mind off my chest. So I need to start wrapping this up, and I want to focus on my suggestions on how we move forward.

I think there’s a lot we can all do at various levels to address this. Some of them major, others are minor. But the key thing is I believe this is a community endeavour. We all need to take a little bit of responsibility for this, and work together to help support.

Some Suggestions for Action

So what can we do? I have some thoughts on this at varying levels of depth and complexity. But I wanted to list as many as I could think of. Some of these range from the simple to the complicated, and I appreciate some of these are very difficult to achieve. But if I didn’t think they were valuable, I wouldn’t raise them!

I’ve grouped them around roles and functions in the sector to try and give it some direction:

Developers at Games Studios

I appreciate that many of these are a challenge depending on how your studios operate and communication guidelines that are in place. But

• Share Your Work: Write blog posts, submit talks or book chapters, do social media threads, simply work to encourage discourse about the development of the tech you’ve made. Regardless of whether you’re indie or AAA, talk about what you did. What inspired you? What did you play/see/read that drove this implementation?
  

• Share Your Failures: We’re too quick to talk about when things went right. It’s important we continue to discuss when things went wrong. We often learn the best through failure. Did you try something new that didn’t work? What issues in Game AI development have plagued your career?
  

• If Not Your Work, Share Your Experience: We’re often quick to focus solely on the game we shipped, and not the experience that surrounds it. Can you talk about problems you’ve solved in commercial projects without discussing the game itself?
  

• Be Curious of Academic Works: There is a wealth of research in both Game AI and AI for games that is published on an annual basis that isn’t really read outside of that ecosystem. Try and find niches that interest you. Perhaps attend a conference or similar event if you can? Engage with academic researchers who will be more than happy to talk to you about their research - and even explain the papers if they’re impenetrable!
  

• Try and Encourage Academic R&D: Where it makes sense, try and engage with researchers about the work they have done and how it can impact a specific niche or aspect of your work. There are a handful of academics out there who participate on the regular - and I’m essentially a lapsed researcher who consults for games studios.
  

• Sponsor and Support Endeavours: Naturally for many of the folks at the coalface, they’re not in charge of the budgets. But consider how to work to support education providers and initiatives, academic partnerships, event sponsorships etc. There is budget there at larger companies that can be put to good use to benefit everyone.

Academic Researchers and Students

• Get Yourself Out There: We know how important it is to get out there and publish, but if you find there are other avenues you can take, then do so. Attend industry events ranging from the big ones to the little ones wherever your budget can afford. Bridging the divide where can on both sides is always a win for both parties.
  

• Publish Outside Academic Lines: Much like the previous point on sharing your work, academic researchers are far too prone to only writing in academia about their work. Hence outside of that space you’re not known. Write blogs about your research. Talk about the journey. Share social media threads about your papers and what they mean.
  

• Be Aware of What the Industry Problems Are: I don’t mean this as a dig, but far too often academic research has a rather naïve take on what the problems are in day-to-day industry (I’ve been guilty of this in the past). What are the things developers are still struggling with? These can sometimes lead to new avenues for your research.
  

• Consider More Industry Collaboration: Now this is admittedly a lot easier said than done. But anywhere we can find that brings these often disparate corners together can be of value. This doesn’t need to be massive research projects with huge budgets. But having discussions about the validity of research in context of industry work is useful. Though note I say this only in the situations where this makes the most sense. After all, not all research is intended for real-world application - even if shareholders often insist that it is.

Games Press

A quick one for all of my friends out there in the games press. You seem to have forgotten Game AI is a thing.

• Don’t Just Regurgitate the Headlines: Get out there and find people who can give you a comment on these issues. Or in the worst case scour the internet for a spicy take on BlueSky you can share alongside it.
  

• Pay Attention to What We’re Really Doing Here: 99% of the discourse around AI right now in games is not what most AI practitioners in games are actually doing. There continues to be innovation happening out there and you’re often missing out on fun and interesting stories.
  

• Continue to Take An Interest in Game AI: It’s not often you hear a game get plaudits for its NPC AI, but if you do think it’s good, or even if it has issue, be vocal about it and talk about it if and where you can.

Devs/Researchers at Local and Regional Levels:

Not everything needs to happen at global and international level…

• Host and Attend Meet-ups: The latter is easier than the former, that much I can attest. But fostering community is valuable. You can do this at your local college, or as part of an indie space. Simply getting together to discuss what you do and how you do it can be helpful.
  

• Share Your Learning Experience: Write that blog/video/talk about attending GDC or the AI and Games Conference. Summarise book chapters or talks that excited you. Think about how you providing a 10-minute long insight in sharing what you learned can help others.
  

• Communicate and Reach Out: Speak to your peers, and reach out to others in the space to see if they can you in any way they can. I’ve presented virtual talks and recorded introductions for small Game AI-focussed events all over the world. For those with a little bit of clout, remember sometimes you reposting the work of others and sharing a message can be a huge benefit to them.
  

• Better Knowledge at Representation and Governance Level: Far too often I have to correct people in positions of authority all over the world about what Game AI is, and how current trends in AI are a disservice to this corner of the sector. This needs to be reinforced wherever we can and why this isn’t going to change.

Archival and Resources

A little something for everyone to be thinking about. We’re losing knowledge and we should work to archive it as best we can.

• Consider Archive.org: If you don’t fancy maintaining a webpage of old materials, perhaps put it up on Archive.org and share social media posts with the links.

  • One day, when I’ve finally had enough, I am preparing for my endgame where I upload everything I have to Archive.org. All the videos, the scripts, the research notes, all of it. I have TB of data that I plan to just release into the wild one day.
    

• We Need to Think About Collective Ownership: A recurring theme throughout this piece has been that we’re often let down by the institutions that support us. What happens when the next event organiser changes their minds? When the current book publishers give up on us? When the next figurehead of the community disappears after being found to be problematic? We need to be thinking more broadly as a community on how to support our own endeavours, and not just rely on larger organisations and individual efforts.

  • And yes, I am also referring to myself in this. Not only will I not be doing this forever, but also I need to be held to account for what I’m doing in this space.

TL;DR

• Make Some Noise

• Learn From One Another

• This is a Collective Effort

• Take the Initiative

• Stand Up and Be Counted

• Get Out There, Be Nice, Have Fun

What We’re Doing

As I bring this series to a close, I wanted to talk about what we’re doing about all of this. In the same year that this sense of unease fell over me, that the broader questions over how and where Game AI is going really took hold, I also come to recognise that I have some influence over this.

In 2024 I decided it was time to try and fight back, and find some ways to make a positive impact.

• I launched this here weekly newsletter - which now has thousands of readers each week from across the games industry.

• We successfully crowdfunded the first of my online courses under the Goal State brand. I am currently in the middle of writing, recording, and editing the final product, and we’re on track for a release in 2026.

• And lastly, my friends and I formed our non-profit event company Game AI Events CIC, and that’s how the AI and Games Conference was born.

I am publishing this final piece of the essay while I am knee-deep in preparations as we seek to announce the 2026 edition of our conference. It’s a huge amount of work. It’s incredibly stressful to put something like this together. Plus I won’t lie, I am not getting rich of the back of this. I mean I’m doing okay, but like… AI and Games quite often only has six to nine months of runway on a regular basis. So hey, provided the money is coming in, and we can keep the lights on, we will continue to do what we’re doing as best as we can!

So yeah, I will continue to be annoying to ask for your support. Because the things that we do to help archive and communicate Game AI - including the conference - is the things that pay us the least!

But regardless, I am so proud of our team across both AI and Games and Game AI Events CIC and their commitment. I am grateful to everyone we work with in our sponsors and speakers who give their time, energy and resource to help us do this. We have some pretty grand ambitions for the AI and Games Conference, but that’s going to take us a bit more time to achieve it. However if we can pull of what we have envisioned for the next 2-3 years, that would be pretty amazing stuff.

Now more than ever I am 100% committed to trying to make this work: conferences, courses, case studies, newsletters, content, etc. Not just because I believe in it. Not just because I feel we need to address these issues, but also that failure to maintain momentum now will be detrimental for everyone. As I’ve spent the past three articles expressing, I feel the situation for us is pretty dire, and I’d rather not look back and regret not trying to do something about it when I had the chance.

Naturally if you have opinions on what we’re doing I’m welcome to discuss them in the comments, or in the Discord. Tempting fate with that one I know…

Ultimately, in an era where our YouTube numbers are dwindling, it would be all too easy to just give up. I mean I’ve been doing this for more than 11 years now. I’ve done my time. But if anything it highlights to me that the problem is evergreen, it’s just the parameters have changed, and so has our strategy. AI and Games will continue to work to be the voice on Game AI for newcomers and experts that you can trust, and I look forward to working with all of you to keep fighting that fight.

Stay safe, take care, and I’ll be back.

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 . I had planned to write part 3 of the Game AI Existential Crisis this week, but figured I should comment on everything happened at GDC.

Oh and before we get started, I wrote this issue prior to Nvidia’s announcements at GTC on Monday, including the horrendous DLSS5 demo. I’ll save that rant for another time.

Announcement: My GI.biz Op/Ed

Before we kick things off, a quick announcement that I was invited to write an op/ed for GamesIndustry.biz as part of their ‘AI Week’. Entitled “Biting the Silver Bullet: AI in the Games industry in 2026 and Beyond”, I took the opportunity to summarise a lot of the big talking points I’ve made in this here newsletter over the past year.

You can read it here, or at the image above. If you’re curious what I presented at the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit last month, imagine this article but as an hour-long talk and you’re not far off it.

A huge thank you to Lewis Packwood for inviting me to submit this piece. I’ve been reading GI.biz for the best part of 20 years, and while I’ve been interviewed for articles on the site in the past, it’s pretty cool to now say I got to write an article for their editorial.

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

GDC 2026 and the Generative AI Conversation

This year I made the decision to not attend GDC. This decision was the culmination of a number of factors: I have a lot of work going on, the US is increasingly expensive to visit - and not particularly welcoming - plus the changes made to GDC itself suggested that the value I attribute to the event through high quality talks was on the way out. I had opted to use what little time I could spare out of the office this quarter at the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit, which I wrote about a couple weeks back.

Naturally it’s a shame I didn’t go, after all I have a lot of friends and contacts in North America that are great to reconnect with when over the pond. But perhaps one of the hidden benefits of being at GDC is I don’t hear as much about what is actually happening at GDC. The conversations are much more focussed, and I seldom spend too much time reading up on announcements and big stories until the week after. However this year, was a very different story.

Last week my inbox was inundated by press announcements either from PR wings of big companies, or from agencies trying to secure interviews and coverage by offering me information under embargo. All of them advocating for the latest AI thing these companies are pushing. I think I have to give you all the credit here as the good folks reading this newsletter and spreading the word. It seems we’re now a big enough outlet that it now warrants trying to get our attention when some new AI shiny gets announced.

So yeah, thanks I guess? No seriously thank you all for reading and supporting our work. This is just a natural by-product of building our wee modestly successful publication.

For this week I figured, given I can’t comment on being at GDC this year, why not comment on the narratives surrounding AI at the event. The sentiment I have surmised both from reading all the big announcements, and from folks on the ground sharing their thoughts with me, was that for every step forward, we’ve taken two backwards. A reek of desperation to advocate for generative AI as people are either increasingly over it, or are seeking more meaningful conversation. I’m sorry to say that if you’re looking for meaningful discourse on AI in the games industry, GDC has opted against that in pursuit of the marketing dollar.

A Round-Up of GDC Headlines

Rather than do a topic-by-topic breakdown of everything that was announced - because I value both your and my sanity - here’s a list of stuff that caught my attention to warrant including:

• ComfyUI, which has built a reputation as being a generally well-liked generative AI open-source toolchain, has now got local AI video generation courtesy of RTX acceleration with Nvidia.

• Google Cloud had a lot to say at GDC. In amongst a very flowery presentation on the sunny uplands of AI in the games industry, they also shared some real work on AI-native games and generative AI production workflows.

• Microsoft’s new PC/hybrid console ‘Project Helix’ will support neural rendering (i.e. AI upscaling), (AI-driven) frame generation and texture compression.

• Xbox’s Copilot will launch on consoles later this year. Providing means to automatically record ‘fun’ moments of gameplay (which your Xbox One could do without AI btw), as well as provide guidance and support on the games you’re playing.

• Razer announced a ‘companion’ AI for QA and their own agentic toolchain.

• Arm is collaborating with Nvidia to build stronger integrations between the former’s CPUs and the latters GPUs.

• Arm is also collaborating with UK studio Sumo Digital to help them evaluate their new AI-upscaling technologies.

• Tencent (re)announced MagicDawn - which was already shown at SIGGRAPH Asia last year - which is their own AI-powered game engine technology for supporting things like global illumination (i.e. lighting), spatial audio, and occlussion culling.

• Not so much a headline, but rather the one thing I heard people get ‘excited’ about, was not one but two different websites have cropped up to try and share insight into which generative AI tools studios are actually using to work on games.

Now this is only the stuff that I felt warranted a mention. I think I read around 30+ news stories and press releases on AI from GDC that ranged from ‘hey that’s actually kinda neat’, to ‘hmm, interesting’, followed by ‘oh well that’s a thing’ to just laughing, deleting the email, and moving on. Sadly, there was far more of the latter than there was of the former.

There was of course some positive stuff when you push pass the PR and focus on the talks. I heard good things from the content my colleague Steve Rabin put together under the banner of game AI, plus from all accounts Rez Graham did a good job in taking over the AI roundtables as Neil Kirby stepped down from the position. I’m looking forward to seeing the talk from EA on how they trained machine learning for the goalkeepers in FIF- sorry, EA Sports FC 26. This looks really interesting.

“Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is?”

Despite all of that, the real conversation was once again generative AI as a tool in the games industry. Lots of sponsored talks on the subject, lots of booths both in the various halls, and a lot of opinions of varying quality.

Speaking of opinions, a lot of headlines were put together off the back of one panel hosted on the GDC ‘Luminaries’ stage, in which Moritz Baier-Lentz, head of gaming partnerships at Lightspeed Venture Partners, i.e. an investment firm with a lot of fingers in AI cookie jars, stated he was “shocked and sad” about the lack of enthusiasm for generative AI and that the industry had not embraced it as much as he had hoped.

I mean I’m sorry, but are we really meant to take that sentiment seriously? With all due respect to the four gentleman on stage - all of whom have been very successful in their respective careers - but between them they have no experience working as an actual game developer (go look them up on LinkedIn, I’ll wait). So once again, we have online discourse on AI in game development being driven by a headline from a panel with:

• Zero experience of actually developing a game.

• Zero experience that helps give context to the value (if any) of an AI tool in a creative workflow.

• Zero experience in the impact of using AI in a creative workflow.

• Zero desire to engage in the issues surrounding generative AI in games.

GDC’s conversation on AI has sadly not evolved over the past 3 years (despite the best efforts of many a speaker) because it feels like we’re still where we were in 2024:

• Lots of booths showcasing tools and tech that, thus far, has not been proven in production. Ranging from the big players, to start-ups that will die in 18 months.

• The discourse of AI entering the industry continues to be surface level and vague.

• Little to no talks on the impact or value - positive, negative, or otherwise - on generative AI tools in production in the main programme.

  • But by god more and more sponsored talks on AI huh?

• The majority of developers, and players, are cemented in their stance that all of this is a waste of time.

We’re having the same conversations again, and again, and again...

A Lack of Meaningful Insights

Now of course a lot of what I would consider to be a lack of meaningful insight stems from the fact that we’re still only 3 years in to this era of AI-tooling in the games industry. Outside of the predominantly small-scale and indie teams shipping games, or at least trying to, there’s very little data out there that can speak to the efficacy of AI tooling in a traditional game production, because nothing at AAA-scale has really shipped yet where AI tooling was there from day one.

So here we are with another year in which a whole bunch of stuff is thrown at us, all in the hope that somewhere, somehow, all of this will turn into profit? There’s no doubting that AI tooling has its uses in specific use cases, but the conversations in most circles are still tinged with a desire to avoid it, or work around it, because we simply don’t know whether this is worth our time. Fortunately the ‘NPC as GPT’ hype has died down (sorta), we’re now entering the ‘AI for everything’ phase, and it’s just another round of the same empty statements and hollow platitudes.

Now yes, I sound horribly cynical, but let me take a moment to reiterate that there was a lot of good stuff mixed in with the ‘meh’. Stuff that has caught my attention as I think ‘hey, maybe they’re onto something?’. Like the work by Arm and Qualcomm in trying to make AI efficient to deploy on mobile. The Double Helix specs talking about texture compression on consoles which would help reduce install sizes if anyone can afford a new Xbox in 2027. Tencent’s MagicDawn also sounds interesting because it’s trying to solve known issues in lighting and audio - high performance low cost audio occlusion would be huge! These are things that are meaningful to the end-user - be they game developer of player - and that’s what the AI discourse continues to lack.

Instead we’ve got one level of discourse happening at conference stage level showing off the new shiny, while trying not to engage with the lower-level - the developer and player level - of conversation. I saw Baier-Lentz lamented that the ongoing layoffs may have dampened people’s enthusiasm for a technology often being used as their replacement. I wonder if he stopped to chat with anyone outside of the barriers placed in Yerba Buena gardens for their perspective? He might get an earful.

Meanwhile I admittedly lost my cool last week when it became a headline across various outlets that Google DeepMind stated in their GDC talk slot for their AI world model Genie 3 that it’s not a practical tool for use as a video game engine, given it cannot retain model consistency.

I mean, not only has many an AI expert pointed this out, but we dedicated multiple issues of to this topic nearly a year ago.

Despite this, we continue to let this superficial discourse dominate the conversation, rather than treat as what it is: hollow. I did state in my BlueSky post that I don’t want to speak ill of the likes of GamesIndustry.biz and that originally reported on this - these are great outlets, they do great work, I read both of them. However, we’re still in an age where too much reporting on AI lacks appropriate editorial critique. If anything the real story here is that Google admitted something that anyone with a solid background in AI in context of game development already knew.

For all of the noise coming out of GDC. I don’t feel like I missed anything major. Outside of the talks - which are the things I value the most - the rest of the AI discourse just feels exactly the same as it did in 2024 when everyone was doing something behind closed doors but few of the big names wanted to commit. The only difference is now there is a larger evidence of commitment but with little to show for it.

No doubt this will change over time, but it highlights once again that for all of the interesting and valuable work happening in the space, a lot of it will be drowned out by the hype.

Oh Just… One More Thing

A big thank you to everyone who reached out to share with me the update on the Arc Raiders situation.

In a recent interview at GamesIndustry.biz, Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund discussed how they have been working to re-record a lot of the dialogue to no de-emphasise the use of AI voices.

It still doesn’t change my thoughts on what is the biggest issue with their approach, in that the game uses the tech without delivering any real value. For studios keen to replicate Embark’s success, the message is that premium quality voice acting can be replaced with AI models, and the audience will (largely) be okay with it.

Fingers crossed I’m not proven right on that one.

Okay, that’s it for this week. Next week: Game AI’s Existential Crisis - Part 3!

Or do I got on a rant about that DLSS5 thing?

Perils of talking about AI in games, there’s always something new to talk about…

Have a good one folks!

• The House of Lords rejects virtually all of the UK government’s prior plans on AI legislation.

• The 2025 public consultation led to over 11,500 responses. Well done!

• A greater need for tighter regulation, transparency, and sovereign AI development.

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 one and all, and welcome back to . This week I would typically be out in San Francisco for GDC. But frankly I’m so busy I really couldn’t afford losing another week out of the office having just been at the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit last month. So here I am writing away. For those of you out there at GDC this week, I hope you’re having a great time, and this will no doubt help explain why you haven’t seen me tromping through the Yerba Buena gardens!

But of course for this week’s edition, I didn’t make life easy for myself. I decided to spend a good chunk of my Sunday reading through the recent report from the UK government’s House of Lords on the state of AI in the creative industries. A topic that has loomed in Ol’Blighty for quite some time now.

But dare I say it, it’s far more optimistic than I expected. Read on!

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

Unpacking the House of Lords Report on AI and Creative Industries

With the UK’s acting government having been in power close to two years now, there’s been very little positive movement in legislation towards AI. As the government continues to push forward with initiatives that are largely disliked by the general public, we have the latest report on the issue from the House of Lords. This 85-page banger not only calls out the naivety of the current plans of the Labour government, but they largely fall in line with public opinion.

See this is why you subscribe and support us. You need someone willing to spend a lazy Sunday burning through coffee and reading through government reports.

A Quick Recap

As we’ve reported over the past year or so, the government had made a number of suggestions as to have to move forward, many of which aligning with big tech and giving them access to the copyrighted material without oversight. These suggestions then framed a public consultation on the issue that was launched over a year ago, which advocated for providing an opt-out system, whereby major AI players could scrape data by default, and allow for the training of (generative) AI models without consent of IP holders and citizens lest they explicitly stated otherwise.

It took the government almost a year to respond after more than 11,500 responses were sent responding to this issue - by comparison a previous consultation in 2024 on generative AI and data protection laws received less than 250. Published in December of last year, It was reported that 88% of submissions supported mandatory AI licensing, and that having a proper regulation on the protection of copyright and IP, alongside transparency in data, was the way forward. Meanwhile the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic continued to lobby the government and pushed for all of this to be resolved as soon as possible.

Since the consultation closed in February of last year, the government has been working to push forward with its initiatives, albeit with a bit of a reset given the overwhelming consensus on AI licensing, but also a change of minister in charge. Having spent just over a year in office Peter Kyle MP moved from his position as Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), and moved into a new role as Business Secretary. It was news I welcomed at the time, given Kyle had shown zero effort to actually engage with the creative industries, yet had numerous meetings with virtually every major player in AI. Perhaps unsurprising that his opinions seemed a little skewed towards screwing over IP holders in pursuit of sunny uplands.

However it’s not been all that rosy since. Liz Kendall MP took over the role in September with an intent to focus more on safe regulation in AI, including challenges issues around deepfakes - something that is long overdue. That said, the DSIT has had little to say on where they’re going to go next with AI and copyright. They’ve since said after the overwhelmingly negative response that "they have no preferred option.” Meanwhile, Kendall has had to continue to put out fires due to not only the disastrously conceived and implemented Online Safety Act, plus the government’s embarrassing ‘free AI training’ imitative in January. Including a bunch of generic, rather uninformative and low-value courses, many of which offered by the very big tech companies who are not interested in actually teaching you about the real issues that AI introduces.

AI, Copyright and the Creative Industry (4th Report)

This brings us to last week, where the House of Lords published their 4th report on “AI, Copyright and the Creative Industries”, responding to the current stance that the UK government has on its proposed legislation.

For anyone outside of the UK, our government operates in two houses: the House of Commons, and the House of Lords. The former is responsible for passing legislation and authorising taxes and expenditure, but is held accountable by the latter. The House of Lords conducts investigations and reports on legislation the government wants to enshrine in law. It’s far from a perfect system, but it has its merits sometimes.

In summary, it’s pretty damning. The House of Lords calls out the previously advertised plans of the government as means to “drift towards tacit acceptance of large-scale, unlicensed use of creative content”. With any gains being made from this arrangement being given “to a small number of US-based firms while harms to UK creators grow.”

Yeah, they did not mince their words.

The house has made six suggestions on where the government should go next. Amongst those we find the following:

• Setting out clear guidance on AI and copyright that will remove rights for companies scrape data in an opt-out model.

• Set out protections both for ‘deepfakes’ and digital clones, but also necessary transparency obligations for training AI models.

• Establish a market for licensing UK IP for AI companies should they wish to use it, and work to prioritise development of UK-based AI models.

There’s a lot more to cover here, so I want to start by looking at their thoughts on copyright and training issues in an age of Generative AI.

Read more

In December of 2024, the first 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. While the original 30-day campaign has since closed, you can still sign up for late pledges via the Kickstarter page.

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Hello all, and welcome to our first Goal State update of 2026. I had planned this for February, and then I blinked and the first quarter has almost wrapped. Good grief, so let’s fill you in on where we are.

Overall Project Update

Since our last update, we’ve had a bunch of small updates on what’s happening with Goal State:

• We closed late pledges, and hit one more backer goal.

  • Now we’ll be adding the Half-Life deep dive to our public YouTube offerings.

• We’ve been recording the theory part of the course.

  • We should have some of the first videos ready to review next month.

• We’ve shared the current state of all of the completed theory writing.

  • With more chapters dropping this month.

• Plus the tutorial code and assets are approaching half-way to completion.

At this point we have three of us all working not to turn the written work into the final assets, and should be in a position to start showing off the final videos in the next month or so.

Read the Completed Written Content

In our last update I mentioned that we have around 70,000 of the written work complete. As of this week we’re just over 100,000 words, and around 60% of chapters completely written. The state of these unfinished are a mixture of:

1. I want to do more research on relevant industry examples.

2. I just need to tidy them up and finish it.

3. In the case of 3 chapters (of 21), I haven’t started them.

But I wanted to show everyone where we are with this, so earlier this month on the Discord server I shared a link to be able to see and review the current state of all 12 completed chapters. Click here to access the document in the Overleaf editor (which is where I am predominantly writing the course).

There’s some key points to raise here:

• This only includes chapters that are 100% content complete and only require spelling/grammar/accuracy review.

• This version of the document includes 12 completed chapters, and is 208 pages and ~76,000 words long.

  • To give you an idea my progress in writing remaining chapters, the version I am working in as of this morning is 296 pages and ~101,000 words long.

• If you have an Overleaf account and wish to be a reviewer, where you can leave feedback on parts of the material (see Liam’s great work on the left hand side), feel free to get in touch in the Discord and we can add you to the document.

• When a chapter is completed in the main document, I will be transferring it across for you to check out.

The full list of completed chapters at this time are:

• 0-0 Welcome to Game AI 101

• 1-1 Foundations of AI

• 1-2 Computing Fundamentals

• 1-3 The Basics of Search

• 1-4 Tree Search Algorithms

• 1-8 A Brief Introduction to Machine Learning

• 2-1 Introducing Game AI

• 2-5 Finite State Machines

• 3-1 Designing AI for Games

• 3-2 The Value of Mixing Methods

• 3-3 Game AI as Theatre

• 3-4 Smoke & Mirrors

Right now my priority is to complete 2-2: History of AI in Games and 2-3: Pathfinding Algorithms in the coming week or so and add them to the document. After this I am finishing up 2-6: Behaviour Trees, and then 1-6: AI Planning and 2-7: Goal Oriented Action Planning.

The writing is admittedly a little scattershot, but that’s also because of the order in which tutorial materials are being prepared (which is in a slightly different order).

Recording Update

Right now recording is split across four axis:

1. Tidying up completed scripts for recording.

   1. After all the written version doesn’t always translate into video delivery.

2. Recording the tidied up scripts.

   1. As we get into our more meaty chapters, recording takes a couple of hours at a time such that we can get the quality we want.

3. Preparing the video content.

   1. This means gathering from our existing assets, creating new diagrams, building presentation slides, or recording some of our demo code projects.

4. Editing the videos together.

   1. A big part here is figuring out flow and how to break up material.

   2. Rather than simply give you a chapter that is 1 hour and 10 minutes long, we break up the material into the corresponding section headers - or where it makes the most sense. So one chapter can be several videos in the final edit.

Right now we’re a little behind on recording, having only recorded about half what I planned by this time of year.

A Small Health Issue

In truth this process is more challenging than expected due to health problems I have experienced in the past year. I have suffered from an ongoing case of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR), commonly known as ‘silent reflux’. This is an ailment where an excess of stomach acid creeps up the throat and into the vocal chords. It affects your voice, while also leading to an excess of mucous / phlegm in the throat, and a sore throat.

Let me stress that, overall, I’m fine, and in good health. However LPR can have a severe impact on your voice and sadly that is my most precious commodity. After all in the past year I have gone around giving talks, engaged with clients, making YouTube videos and of course recording Goal State. But there are days where I can only comfortably use my voice in that ‘mode’ (anyone who knows me personally can attest the ‘YouTube voice’ isn’t my regular delivery) for an hour at best.

It has also meant my voice sounds deeper and more ‘croaky’. You may have noticed this particularly if you watched the episode on Amnesia: The Bunker last year where my voice is notably lower than usual (viewers even asked about it in the comments).

The good news is, I have been on a range of medication combined with small changes in diet in an effort to address this. I am generally a rather health conscious individual, but specific food, drink, and lifestyle can exacerbate this, and I’ve spent much of the past 2-3 months trying to get on top of it given the medication alone was not enough - and it was also causing side effects due to prolonged usage.

So this is a long way in saying, we’re still pushing forward, but this has slowed me done somewhat.

Practical Update

As detailed in the previous update, Andrew Roper has came on board to support getting all the tutorial materials up to my intended level of quality. Andrew is doing a great job right now as he builds the two strands of practical materials in parallel across two engines (Unity and Unreal). At this point most of the codebase is complete for the early segment of the course on uninformed and informed search algorithms, plus tree search algorithms (Minimax, MCTS), and the next step is implementing all the other pathfinding algorithms (Flow Fields, D* Lite, JPS etc.) in both engines.

But here’s a little of some of the stuff we’ve designed in the Unity project. We wanted to be able to visualise how different algorithms work by visualising how states spaces operate. So these examples show we can run different algorithms in a grid structure and how it leads to us finding paths to states. Not here we show visited states (gold/orange), states in the agenda to be visited (red), the active state (blue) and then the path (purple).

Plus of course we want to get some Dijkstra’s in there given that’s also useful for pathfinding.

Right now the grid is rigid given in the pathfinding tutorials we start playing around with the space by changing its shape, and then you start seeing how these algorithms differ, and then as we go into in the pathfinding chapter we start allowing you to run A* with different heuristics, and then variants of the algorithm to get better results.

As I say, these are all implemented in both Unity and Unreal, and then for the tutorial videos we’ll be providing you with some boilerplate code to start, and then walk through to implement the algorithms.

We should have more to show on this as we continue to put it together.

Grab Your Desktop Wallpapers

One of the backer rewards that I’ve just forgot to get done - sorry about that. We have a collection of wallpapers using the background art assets we had designed for Goal State. You have two versions of each: one with the logo as shown above, and another with a smaller version of the logo in a more reduced format in the corner.

You can find them right here at this link. They’re available in 4K format (2160p). If you have a custom size that would be beneficial, then let me know and I can ask Andy (our graphic designer) to make some updates for me.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it. We’ve made a lot of great progress since the start of the year, and my hope is for the next update you can start to see more written material ready to review, and the first videos will be edited enough for us to show them to you.

It’s all finally coming together, and I have milestones set internally for what we want done for Goal State by end of Q1. So I better go make that happen!

-Tommy

• Metacritic Reacts to VideoGamer’s AI-Generated Reviews

• TikTok Generating Inappropriate AI Adverts Without Permission

• My time at the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit

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.

Hey all, and welcome to this week’s edition of . I’m back home after travelling to Lisbon for the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit. So I figured as I try to get my working life back together I will catch up on the news and give you an insight into what it was like to attend.

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

Announcement: Vote for Your Reader-Selected Newsletter Topic

It’s time to have another ready-selected issue of the newsletter come your way next month. While it was a tad delayed due to all sorts of editorial timelines, the first voted for issue was the breakdown of AI surveys and finding some meaning in amongst the various editorial spins being put together by various organisations.

I had some thoughts on what might be of interest for you all. Some are unselected topics from our last year’s poll, but also I added in some more current topics that might be of interest. Check it out below:

• Comparing EU and South Korean AI Laws: As South Korea’s legislation comes into effect, how does it compare to the EU and what should games studios be wary of?

• Digging into Steam Data on AI-Tagged Games: The number of AI-tagged games continues to surge on Steam, but are they actually making any money? We dig in to find out.

• Explaining the DRAM Crisis and its Future: The recent surge in DRAM prices hasn’t emerged from nowhere. For the people in the know, this has been coming for a while now. How did we get here? And where are we going.

The plan is for the voted issue to be published around end of March/start of April. So get voting and we’ll make a judgement after the poll closes in a week’s time.

The Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit 2026

So yes last week I was out in Lisbon for Gamescom Dev (i.e. Devcom’s) leadership summit: a 3-day event positioned towards people in leadership across the video games industry. This ranged from the leads of smaller businesses, be they indie studios, co-dev teams or vendors, to the managers and C-Suite of some of the largest players in the industry. I was invited to be the closing keynote speaker of a bumper second day that included a variety of talks, roundtables, fireside chats and hot take sessions.

One aspect of these events is that they operate under a veil of secrecy. A non-disclosure is signed by all participants, and I am limited in how much I can report back to you. However, I want to stress that this is far less nefarious than it may sound if you’re not familiar with these types of events. An NDA is vital given many people here are discussing aspects of their business, be it strategy, performance, and upcoming products - in fact I spent over an hour at dinner one evening having a really fun discussion about the underlying tech behind a highly anticipated 2026 AAA title. But also they’re sharing their own thoughts about issues that affect our sector. Given the nature of this industry, should I report back on some of the things said, that could have an impact on that company for no other reason than the person involved expressed an opinion. Not because anything said was questionable or concerning - in most instances at least - but rather in a world where business leaders need to be seen as resolute, confident, and pragmatic, to reveal yourself as anything to the contrary - to be, dare I say, human - can have consequences.

It’s also a matter of trust. It creates a bubble of transparency and openness that wouldn’t exist elsewhere, and it was interesting to hear the thoughts of people who are in critical leading positions of some of the most beloved and successful franchises and studios in the world as they tell me about the things that keep them up at night.

I don’t sugar-coat it when I say it gives them sleepless nights: this was a point raised in presentations other than mine, and a recurring theme that emerged among attendees was the sense of validation in knowing that other people in similar positions are worried about the same things they are. As cliché as it sounds, it’s lonely at the top, and knowing what to do in the moment is daunting.

This segues nicely into my area of expertise: the boom of generative AI in the video games industry. I was invited both to present a talk on the subject, as well as be a roundtable captain alongside Tsahi Liberman. Having open and frank conversations about whether studios are using generative AI in their games, what their concerns are for its adoption, and what impact all of this could have in the long run.

It was encouraging to see that many of the conversations I had, be it during the roundtables, after my talk, or throughout the week, were focussed on issues we have discussed in this here publication in the past year or two:

• Knowing where to draw the line on generative AI adoption. Focussing on generative AI in processes, but not in game production.

• The importance of recognising need for good AI policy in studios.

• Acknowledging the strong dislike of generative AI appearing in products in the PC and console spaces.

• The lack of understanding and knowledge of whether generative AI will actually deliver value.

• The long-term implications of embracing generative AI be it in player sentiment, flooding of the market, regulatory hurdles, and the quality of games.

Again, I can’t get into specifics, but it was encouraging to see a lot of the issues I raise are things that are being discussed at these companies, and that my presentation helped validate a lot of their concerns on how the industry is moving forward.

Ultimately it was a really interesting event, and a pleasure to get to hang out with a lot of really fun people who had been involved in the development of some of the biggest games in the industry. A thank you once again to the organisers for having me present.

AI (and Games) in the News

Let’s wrap up this edition with some of the headlines of the past week or two.

Publisher Finji Fights Back at TikTok’s AI-Generated Manipulation of Assets

A really bizarre and quite disturbing story that broke on IGN last week was about game publisher Finji, famous for their involvement in titles such as Nights in the Woods, Tunic, and last year’s Usual June. Finji made public of an ongoing dispute with TikTok of using generative AI to create modified version of their advertising assets without their knowledge.

TikTok has AI features that allow for them to publish variations of your advertisement using generative tools so as to reach broader demographics. These are opt-in by default and Finji had refused to adopt them. However, CEO and co-founder Rebekah Saltsman stated that they have been in an ongoing dispute with the social media company in the past few months as it was creating adverts that showcased "sexualised, racist, and sexist representation" of the Usual June game from last year. TikTok initially denied being responsible for this, and now an investigation is underway.

VideoGamer Removed from MetaCritic After AI Review of Resident Evil Requiem

Once beloved gaming website Videogamer has fallen from grace in recent years. It had a strong following in its early days and had a team of rather eclectic voices who would subsequently go on to do great work in other areas of gaming press (including Chris Bratt who would later found the YouTube series ‘People Make Games’).

More recently the publication was bought up by the notorious Clickout Media, who are renowned for buying up sites to then fill them with SEO-optimised clickbait to push their advertisements towards gambling and casinos. During this time most of the staff were fired, with the intend to move towards maintaining a crew that essentially micro-managed AI.

Well, this all blew up last week when their review of the recently released Resident Evil: Requiem got the internet ablaze. Not just because it’s AI-generated nonsense - see the quote below - but also that it was still considered a valid publication on Metacritic.

Resident Evil Requiem is not just a victory lap for Capcom’s survival horror dynasty; it is a chainsaw-revving, blood-soaked testament to why we love getting scared stupid. It is the sort of finale that effectively grabs the franchise by the lapels, shakes it violently, and demands you acknowledge just how far it has come since the tank-control days of 1996. While other series limp toward their conclusions, RE9 arrives with the confidence of a Tyrant smashing through a brick wall.

I mean, I know not all games journalists are poets, but this is so cliché-laden and lacking in any nuance that you get the gist it was generated by GPT.

Further digging into this found that while the review clearly looks AI-generated, the author and their bio and headshot have been generated with GPT as well - plus those of other journos at the site. This has subsequently lead to Metacritic removing the publication from the site, and a statement being issued that highlights that their policy is to never include AI generated reviews, and will remove any publications found to be adopting this approach.

The shadiness of this aside, it’s important that Metacritic takes a stance on this given the (over-inflated) importance it has in the eyes of executives. Given it’s often used to highlight critical reception of titles in investor calls, and has also been the source for decision making in bonuses given to developers. AI content in this space has the potential to manipulate this process.

New Tool for Catching AI Disclosures on Steam

The recent Steam NextFest has once again raised questions surrounding the adoption of generative AI in PC games. To that end, an new browser plugin for FireFox and Chrome, entitled ‘AI Warning for Steam’ is built to identify whether a Steam page has an AI disclosure and put it front and centre in your face.

Should the disclosure be identified, it presents it as shown above as a modal pop-up, and blurs out the rest of the page until you have acknowledged it. Thus ensuring you know 100% that there was an AI disclosure for this game.

At a time where it feels Steam is de-emphasising the adoption of AI tooling - an issue I complained about a few weeks back - this is the consumers working to make it front and centre.

At the time of writing, this plugin now has over 4000 active users across Chrome and Firefox.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for this week. I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things after the Leadership Summit trip tired me out. But expect a Goal State update for backers by the end of the week!

Welcome to The Take, our editorial issues of the AI and Games Newsletter where we dig into the bigger issues impacting artificial intelligence in the video games industry. Issues of The Take are exclusive to premium subscribers of AI and Games.

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Hello one and all and welcome to this week’s edition of . Today this issue lands in your inbox as I am attending the Gamescom Dev Leadership Summit in Lisbon: a 3-day retreat for leading professionals in games to come together and discuss the issues impacting our sector. I was invited out here to present a keynote on AI which will take place later this evening, wish me luck!

The leadership summit is designed largely to operate behind closed doors, and we agree to an NDA upon arrival. This means that my ability to report back on this for readers will be quite limited. That said, I will strive to put together a summary next week that covers some of the talking points raised throughout my time here, and reflect on my own experiences with respect to my non-disclosure.

In the meantime, I was around 30-40% through writing another topic for this edition of The Take, only for the news about Microsoft’s leadership swap to blaze across the internet last Friday. Usually at this point I’d just soldier on and we’d make that but one of the headlines in our news round-up, but actually this felt worth changing my existing plans given it touches on a point I raised just last month.

Onwards!

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Announcements

Just one this week, short’n’sweet.

New Case Study on GameBot’s COTA Demo

Not content with launching a case study on Snowcap at the start of the month, we just published a new piece both on the website and YouTube about COTA: a technical demo created by GameBot designed to showcase how they have built an LLM architecture capable of playing entire rounds of a tactical first-person shooter.

The COTA demo is available now for anyone wanting to try it out. I was invited a few weeks in advance to try it out and give my impressions. Plus we had a stack of questions for GameBot about how it all works, and had the pleasure of getting insights from the project lead Mu Yang. You can read it on the site now, or check out the accompanying YouTube video which has a lot of footage of the demo in action.

The Take: Microsoft Gaming’s Change of Leadership

Last month I wrote my 2026 predictions issue: my overview of every major talking point I expect to be coming our way in the next 12 months. After publishing, I spoke with some members of our Discord community as well as folk out in the industry about what I wrote - it’s true I do actually meet folks who read this newsletter in the real world! While some readers argued I’d went for low-hanging fruit, the one that raised a few eyebrows was #9: The Death of Xbox as a Platform.

To quote the end of that segment:

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.

This argument was driven largely by both the repeated failure to give a reason and justification for the Xbox as a console, but also with how the gaming vertical sits within Microsoft’s broader business. To my mind, it’s not a sustainable strategy in the long run for them to maintain Xbox as a portfolio of hardware to sell subscriptions given the parent company’s broader goals and AI-focussed aspirations.

Now one thought that had crossed my mind - that I wasn’t confident enough to predict - was that Phil Spencer could step down and allow his next-in-line, Sarah Bond, to take the mantle. Spencer would then assume a different role within the Xbox space at Microsoft. However what transpired last week, was even worse than what I had anticipated, and it only further accelerates the trends I’ve observed that my prediction was based on.

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February 24th 2026 saw the release of COTA: a technical demo showcasing GameBot’s new AI bots that are powered by large language models (LLMs).

COTA, which stands for Cognition, Operation, Tactics, and Assistance aims to highlight how the developers have built an LLM-driven AI architecture that can reason on micro- and macro-gameplay levels, react to changes in game state, plan strategically to achieve tactical goals, and coordinate a team of both AI agents and humans in real-time. Though the real highlight, is that GameBot asserts that their solution gets around the latency problem, with the underlying architecture capable of coordinating all of these bots with a response time of less than 100ms.

For this edition I’m going to dig into how COTA’s underlying AI architecture works. With the demo now live for anyone to download and try out, we were invited to playtest a pre-release version to get an idea of how it all works, and put together some initial impressions of how it all plays in the moment.

It’s an interesting idea for sure, and I can attest that it works: the bots are fast, responsive and capable of playing through entire rounds of gameplay in ways that feel coordinated and sensible. But it feels like there’s still a bit of work to be done both in the quality of underlying behaviours as well as how this is all communicated to the user.

We’re going to dig into the underlying architecture of the bots and how they operate in action, plus we also had GameBot answer my questions about how this all works and what the future of this tech is shaping up to be.

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GameBot and the COTA Demo

So a quick overview of what the demo is all about before I get into the weeds of it. Built in Unreal Engine, this demo has you play a stripped down clone of Counterstrike’s Dust 2, and has players face off in a 5v5 game of bomb defusal - with the team of counter-terrorists defending their side of the map while the terrorists seek to plant the bomb and set it off to score for the round.

But the focus is on the bots you play alongside. In each round of the demo I was playing alongside four bots, against a team of five bots. However unlike a regular playthrough, I can observe at any time not just the strategy the bots are making, but deep-dive into their decision making, plus I am being told by the bots what to do in the moment. Given I’m part of the team, I am given instructions on how to proceed in ways that fit the broader strategy, and this updates and changes as the teams overall gameplay progresses. The devs are confident that this architecture provides a general purpose decision making framework that can adapt to different genres as well as scale to other game modes and situations.

The project stems from a company called GameBot, who have dev teams across North America and Asia, and have been involved in building bots for mobile games since their inception in 2019. The company has cut its teeth building AI bots for the likes of PUBG Mobile plus League of Legends: Wild Rift, the portable version of Riot’s beloved MOBA. These bots have ranged in their technical complexity but often using a combination of traditional game AI alongside supervised learning and reinforcement learning techniques - which is an increasingly popular approach to bots in mobile gaming. But this is the first time around - to my knowledge at least - that they have built a bot that is being driven by generative models.

It’s worth stressing as we move forward, that this is distinct from the MLMove project that we discussed late last year. MLMove was the use of a lightweight 21MB transformer - the type of neural network used for large language models - that sought to handle the movement for modded bots in Counterstrike by learning from data from esports players. COTA on the other hand is dealing with more than just the movement, it’s handling both individual actions and team tactics, while also recognising and responding to the player’s actions - and as we’ll discuss in a moment, it does so without the use of player data.

So let’s kick things off with a quick breakdown of what it’s like to play the demo, and what is happening under the hood as you play. As you can see in the image above, I can bring up a UI the left hand side of the screen what our teams strategy is - both the global strategy, as well as what my priorities are for the round. As the round continues, both the strategy of the team, as well as what individual team members should be doing shifts accordingly.

For this to work as shown, the underlying COTA architecture is running a two-tiered system, there is the commander layer, which is the strategic layer for all the bots, that is thinking on the global or macro scale. It’s assessing the map control, the intensity of combat, and potential strategy of the opposing team, all while analysing the overall status and health of your team. The commander will then dictate the overall strategy: are we going to attack a point, maintain control over a section of the map or rotating to another, or fall back.

Then there is the operator layer: which is the individual bots. Each of the bots is focussed solely on their own individual behaviour in the moment: reading the game state to then decide how to move, aim, shoot etc.

Decisions from the commander layer are filtered down into a individual strategies for each operator. Meanwhile the operators acknowledge the strategy, and factor that into their decision making alongside how to create a movement path (deciding where to move towards and how to angle the view), alongside the contextual placement and actions such as firing or throwing grenades.

Now as you can see from the image above, the output of the LLM is a ton of text, but how does that turn into gameplay? Let’s go a little deeper into the tech stack.

The COTA Tech Stack

Given we mentioned it from the top, we know COTA is using Large Language Models, but I wanted more information on what’s really going on, and credit to GameBot - after I sent a stack of questions about the structure of input data, processing of game state, the training mechanisms for the LLM, the size of the model, the context window and prompting practices, and behaviour execution, I got my answers from the devs directly, with help from COTA’s project lead Mu Yang, who is also the director of algorithms at GameBot.

The first thing Yang clarified for me is the system is dual-layered, meaning it runs multiple models in the architecture. Separating the commander from the execution was a deliberate decision given LLMs historically have been shown to struggle with handling macro and micro behaviours in parallel. Hence having the commander do the big thinking while the operators acknowledge this in their own behaviour seems like a natural fit. This also helped keep the 100ms limit on reasoning that the team had planned for, given this was considered an acceptable timeframe for fast and responsive behaviours.

But how are these models are trained? As I mentioned earlier MLMove was achieved by pulling down scores of data from professional players, but COTA is running this entirely without user data. First up, the Commander needs to have a broader understanding of how the game plays, and be capable of processing information about the game state effectively.

Mu Yang: We ran extensive internal tests and found that an 8 billion parameter model is the right balance [totalling 16.5GB in disk size]. It’s large enough to reason and understand the complex situations. We begin with supervised fine-tuning, or SFT. Based on prior commercial projects, we built a data synthesis pipeline to generate gameplay samples. Each sample contains a game state, a text instruction, and a game action. A subset of this data is annotated with chain-of-thought reasoning. We then apply GRPO-based reinforcement learning on the remaining data. We created rewards for action correctness and output validity. Finally, we used reinforcement learning from human feedback to align the commander’s decisions with human intent.

Meanwhile the operators require a similar but different approach, given they need to have clearer understanding of the rules of the game, such that they stay on target and on point.

Yang: The operator follows the same overall training structure, producing a ‘teacher’ model we call ‘Operator Thinking’. Operator Thinking receives richer inputs than commander, including first-person visuals, map information, game rules, and high-level instructions from the commander. Its output includes both reasoning and the textual action descriptions. At this stage, the model demonstrates strong generalization and can adapt to new maps or rule sets.

So as Yang described, the original operator model is capable of making intelligent decisions about what to do in the moment. But the thing is, it’s too big. Hence as described, this first operator model is what is known as a teacher. GameBot then use an approach known as the Teacher-Student model, also referred to as knowledge distillation, where a smaller version of the model - called the Student - is trained by distilling down the information in the original teacher model into something smaller.

This modified student model also has game rules and map knowledge being mapped into it directly, alongside compressed state descriptions and a game specific action head to the attention layers to help with multi-action execution. So while distilling down key information from the original model, plus making these additional tweaks, it means it can make decisions within the 100ms limit.

Now what you see in the commander and operator UI layers is the outputs being generated by the LLM. This is being fed from information from the game state, and then it’s being processed. Each operator is gathering information from the current frame using traditional game AI methods such as environmental queries about whether they can see opponents, as well as basic information as to their current position and movement and status. This character-centric approach prevents giving bots any information from the game state they should not have in the moment. This is then translated into a text-based prompt that is fed into the LLM, and what you’re seeing in these overlays is the output. This text is then parsed and translated into actions in-game, and this is all being done server-side behind layers of security to prevent it being manipulated.

Yang: All inference runs server side. The operator runs on the server, and its actions are sent directly to the game server. Both systems run in the same server cluster to minimize latency. There are no predefined behavior scripts. All actions are generated by the model itself.

Our First Impressions

Having spent several hours playing through the COTA demo over the past couple of weeks, it really got me thinking about on multiple levels. The efficacy of the tech: does it actually work in context? But also how does it feel to play a demo where I am working these bots, and am also - to a certain degree - having my behaviour governed by one.

I’m left with some mixed feelings about it. For one thing it is technically impressive. The bots do work: the team are executing entirely via the LLMs. There is a sense of overall collaboration, they react to changes in the game state, they are capable of acting in the world in ways that make sense the majority of the time. Outside of a few hiccups, the performance of the game was generally quite smooth, and I didn’t notice any impact from the LLMs on the server running their inference. However, there are a number of qualitative factors to consider, both in the performance of the bots as well the way in which this is integrated that make it difficult to enjoy the demo itself.

Strategically the commander is capable of both devising tactics, breaking them down for individuals, reacting to changes, and then reformulating the plan in real-time. This was interesting to observe as things changed, during a round, as well as having it observe what I do. After all I would sometimes follow orders, and other times just ignore it - or actually fail to understand what it wanted. It’s capable of reacting to this accordingly - though sometimes I noticed it just doesn’t give me anything to do? Perhaps it’s just fed up with me. Admittedly it was more fun to watch teams of bots go at it against one another. It strikes me that could be a game mode in and of itself if you can feed your ideas to the commander.

Though I noticed several times that it employed some... questionable strategy, or felt repetitive. Far too often the strategy as an attacker was to push up on Alpha by splitting the team between ‘alphalong’ and ‘catwalk’. We very rarely, if ever, attacked Bravo. Meanwhile it feels like there’s a need to dictate to operators the level of urgency with which the commander’s strategy should be executed, or by having more global state knowledge. I watched as my team lost several rounds where we either failed to catch a defender defusing the bomb, took too long to rotate given they would go all the way back to spawn, or in some instances failed to defuse the bomb in time despite us having control of the point, and the opposing team was all dead.

I do think more could be done both in the movement and in the final execution layers. Given I would see bots bunch up turning corners or entering areas of the map, making it all too easy for them to get wiped out. Meanwhile I noticed in spectator mode that a lot of bots take shots when they’re behind cover, or have their view either lurch around, or snap to an enemy’s location too aggressively. The latter is certainly a difficulty feature, but a lot of this could be refined by building more fleshed out behavioural macros that the LLM outputs could be processed into.

Ultimately for me, the big problems with the demo - which was addressed to some degree during the preview window - was the lack of UX design surrounding the bots. This isn’t a generative AI problem, it’s a game AI problem - and if you’ve followed for a while, you know how often we talk about using additional flourishes in art, animation, UI, and audio to help communicate the behaviour of NPCs - and for me a lot of what would really help sell these bots is currently missing. Naturally of course this is a demo about the tech, but I don’t think you can sell one without the other, and so I want to break down what was perhaps for me the biggest hurdle I had when playing.

As you’ll have noticed throughout, there’s a huge amount of text on screen, be it the global strategy, or my individual actions, and those of others. Even when it’s just the immediate actions sent to me by the commander, it relies on a lot of built-in knowledge about the map design and even some terminology about what I’m meant to do. Of course I’m going to learn that over time (and I’m not a Counterstrike player so it did take minute) but the issue is I have to stop looking at the centre of the screen - where the action is - to focus on text coming in via a text field. This also updates frequently and trying to read all of that while in the thick of combat is a big ask. For me this can be mitigated in a number of ways:

• Adding voice lines and barks for the bots and the commander.

• Having the UI and HUD highlight where I’m meant to be going.

• Simple UX cues to indicate whether I’m operating in line with the intended strategy.

During the preview window the demo was updated to include barks - which for those unfamiliar is a way to communicate information in a condensed format - and while it’s going through a text-to-speech pipeline that sounded pretty rough, it already made a huge difference. Suddenly having a lot of game state information - and the intended actions of the bots - be condensed into short audio soundbites was really useful. I could just listen to them speak to me, and then react accordingly. The thing that’s now missing is having the commander clearly tell me whether I’m adhering to the strategy or not, given I would rather not have to focus too much on that text field.

The most recent version also includes the ability to speak into the microphone, where I use a speech to text pipeline to communicate with the bots. I sadly didn’t find much value in it, given I didn’t really feel like anything I said was having any material impact. I would try and share information about my current strategy, where I spotted targets and ask for what to do. But I never really felt like this input had value, nor were they really responding to me. I will stress as well I don’t enjoy talking to NPCs, given it adds an additional level of cognitive load where I had to think about not just what I want to say, but how I say it such that an AI bot will interpret it. After all first it has to get past my Scottish accent - and I noted several times the speech-to-text only understood half of what I said, but also I have to make sure I’m having to think of how to express this information such that the LLM will process it. This was a similar issue that I had not that long ago when Ubisoft invited me to try out the Teammates demo - which I wrote about in our weekly newsletter over at AIandGames.com. So it’s not necessarily an issue specific to COTA, but rather a problem that this type of game design will have to reckon with in the future.

For me it’s about doubling down on the UX design, particularly in audio barks and the HUD. If the devs can work through that, then it could really add value to the player’s experience.

Closing

So that’s the COTA demo for you. As mentioned earlier the project is out now, and it’s free to download and check it out. I’ve spent a few hours with it over the past couple of weeks, and I started getting more adventurous with it over time. Plus GameBot are encouraging people interested in the project to join them in their Discord server to share your thoughts and give feedback on the project. Links are at the bottom of this article.

• Check out the COTA demo at:
  https://gamebot.ai/product/cota-apply?channel=kl_01
  

• Visit the GameBot Discord:
  https://discord.gg/vWrGCHGsKc

A thank you to GameBot for reaching out to us try out the project and collaborate on this issue, and for taking the time to answer our questions as well. It’s nice when we get to ask more technically complex questions to the PR team and then the devs answer them for us. It’s very much appreciated.

• We talk to Supercell about their AI 2026 Innovation Lab as applications close this week.

• Game AI Uncovered volume 4 is out now, with words from yours truly.

• EA Sports FC using generative AI support commentary.

• Plus tech specs dropping on PC a reaction to AI-driven RAM shortages?

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 ! For this week’s edition I sat down for a chat with Taavi Paananen and Matias Varjonen to talk about the 2026 iteration of Supercell’s AI Innovation Lab. What was a 10-week event located in Helsinki in 2025 has now expanded into a 9-week programme being hosted at multiple sites around the world that is providing financial support, AI resources, and mentoring for aspiring teams and individuals to experiment with how to use AI to build games never seen before.

With the deadline for applications closing this week on February 22nd, I dig into what Supercell have been up to, give you a breakdown of what this programme is offering, and chat with Taavi and Matias about the broader plans and aspirations of the AI innovation team.

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News and Announcements

Alrighty, before we get into our big story, a quick run through of some announcements, plus a couple of headlines.

Game AI Uncovered Volume 4 is Out Now

The Game AI Uncovered series, which includes a chapters written by game AI professionals on their projects, has released a shiny new 4th edition. Edited once again by Paul Roberts, this edition includes behind-the-scenes insights in the making of games such as Undisputed, Dirt, Grid, Wherewolf, Psychonauts 2, and Hawken Reborn.

In amongst all this awesome stuff, I have also written my second chapter for this series - a beginner’s guide on AI character design. It’s great to be part of this all over again, though as I discussed on LinkedIn I had forgotten which volume my work would appear in. I almost bought a copy last week until Paul reminded me I get one for being a co-author. It speaks to the amount of work that is required to go from initial draft to launch, and congrats once again to Paul and my fellow co-authors.

The book is out now via the Routledge website, and other booksellers.

AI-First Publisher Krafton Clarifies AI Use in Project Windless

Announced last week at PlayStation’s most recent ‘State of Play’ event, Project Windless is developed by Krafton Montreal Studio, and has players control a 9-foot humanoid rooster named Rekon. Inspired by the book series “The Bird That Drinks Tears”, the game appears to borrow from the Dynasty Warriors formula, yet somehow looks even more violent and ridiculous. I am officially intrigued…

Given that Krafton have previously declared they’re moving forward to becoming an AI-driven business, it does lead to questions about pretty much every single production they’re working on as to how much Generative AI is involved, given it continues to be something that the vast majority of players are simply not interested.

As reported by Victoria Phillips Kennedy at Eurogamer, Krafton responded to questions on this and stated that the game doesn’t use generative AI in the game itself. Only exploring it “internally during exploratory phases”:

"For Project Windless, the Montreal team is taking a traditional, craftsmanship-driven approach to single-player development. The team primarily uses AI internally during exploratory phases to support iteration and efficiency rather than as a central, player-facing feature of the game.

The game is currently aiming for a 2026 launch date and is planned for PC and PS5.

Upcoming Lego Batman the Latest Game to Drop RAM Specs During AI Drought

Releasing on May 26th, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is looking to be on the big releases of Q2. Heavily by the wide range of movies of the popular DC character, and the Arkham series of games, this caught many people’s attention when it was announced during the Game Awards last year.

The other reason it caught people’s attention was that it originally had a system requirement of 32GB of RAM, which is quite high for a new title even now in 2026. However it was noted last week on a Steam announcement - much like IO Interactive’s 007: First Light before it - that it has since dropped the RAM requirements down to 16GB.

In an age where RAM costs continue to increase due to AI datacentre demand choking up supply, I think we’re going to see a lot more effort by studios to optimise titles at release and trying to low the memory requirements as much as possible.

The AI Crunch on Hardware Only Gets Worse

As we’ve discussed in recent weeks, the situation with hardware shortages driven by the rush to build AI datacentres is really ramping up. I knew things were going to be bad this year, but it’s interesting - and depressing - to see just how quickly this is ramping up.

In the last week I’ve seen four different stories crop up on this trend:

• The Steam Deck OLED is currently out of stock in the US and Japan, with Valve confirming there will be stock fluctuations throughout the year.

• The ASUS Rog Ally X has seen a price increase of just shy of $200 in Japan - because it runs on a faster version DDR5 RAM.

• Rumours are abound that Sony will delay any PlayStation 6 plans due to the current RAM crisis - which lets face it, could last for a couple of years.

• Hard drive manufacturers Western Digital and Seagate have sold their entire 2026 production quota already. Where is it going? AI data centres.

It’s only going to get worse before it gets better. Who knows, maybe when the bubble bursts you can some new hard drives and memory at a discount?

Unity and Godot Share the AI Headlines For Completely Different Reasons

So yeah, two stories this week that are very different for each other. The first came from the recent earnings call from Unity where CEO Matthew Bromberg addressed their current AI offerings by stating their new AI toolchain - which will be showcased at GDC 2026 - will “remove as much friction from the creative process as possible”. Essentially they’re expanding their generative AI tools to make it easier to create assets and code.

As Chris Kerr wrote on GameDeveloper, Bromberg suggested that it will “enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform—so it's simple to move from prototype to finished product.”

Spoken like someone who has never shipped a game before, but okay…

Meanwhile, Unity’s emerging (and still largely liked) competitor Godot has suffered from some of it’s own AI woes given it’s an open source game engine.

Thanks again to Chris for writing up this piece about how the team maintaining the GitHub repository for Godot are being inundated by pull requests (changes to the engine code that are being offered up to integrate into the project) that they suspect are being generated by AI given their quality. You can catch Godot engine’s project manager Rémi Verschelde’s comments below.

EA Using Generative AI in Sports Commentary - A Natural Evolution?

Last one for you this week comes from a recent interview in the BBC with football commentators Guy Mowbray and Sue Smith on their voice work for EA Sports FC. More specifically for us, they highlight that EA is now adopting generative AI to help support the workloads put upon each of these presenters.

While the adoption of generative AI in voice performance is a contentious issue - ranging from SAG-AFTRA strikes to even my own op-ed on its usage in Arc Raiders - sports commentary always struck me as a sensible place for it be adopted. As Mowbray himself states, working on commentary for sports games is a “never-ending job” as they need to update voice work for new player - with over 20,000 names in more recent entries as they include more leagues in both the men’s and women’s sport - plus addressing new terminology, and adding flavour. As Smith says the team works on this for hours a day for months of the year, and it adds a lot of strain to their voices as they add lots of different variations on the same sentence - given it has to have contextual relevance - all the while ensuring their voices “have to be perfect”.

The use of AI is seeking to remove some of the strain on their workload, while working to maintain the overall quality. It’ll be interesting to see how this all comes together in future versions of the game.

Supercell’s Plans to Kickstart AI Innovation

As regular readers can attest, 2025 was a pretty crazy year in the space of AI for video games. There’s a lot of companies making moves throughout, but the one I was watching from afar is perhaps not who many would think of, the mobile gaming giant Supercell.

Headquartered in Helsinki with offices and studios across the world, the studio famous for titles such as Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans and Clash Royale had been exploring the current state of machine learning and generative AI for game development; hosting an AI meet-up in San Francisco during GDC, and at other events in cities where their studios were based - ironically I was invited to one in London last year, but I was visiting a client in Helsinki.

The Three Horizons: The company has established an AI strategy focussed on ‘horizons’ that lean on three verticals: of operating smarter and faster, of proving out features for new game ideas, and experimenting with new frontiers for players to engage with Supercell IP.

All of this is supported by what would become Supercell’s AI Innovation Lab: an idea that originated as a 10-week pilot programme for game/AI creators in the spring of 2025 in their Helsinki offices. The studio has since become very excited about the possibilities, with this year’s initiative running as a 9-week incubator programme across multiple sites around the world. This year the studio is now having three cohorts run in parallel, having opened up a new AI innovation lab in their San Francisco offices last fall, and the dedicated hub in Tokyo opening in March this year.

Here Comes a New Challenger: Now let’s face it, Supercell isn’t the only company making these kinds of moves. But unlike many others they’re moving fast, and they’re increasingly public about their efforts. All that said, from the outside-in, it’s difficult to determine their intent, and ultimately what they hope to achieve. Late last year I had a chance to sit down with Taavi Paananen and Matias Varjonen, the team behind the first Supercell AI Lab in Helsinki, to find out more about their work, and whether all of this would pass the sniff test. It was a fun and interesting conversation, and it was great to see that we are aligned in many respects. So we had a follow-up chat earlier this month to discuss the 2026 iteration of Supercell’s AI Innovation Lab as applications are about to close on February 22nd.

Supercell’s Approach to AI

When I started hearing rumblings about what Supercell were up to at GDC last year - I had people texting me updates during their meetup while I was at another party - I couldn’t help but be a little cynical. After all, I’ve spent much of the past two years reporting in this year’s publication about all the half-baked and ill-conceived pushes companies are making into AI. Be it AAA companies delivering nothingburger statements for investors, to start-ups promising the earth and quietly fading into obscurity.

Of course for parity’s sake we’ve also seen a lot of companies come out, saying the right things, and doing interesting stuff, be it Ubisoft, Studio Atelico, Meaning Machine, Lingotion etc. But what was Supercell’s take going to be?

Focussing on the Players: What struck me from the get-go was the insistence on avoiding the very pitfalls and trappings of other studios. As Varjonen explained, the intent of the innovation labs is to act as an incubator for finding out what AI could offer to players, and not simply investing as an exercise in efficiency or cost-cutting .

“We see AI as one tool in the toolbox, while the player experience remains at the forefront. We don’t believe in AI for the sake of AI” said Varjonen. The intent wasn’t to jump into this wholesale and have the rest of Supercell fall in line, but rather have the work bubbling up from the labs be presented more broadly across the company; discussing whether this makes sense in the broader scheme of their development pipelines. After all, something that works in an incubator isn’t guaranteed to work when the complexities of real-world production bears down upon it.

“For us, the AI innovation lab is Supercell’s in-house incubator program. Its mission is to explore what is now possible in games that was not possible before.”

As we discussed over coffee, while many studios in the games industry are having conversations about the value of AI - be it tinkering with tools, running pilot programmes, or working to placate investors - very few speak about it publicly. Heck it’s how we wound up sitting down together, given I knew they were making moves - and while we’re one of the few publications out there discussing both the pros and cons of AI in the games industry. As he explained, it was important for Supercell to not conduct this R&D behind closed-doors, but instead try and encourage the conversation on AI in the sector.

An Opportunity for Game Creators: As Matias explained, “AI has levelled the playing field for builders: allowing anyone with a vision to hop on the developer’s seat. Yet there is a lot of unhappiness within the industry, be it lack of funding, a shift in the market, or changing player expectations.” These are issues I’ve discussed on the newsletter throughout this past year. The game market is currently highly volatile, and inconsistent - with the likes of Wildlight’s Highguard and Riot’s 2XKO sadly being the first casualties of 2026. Plus as we discussed with Carli Stein and Cassia Curran last year, the investor market on both sides of the AI/gaming sphere is still a challenge.

This is where the innovation lab hopes to provide an opportunity for people interested in exploring recent innovations in AI. Both in terms of the all-important monetary support, but giving people an opportunity to gather meaningful feedback from developers and players. Varjonen describes their ambition for the innovation lab to “be a lighthouse. To help people find their place, and launch their crazy visions. We have the launchpad, they just need to build the rocket.”

The 2026 AI Innovation Lab

The plan for the 2026 innovation lab is for selected participants - be they individuals or entire teams - to spend 9 weeks with a suite of tools and resources at their disposal to work on crafting new game ideas and concepts using contemporary AI technologies.

Starting with a week-long kick off bootcamp in Lapland, Finland, the remaining 8 weeks take place at one of three labs sites (Helsinki, San Francisco, Tokyo). Participants receive financial support to cover housing and essentials during this time, and will be provided office space to set up their projects, mentoring from staff at Supercell, as well as have the opportunity to engage with the company’s broader ecosystem to get feedback on their ideas. Including participating in a demo of their projects that could lead to their projects being spun up internally within the company, and a permanent job alongside it.

Support Comes in Various Forms: Naturally if we’re talking about modern AI, especially generative AI, that also comes with a cost attached to it. Training and deploying generative models is an expensive proposition, and so Supercell are providing 50k in credits for compute - allowing for AI models to be trained, iterated upon, fine-tuned, and then deployed - plus an additional 20k for testing their ideas out with real users. This can mean running pilot programmes on prototype projects, and supporting the overheads of deployment, and ensuring the additional compute costs for hosting an AI model on the server are covered.

While there is an opportunity to demo the projects at Supercell HQ, the thing that did catch me by surprise is that despite so much investment, they are not enforcing equity or intellectual property rights. Should participants conclude their time with the lab and decide to take their ideas elsewhere, they’re free to do so.

Paananen summarised it pretty succinctly: “It is not often that the best company in its field opens up its doors for innovation, takes no IP, and simply pays for all flights, housing, and other necessities for 9 weeks.”

Well, no… it’s not that often at all.

Apply by February 22nd

I’d be remiss to point out that the deadline for the innovation lab closes this week!
If you’re interested in applying, here’s some key information you:

• Application Deadline: February 22nd 2026 (i.e. this Sunday)

• Program Period: March 23rd to May 2nd 2026.

• Location: At one of Supercell’s AI innovation labs in Helsinki, San Francisco, or Tokyo. With the opening week being a bootcamp held in Finland.

• How To Apply: Visit ailab.supercell.com and smash that apply button.

Participants are expected to be on-site at one of the three sites throughout the project. So do bear that in mind. Someone’s going to need to look after the cat!

Wrapping Up

What comes out of Supercell’s Innovation Lab this year will certainly be worth watching out for - and who knows we might be able to deliver a follow-up on that later in the year.

In the meantime, thanks to Taavi and Matias for his time, and best of luck to everyone applying for the innovation lab. It certainly seems like a unique and exciting opportunity.

As for us, we sadly don’t have time to spent 9 weeks hacking away at prototypes, we have work to do! In fact next week I am in Lisbon as I present a keynote for the 2026 Gamescom Dev Leadership on AI in the video games industry - shock surprise - and while I won’t be able to talk much about what I’m up to, we will still have an issue of in your inbox on Wednesday. See you then!