Announcing the 2025 AI and Games Conference | 04/06/25
A two-day event bringing together the leading experts in AI for game development.
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.
You can subscribe to and support AI and Games on Substack, with weekly editions appearing in your inbox. The newsletter is also shared with our audience on LinkedIn. If you’d like to sponsor this newsletter, and get your name in front of our audience of over 6000 readers, please visit our sponsorship enquiries page.
Hey all, and welcome back to the
newsletter. After a lot of work behind the scenes it’s time to announce the return of the AI and Games Conference for 2025!Today I’ll be sharing the key information, plus some efforts we’ve made to expand the event while continuing to provide a fun and accessible occasion for anyone interested in and around AI for game development.
Follow AI and Games on: BlueSky | YouTube | LinkedIn | TikTok
Quick Announcements
Before we get into conference details, here are some quick announcements, including my speaking at other events!
Our latest case study is now live here on
: a deep-dive into the use of machine learning for controlling vehicles in 2024’s Star Wars Outlaws. It was one of my favourite talks from GDC 2025, and now here it is broken down in my own way. You can watch it above, or read it below.As soon as I’ve clicked ‘Publish’ on this newsletter, I’m packing my bags as I fly out to Rome for /dev/games 25. Tickets (including livestream) are still live, and I look forward to hanging out with people when I’m there. I’m giving a talk exploring the gaps that currently exist in game AI right now, and how generative technologies are doing little to nothing to address them.
Plus another event has been added to the calendar for June! I’ll returning once again to the annual Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Games. This is a week long academy from June 23rd-27th for people interested in learning about innovations in AI research that impact the games industry - and I’ve attended as a guest in 2023 and 2024. See the vlog from 2024 for more information on how the event turned out in Valletta in Malta. This year, it’s happening in Malmo in Sweden!
Tickets are still live on their website! Go check that out.
For all of our Copenhagen/Malmo-based followers, we’ll be having an informal AI and Games meet-up on the evening of the 24th in Malmo. More details to come, but if you’re in the area and want to meet up, you’re more than welcome to join us!
Plus I have booked in my plans to attend both Develop:Brighton in the UK in July, as well as Gamescom in August. More on my plans for both events will be announced soon, but if you’re keen to chat about much of the work we do with game studios, or sponsoring our conference and/or this here newsletter, then feel free to drop me a line by the button below or on LinkedIn.
The AI and Games Conference is Back!
It’s been an interesting six months or so since we ran our inaugural event in London. This time last year we were still trying to determine whether we would even attempt to make this happen, much less how to get it over the line.
Fortunately it all went rather well! We published the post-mortem of the event on YouTube late last year (below) as we started reflecting on what worked, and where to improve, and came away with a lot of exciting ideas of how to make this enterprise grow sensibly, and practically.
But before I philosophise, let’s dig into the details…
The Key Information
What you need to know, right here:
What is the AI and Games Conference?
An event that brings together professionals who work in the games industry or in games-related fields of study to network and share their expertise.When is it?
We’re running a two-day event on November 3rd and 4th 2025.That’s a Monday and Tuesday btw.
Where is it?
We return to our venue from 2024: Goldsmiths, University of London, UKBut as we’ll discuss, we moved to a larger area of the campus.
Are tickets on sale?
Early bird tickets are now live! Visit the conference website for more information.Can I speak at the event?
Call for submissions is now live on the conference website until the end of July.What is different this year?
As I’ll discuss in more detail in a second, our focus was not just to expand to a multi-day event, but also work to provide more opportunities for networking. This is achieved courtesy of our larger central area, with more space for meetings and social engagements. Ultimately our goal is to ensure our event grows in ways that maintain our core values.
Back in the Saddle Again
Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of running this conference is the people behind it. As discussed in our reveal last year, the conference came about as a result of our collective desire to make this happen, and we put a lot of time and effort into meeting our own expectations. So I’m beyond thrilled to say that everyone is back to help us achieve our vision for 2025.
As a quick reminder, our event is organised by the members of the non-profit organisation Game AI Events CIC:
Alan Zucconi (Goldsmiths University)
Duygu Cakmak (Creative Assembly)
Gabriel Robert (Final Strike Games)
Matthias Siemonsmeier (Splash Damage)
Tommy Thompson (AI and Games) - y’know, me!
In addition, we have Sally Kevan (TVG Events) who handles our event logistics, Shraddha Gupta who recently joined me at
is working on PR and marketing, and of Half-Space Consulting (and the ) is helping out in between writing chapters of his upcoming book.George, if you’re reading this, then you should be writing!
Speaking personally, I can’t overstate how amazing it’s been to work with this group of people: they’re all wicked smart, thoughtful, empathetic and caring - and a good looking bunch too! We came together in a rather hurried fashion in 2024, and we got the job done despite having to learn a lot as we went (I swear George and Sally saved us so many times). It was great to reach the end of the 2024 event, only for the team to double-down and commit to making it happen all over again.
With a first event under our belt, it has allowed us to have more serious conversations about what we wish to achieve. Not just with the AI and Games Conference, and not just in 2025. We’re planning for the long-term, and I won’t lie some of it is pretty ambitious. But we agree that none of that can happen lest we ensure our little enterprise grows sensibly. Ensuring that while the business fundamentals are established, we equally deliver on providing accessible and relevant events for the game AI community, and retain our ethical and editorial integrity along the way.
Growing in a Sensible Fashion
The one piece of feedback that was universal across every axis - from our speakers, to our sponsors, and our attendees - was that you wanted more! Critically, we wanted more, but when you’re starting out doing something like this you need to test the waters. As anyone who has ran an event before will tell you, most first iterations run at a loss, and are still finding their feet in terms of the programme, and the intended audience. So the plan for 2024 was always to run it for one day, and then hope upon hope that people get excited, and turn up!
So to sell out in year one (with a waiting list that had over 100 people), have a wonderful group of sponsors from across the games industry, and a series of high quality talks from fantastic speakers vastly exceeded our expectations. And so before we even ran the 2024 event, we knew we were going to grow it out into something bigger.
But critically, we wanted to retain the vibe and the feeling of the day in 2024. As mentioned in the post-mortem video above, I was so proud of what our team pulled off - in a relatively short period of time too. But more than anything it was just great to see people engaging and connecting throughout. It’s difficult to retain that feeling when you start blowing up the event into multiple days across numerous tracks. Plus, our conference is organised and ran by our dedicated non-profit Game AI Events CIC. Therefore any efforts we make in expanding must stay true to our charter in supporting our community.
So this year we’ve expanded to two days (the debate for three went longer than planned, but we held at two). But with a focus on expanding the central space to allow more room for networking, plus a dedicated meeting space and a small expo floor for companies and games studios to showcase their works. We will then have multiple tracks but a minutes walk from the central hub, which I’ll discuss next.
Expanding our Remit
This year the conference is bigger in multiple ways: a larger venue, scope for more talks, and extended capacity to handle our projected number of participants. But we also wanted to have more scope for presentations from various corners of the industry.
We had a great collection of works last year spread across two tracks (AI for Gameplay / AI for Production), and we worked hard on curating a lot of our initial programme through invited speakers. We were then very fortunate to have a number of exceptional talks submitted from across the sector. This resulted in a programme that highlighted that game AI (the practice of building AI for gameplay) continues to hold strong, all the while machine learning is delivering value in various corners of the sector.
A common refrain from our feedback was how jam packed the schedule was, and much of that came from having so many high-quality submissions. We sadly had to reject more talks than we would have liked, and so this year we now have more time (2 days) and more space on-site to include a broader range of talks - all the while maintaining our editorial focus on quality and relevance to the sector.
The call for submissions is now live until the end of July, and we encourage speakers from across the games industry, as well as academic researchers working in games-related fields. Our submission page goes into more detail on the expectations we have of submissions - critically that we’re looking for practical, relevant, and engaging topics that showcase practice within shipped games and their production pipelines, to digging into emerging research that could impact the state of the art of both the games industry, and the AI field itself.
Speaking personally, our event should be the home of game AI knowledge exchange in Europe. I worry about the opportunities our community has to connect with one another - in an era of generative AI dominating the discourse, the spaces available for us to talk about anything else is dwindling.
Plus this year, we’re keen to have more talks discussing AI around the games industry itself, much like our very well received talks on the legal implications from 2024. It’s a tough balancing act to handle the range of ways AI now intersects with the industry, but our team are keen to address it!
We’ll be announcing the programme over the next couple of months including presentations from our sponsors, plus invited speakers, and accepted submissions.
More Opportunities for Networking & Meetings
One aspect from last year that we originally baked into the plan, only for it to go awry, was we envisaged having more time for networking and social interaction among participants, as well as having a meeting space for attendees to sit and chat with one another. After all, it’s not often our corner of the industry has a dedicated place to meet, so we wanted to celebrate that.
Sadly this sort of went out the window as a result of two otherwise positive things:
The event sold out, and we wound up with maybe 30-40% more attendees than we anticipated - thus taking up all that space!
We had so many fantastic pitches that we reduced the time between talks to squeeze in as many as we could.
By moving the event to two days, it allows us to space out the programme - though critically we are also increasing the amount of time between presentations as well. The central ‘hub’ of the event event is now centralised within the great hall of the Richard Hoggart building - which attendees from last year will remember was the building you walked through to get to the venue. By setting up here, it gives us a lot more space for our reception and information desk, tea/coffee breaks, business meeting spaces, and an expo floor for companies and studios. Plus if you’re hungry there are on-site canteens just around the corner, and plenty of seating space in that dining area.
All of this has the happy by-product of making it much easier to reach the conference, given we’re now at the front door of the university campus!
A Thank You to Our Sponsors
In among the many positive signs we had from last year, was that many of our sponsors - who critically without them we could not afford to run the event - not only saw value in what we were doing, but were keen to return and support our ambition to grow.
I want to give a special thanks to AWS, Creative Assembly, Riot Games, Arm, and BitPart.ai - all of whom return as sponsors for the 2025 event. In addition, a special thank you to Havok and Databricks who have came on board this year to support the initiative. Plus we have more sponsors to announce in the coming weeks!
We still have sponsorship opportunities available for the 2025 event, all of which provide extra value to our attendees and get your name in front of our audience. If your business is interested in supporting the event, visit the website to find out more, or message me directly!
Supporting Our Community
Naturally in expanding our event, it becomes more complex, and in turn more expensive. One of our goals from the beginning is to ensure that this event continues to as accessible as possible, whether it be by diversifying the price of tickets for different attendees, to ensuring our talks later become available on our YouTube channel. To that end we’re working to keep prices for non-industry professionals as low as possible. Much of this is courtesy of our sponsors who help us absorb the costs incurred. With special thanks to Arm who have came on board as student sponsor: subsidising our costs such that student tickets are capped at a maximum fee of £99. We are currently working on providing further support for attendees, and will have more to say in the coming weeks.
Plus I want to take a moment to stress that we’re highly aware of the challenges faced by our friends and loved ones in the LGBTQIA+ community as their rights and freedoms are being used as a political football. I want to reaffirm that Game AI Events CIC is a non-profit committed to providing accessible, productive, and enjoyable events for the game/AI community in the UK and Europe. This extends to all participants regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, nationality or belief. We will not tolerate harassment in any form.
Our code of conduct, which you can read here, highlights we do not tolerate any form of undesirable and inappropriate behaviour - with forfeiture of ticket without refund, and expulsion from the event if necessary. We are also in continued dialogue with Goldsmiths University to ensure that we’re aligned on the broader issues affecting the transgender community in the UK, and will strive to ensure the AI and Games Conference continues to be a safe, welcoming, and inclusive space for anyone who wishes to join.
Wrapping Up
This week I decided to be rather selfish, and focus entirely on our very own conference. I have had many questions in recent weeks as to whether we were coming back for 2025 and I’m pleased we can now make it official! We’ll have plenty more announcements on the event in the next few months. We’re super excited to be bringing back the AI and Games Conference, and I look forward to seeing many of you in London this November!
Next week - once I finish unpacking my Switch 2 pre-order - we’ll try and catch-up with everything that’s been happening in AI around the games industry. As is often the case, I take a week or two off, and everything happens behind my back. The cheek of them!
Catch you next week!