Helika is heading to @Cannes_Lions. Anton @BHelika and Max @bigdog_max are on the ground June 22-26. If you work on brand characters, fandom, or keeping audiences engaged between releases, come find us.

Tens of millions of people now spend hours each day talking to AI characters — most of them modeled on existing IP from games, films, anime, books, and music. Almost none of it is licensed. The audience skews young, the engagement is sustained, the demand is established. These conversations are already happening. The IP holders just aren't in them.

GDC Day 4 @Xbox dropped Project Helix. @Kojima_Hideo pre-ghosted his own keynote. @nvidia keeps generating frames with DLSS (number went up again). @expedition33 is about to win everything tonight because Game Developers Choice Awards. Meanwhile the Helika team is on the floor — come talk publishing, the Publishing Engine, or how to bring your IP to life. If you bump into @AbugovIlya or @BHelika — say hi and ask away! [day four. still standing.]

Aaand it’s on! Demo Day 2026 has begun!

Monday. PGC San Francisco. We've been building toward this. Publishing Engine reveal at AM. Then two panels, live game demos, @avax x Helika Accelerator graduation and an afterparty to cap it off. This is the day. Come through. Register here: pgc.helika.io

Thanks @pgbiz for covering what we've been working on. March 9. PGC San Francisco. The Publishing Engine unveil. If you're around — come find us: pgc.helika.io pocketgamer.biz/helika-is-bu…

Game AI has had one hell of a journey — from pathfinding and behavior trees to LLMs that make characters feel alive. Time to talk about where it's going. On March 9 at PGC San Francisco, six people who've built through every era of it are sitting down to do exactly that. Alain Dessureaux · Alex Tarrand · Damian Isla · Markus Kiukkonen · Martin Singh-Blom — moderated by Susan Cummings Register here pgc.helika.io to watch the discussion yourself. #PGCSanFrancisco #GameAI #GameDev

Game publishing is broken. Time to talk about it. On March 9 at PGC San Francisco, we've got the right people in the room. Register here: pgc.helika.io Hilmar Veigar Pétursson · Bill Young · Emma Farrow · Jakub Kwinta · Kelly Kiewel — moderated by Jordan Mirrer

7 days to PGC San Francisco Demo Day. Register: pgc.helika.io On March 9, the Avalanche x Helika Accelerator cohort goes live: demos from the teams, the reveal of Helika’s Publishing Engine, and two panels on publishing AI. If you’re building games and care about shipping, growth, and what “publishing at scale” actually looks like — be there.

10 days out. @avax x Helika Accelerator Demo Day at PGC San Francisco — March 9. Five studios take the stage, Publishing Engine reveal, panels worth showing up for. Register: pgc.helika.io

Huge shout out to @pgbiz for the write up. Come join us at PGC on March 9 for Demo Day and our Publishing Engine showcase! Don't miss it. pgc.helika.io

Getting a game in front of players is one thing. Keeping them engaged, growing the audience, running the pipeline — that still costs a fortune and breaks without the right people. Publishing hasn't had its Unity moment... yet.

"AI will democratize game development" is the new "anyone can make a game". The goalpost moved again. Both are technically true Both miss the point Making something is easy. Making something good is still hard. And making something people care about is still the entire game.

Hot take: A lot of AI “wins” are demo-grade and don’t survive real users, real latency, and messy edge cases at scale. Real authority comes from production-grade fixes for messy human data — monitoring, evals, guardrails, and boring reliability work. What’s your biggest AI deployment nightmare? Ours turned into a full one-month rollback: tracing regressions in prod, combing through code and prompt versions, and auditing logs to figure out what changed, when, and why. It was fun to untangle, but we'd rather never do that again lol.

What are we building? 🏗️ @BHelika, Founder and CEO of Helika, teases our Publishing Engine and how it will help game developers. Stay tuned to learn more! #gamedev #innovations #AI #publishing

Two developers of GOTY titles - Baldur's Gate 3 and Expedition 33 - have said the quiet part loud. Many #gamedev studios already use AI and have integrated it into their production pipelines, such as pre-production research or concept art. There are no ready-to-use, fit-all solutions yet. Approaches and applications vary, but those bold enough to experiment with new technology are most likely to gain from it💡

Warner Bros. Games is the most overlooked part of the potential Netflix (or Paramount) deal. Maybe it’s time for them to become independent? 🤔 The company with IPs like DC, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter has always struggled to manage its studios. Bloated budgets, massive delays, and poor quality led to major failures, such as Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The company was also unable to capitalize on its successes. Hogwarts Legacy launched to huge praise and significant sales, but WB never followed up with major post-launch updates or additional content to sell. Now, some analysts are bold enough to call gaming an “insignificant” part of the WB deal, while others argue whether Netflix or Paramount would be a better home for this game division. Sadly, both companies have a similarly turbulent history with gaming, and so far have had the most success licensing their IP rather than building studios and making games. With the most recent breakout success in gaming coming from smaller, independent studios, making WB Games independent could unleash creative power within studios that big corporations tamed. These developers deserve their chance to shine!

AI will be the driving force behind the industry's future growth 💡 @owenmahoney, the former boss of Nexon who signed to publish ARC Raiders, called out AAA game studios for their misguided focus on cost-cutting and risk aversion, which leads to an overall decline in the quality of big games. In the interview for @thegamebusiness, he went so far as to call the situation “an end of days” for this segment. He pointed out that many of the hit games of the last 24 months didn’t come from big AAA studios, and sees potential in mid-sized studios and indies to lead the industry. What really has caught our attention is Mahoney’s belief that forward-thinking developers will fuel their growth by adopting AI as a tool to streamline processes, shorten delivery times, and increase output. It will open unprecedented opportunities for them to create unforgettable experiences that AAA studios are too afraid to invest in. We share this belief and want to help developers get their games discovered by gamers. With AI-based solutions in Helika’s Publishing Engine, we open an entirely new set of opportunities for developers looking to build hype for their titles, collect user feedback, interact with gamers, retain customers, and more ⚡

❗Most players don’t care about AI use as long as the game is fun to play ❗ Seeing all the heated discussions about the use of AI in ARC Raiders and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, we took a closer look at how they impacted both games. For that, we analyzed over 100,000 Steam reviews and 12,000 YouTube comments 🧵

It's coming faster than we think in gaming