Speedrun gaming accelerator by Andreessen Horowitz, 3 highlights.

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 410.

No app store toll with Neon.

Neon offers an infrastructure for game developers to sell directly to players with no app store as a middle man. Insfrastructure like whitelabel webshops and payment. Remember? Gaming is a very large source of revenue for Apple, with 30% commission on any game sales. Founded in 2022, based in San Francisco and raised $14m funding in November. Opinion: Neon calls the whole process “player experience” (PX), D2C is D2P here. This company is built on the assumption that PX is higher when selling directly to players instead of selling through app stores.

The clash between game developers and app stores is still going on, Neon is here for it.

AI agents, also as a test gamer. This is Nunu AI.

Nunu builds multimodal AI agents specialised in understanding and playing computer games. These agents are above all used for game testing and QA. Can also be used for player simulation, NPC characters, developer assistant. Opinion: Specialised in game QA, a lengthy process, every game scenario has to be tested in detail. The AI agents are primarily vision based, so they experience the game just like a human player would and give insights into their reasoning behind a game decision.

More efficient game QA now, smarter bot players in the future!

Hedra — AI generation of expressive face shots.

Hedra is an AI video generation tool, specialised in expressive face shots of characters. Characters in different styles, from cartoon to realistic avatars based on photos of actors. Based on a variety of image generation models (Flux, Stable Diffusion…). Hedra combines that with voice generation or voice cloning. Opinion: Very expressive face shots of characters, strong facial and vocal expression, like in movies or computer game scenes.

With Voice, faces, expressions — everything is near humans, thanks to the AI development and the big gaming market drawing this. There is a free tier to try it and play around!