Decart — Built Oasis (first playable AI world) and Magica (first AI-native UGC engine). $3.1B valuation, $153M raised, spent <$10M of it. Revenue from day one. Sequoia, Benchmark, Aleph. "We're here to build a billion-user consumer app."
Google DeepMind — Genie 3 generates interactive environments from text at 24fps, 720p. Project Genie launched publicly Jan 29, 2026. First consumer world model product. Unity and Roblox stocks dropped on the announcement.
NVIDIA — ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) shipping AI NPCs in real games. PUBG Ally launching 2026. Cosmos models downloaded 2M+ times. Jensen Huang: "$50 trillion manufacturing and logistics" — but gaming is the consumer beachhead.
Roblox — 85M daily active users, 150M monthly. 40M+ user-created games. Paid creators $740M in 2024. Launched CUBE 3D (1.8B parameter model) for AI object generation. The incumbent being disrupted AND adopting simultaneously.
Inworld AI — AI NPC platform in production games. 200ms response times vs 1–2s for standard APIs. Shipping at scale in titles with millions of players.
China — NetEase deployed DeepSeek-powered AI characters in Justice Mobile. WeChat minigames: 500M monthly users, 400K+ developers. 497 game licenses issued Q4 2025 — highest since 2019.