Supercell Investments and ElevenLabs have backed a new GenAI gamedev studio Glass Bead Games, founded by two former Google Stadia engineers.
According to a LinkedIn post from cofounder Kuangye Guo, the new California-based studio is making “a survival-craft sandbox that leverages GenAI to hand players unprecedented agency”.
Glass Bead Games founders Kuangye Guo and Haochen Liu described themselves as ‘gaming tech veterans’ who have each worked in leadership at Google Stadia and Alibaba’s cloud gaming service, YuanJing.
Guo was a founding engineer of Google Stadia and CTO of Alibaba’s YuanJing service, while Liu is also a founding engineer of Google Stadia and former VP of engineering at YuanJing. Liu has also worked as a producer at YuanJing-owned developer Singularity Studio, where he worked on an Unreal Engine 5-based metaverse project.
The core Glass Bead team had previously joined Supercell’s AI Innovation Lab in Helsinki, says Guo, which appears to have led to the funding. The Clash of Clans maker is listed on the studio’s website as its only investor, while ElevenLabs is listed as ‘technology partner’.
Elsewhere in the post, Guo says the studio’s debut game is designed “infinite, tailored, player-driven stories” – “Think Minecraft with an AI game master,” he continues. It is codenamed Project Shanhai, and is set in ancient China.
“As the guardian reborn into a mortal, player will balance survival, cultivation and restoring balance of the world,” says the blurb on the studio’s website. “Each choice you make has a meaningful impact on the world, opening up endless possibilities.”
Supercell boss Ilkka Paananen told the BBC recently that he believes it’ll take “a few years” for a developer to create a completely new type of game using AI, but a breakthrough is imminent. “It’s not a question of if it’s going to happen,” he continued. “It’s question of when it’s going to happen and who will make it happen.”
He also outlined what has been happening at Supercell’s AI labs in Helsinki recently. “We basically gave them a free hand to do whatever they wanted, in order to spark innovation,” he said. “The end result might not even be a game, or a game that you and I would think about as a game, but it’s completely different experience enabled by AI.”
