In July 2015, developer Comcept launched a Kickstarter campaign for its game Red Ash. It didn’t go well. Despite raising over $500,000 in pledges, the campaign missed its target and critics pummeled its approach — pointing to Comcept launching the campaign before seeing through a previous one, announcing a console port without identifying which console and continuing the campaign after finding external funding. For production studio Hyde, which had teamed with Comcept to develop the game, the campaign presented a new problem. Hyde has been around since 2002, has worked on over 200 games and has had a hand in some of Japan’s biggest franchises, including Final Fantasy, Persona and Yakuza. It just can’t talk about most of them. The team often works in secret, doing its job but not appearing in the credits or mentioning the work publicly. Speaking with Polygon, Hyde President Kenichi Yanagihara estimates that he will never be able to talk about 70 percent of what the company does. And that worked fine until Hyde asked the public for money.
Meet the AI OnlyFans: How one startup raised millions to build an ‘erotic companions’ platform | Kai Nicol-Schwarz
Meet the AI OnlyFans: How one startup raised millions to build an ‘erotic companions’ platform --- When AI erotic companion startup Oh raised a $4.5m funding round in January, it had something few in the shadowy new sector could boast. A roster of named investors, publicly backing the company. VCs are often bound by “vice clauses”, which prohibit firms from investing in controversial products like pornography or weapons. As a result, startups working on ethically contentious products often rely on angel investors and family offices to stay afloat. But Oh, which generates NSFW adult content and conversations with both fictional characters as well as bots based on real people, has tapped into a group of seemingly less squeamish investors: crypto VCs. It’s drawn backing from the likes of Tangent, Kosmos Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Bodhi Ventures and Tagus Capital. “Raising money for a business like this from non-crypto VCs is very difficult,” says Oh founder and CEO Nic Young, who positions the startup as a “decentralised platform” and offers payments via crypto. “A lot of crypto VCs don’t have vice clauses — it’s more liberal and free.” Oh wants to use those fresh funds to build the “AI OnlyFans”, with plans to roll out autonomous scantily clad bots that can market themselves on social media and direct message users with spicy conversation starters. The biggest challenge? Convincing enough users it’s not that weird turning to AI when you’re looking for romance. https://lnkd.in/eRF7a5Dn
Studio Ghibli’s Biggest Secret Is What Comes Next
The world-famous studio that helped ignite a $25 billion-a-year anime boom is in no rush to make another movie
End Game, the startup behind Zombs Royale, raises $3M | TechCrunch
End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: "We’re just
500+ Billion Tokens Later: Letting AI Agents Decompile A First-Person Shooter
During the last 3 months, I spent some of my time and tokens decompiling a popular first-person shooter. The goal was not to reach a simple proof-of-concept state. Instead, we really wanted an accurate, stable and feature-complete recreation of the game. The avid reader of my blog might have noticed that I had previously written two posts that have since been removed. Everyone else might now be wondering which game I am talking about. To both of you I can only say that corporate America was here to ruin our fun.
Opinion | Video Games Are Destroying the People Who Make Them (Published 2017)
The industry’s infamous “crunch” culture is taking a serious toll on workers.
Inside Nintendo's secretive creative process
Nintendo’s ‘conductor’ takes us behind the game giant’s inner workings, how it finds talent and the philosophy that sparks its eccentric ideas
How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code
Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks …
'Who’s Deciding The Fate Of This Game?' The Secretive Process Of Getting A Game With Sexual Content On Steam
'You work six years on a game, you line up press and events for the launch, and then some guy at Valve clicks on a checkbox and blocks everything.'
Game Platforms | Game Developer
Explore the latest news and expert commentary on Game Platforms, brought to you by the editors of Game Developer
Revealed: Britain's contracts with Palantir hit £1bn
Newly surfaced disclosures reveal the government has spent or agreed to spend at least £992m with Peter Thiel’s controversial AI company – as pressure mounts on Andy Burnham to block them. Max Colbert reports
Secret History of Silicon Valley
They Promised Us Jet Packs. They Promised the Bosses Profit. (Published 2016)
Alphabet’s X research lab is still being asked to imagine the impossible. Only now, under pressure from investors, it has to imagine making money, too.
MindsEye’s Dev Breaks Silence On Chaos And Mismanagement
Build a Rocket Boy's ex-lead animator, Chris Wilson, had a lot to say about his time at the company, and the two co-CEOs steering its sinking ship
'A new industry with a new identity:' Canadian devs in 2026
We spoke to developers at Toronto Canada's XP Game Summit to see how they are getting by in increasingly tumultuous times.
One company is at the center of a wave of rogue AI attacks
Mistakes at Israeli startup Irregular sent Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google agents after real-world targets.
