Happy Monday! Thanks for subscribing to GameMakers.

In today’s news:

• How generative AI is changing game development (and UGC) (VentureBeat)

• Krafton's Road To Valour: Empire stands in for BGMI in India (PocketGamer.biz)

• Hackers steal Activision games and employee data (TechCrunch)

Market Data

Top 10 Charts

• Bridge Race from Supersonic made a huge leap into the top 10 in downloads this past week.

Top 10 Publishers by Rank

• NCSOFT cracks the Top 10 publishers ranking this week. Congrats!

Top 5 Trending Downloads & Revenue

• I thought Dumb Ways to Die got a ton of downloads organically. But wow, check out Spider Rope Hero!

• In the last Market Wire, I asked our readers how Dumb Ways to Die got so many installs. Market Wire | Feb 13, 2023. Many thanks to all of the folks who responded. But let me give two people credit.

  • Jesper Gustavsson (who messaged me first):

  • And my good friend Matej Lancaric did a whole article on this topic: How to be #1 game in US Appstore without spending a dime?

Top 3 News

#1. How generative AI is changing game development (and UGC) (VentureBeat)

I’m sure many of you have been approached by a number of companies working on game development applications using AI. VentureBeat reported on their perspective of applications from generative AI in this article:

• Generate art and assets:

  • “Generative AI trained with a handful of images can produce a significant number of similar pieces faster than a human could. Additionally, tools such as DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT can be used to by game writers to craft original stories, expand upon core ideas or generate in-game text.”

  • Commercial example: “Recently, Scenario opened up its generative AI platform to developers. It purports to offer individually trainable generators, which developers can use to create art pieces tailored to their specific style.”

• Character creation:

  • “utilizing AI in character creation… Players can use AI to create their own in-game clothing.”

  • Commercial example: “Ready Player Me, a metaverse avatar creation platform, recently launched a trial of its generative AI creator.”

• In-game artificial intelligence:

  • “Other developers have used generative AI to improve on more ‘traditional’ in-game artificial intelligence.”

  • Commercial example: “Inworld AI plans to use the tech to give NPCs in games more dialogue in response to what the player says to them. They’ve used this already to create a demo of a virtual Santa Claus who responds to children’s interactions with him.”

• User-generated content (UGC):

  • “AI tools are becoming a staple in the creation of user-generated content (UGC). This type of content abounds in games such as Roblox and Minecraft.”

  • Commercial examples:

    • “Roblox is even rolling out its own genAI tools so users can build content for the game more easily.”

    • “In the last few months alone, AI tools have helped users create a horror visual novel, multiplayer games on LG TVs and their own NFTs. Content creators are using tools like ChatGPT to mod existing games to have more dialogue (similar to the Santa demo above), while others are using it to make new text-based adventure games.”

Stay tuned. More in-depth coverage on AI in game development is coming up in the weeks ahead!

#2. Krafton's Road To Valour: Empire stands in for BGMI in India (PocketGamer.biz)

India banned a number of games linked to China last year, including popular shooter games like PUBG and Free Fire. In this context, KRAFTON (the maker of PUBG and, in full disclosure, an investor in my game studio) created a game specifically for India called BGMI (BattleGrounds Mobile India).

Mysteriously India also added BGMI to the ban list last year.

According to PocketGamer, KRAFTON has released a new game specifically for India:

• “Krafton, developers of PUBG Mobile and BGMI (BattleGrounds Mobile India) are set to bring Road to Valor: Empires exclusively to the Indian market.”

• “The new game is a real-time strategy title where players take control of a variety of different civilisations from throughout history, battling it out with other players to see who comes out on top.”

• “Krafton’s new version will be aimed specifically at the Indian mobile market with Hindi language support, starter-packs and other unique features for the Indian version of the game.”

What almost nobody in the world knows is that the Indian IAP market is much more lucrative than people believe. In fact, a few very select people with inside information seem to suggest that many of the data services are dramatically underreporting revenue generated from India for games.

How lucrative can India be? Hear this from Shailesh Lakhani from Sequoia Capital India (in full disclosure, also an investor in Lila Games):

• $$$ Shailesh quote: “There will be a single game title that reaches $1B in revenue.”

• Note: I’ll follow up with a post dedicated to this video next week.

To address the Indian market, however, may require a lot of localization and limitations on violence. Note this tweet from Oliver Jones well ahead of the BGMI ban:

#3. Hackers steal Activision games and employee data (TechCrunch)

Yikes! As reported by TechCrunch:

• “Unknown hackers stole internal data from the games giant Activision.”

• “games blog Insider Gaming said it confirmed a data breach after obtaining “the entirety” of the stolen data, which was not published by vx-underground.”

• According to the site, hackers stole employee information such as “full names, emails, phone numbers, salaries, places of work, addresses, and more.”

• “In January, Riot Games disclosed a breach in which hackers accessed the company’s ‘development environment,’ allowing them to steal source code of the popular games League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, as well as the source code for the company’s legacy anti-cheat system.”

• “Earlier in September, hackers published unreleased footage from the upcoming and much anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. At the time, the game-maker Rockstar Games admitted that hackers had been able to get their hands on ‘confidential information from our systems, including early development footage from the next Grand Theft Auto.’”

I think I’m a relatively smart guy and fairly sophisticated in tech. However, when I worked at NBCUniversal, IT phished me like 3 times.

I wanted to highlight this article because I believe some high-profile gaming startups will get hacked. It’s only a matter of time and lack of caution.

The danger to my fellow co-founders in gaming startups is that all of our company information, from source code to employee salaries and other proprietary data will get leaked.

Be careful, everybody and get secure. In this new world we live in, having someone responsible for cyber-security at your company will be critical!