What is happening, and what it means for a studio
The guides explain how this works and do not change much. These are shorter, dated, and about something that just happened or an opinion worth arguing with.
- The twelve months in which this became a market
September 2025 to October 2026, in five dated steps: what was funded, what was bought, and why the money went somewhere other than where the argument pointed.
23 October 2026 · 5 min read - Equity instead of a licence: reading the DeepMind–EVE deal
Google DeepMind took a stake in the studio behind EVE Online rather than licensing the game. What that structure signals, and why the licence is still the repeatable deal for everyone else.
16 October 2026 · 4 min read - Reward hacking is a procurement question, not a research one
When a lab buys an environment, the scoring is most of what it is paying for. Four things to test before signing, and why a provider that calls scoring a configuration step has told you what it is selling.
16 October 2026 · 4 min read - The second lab costs less than the first — and the studio keeps the difference
Most of the engineering that makes a game agent-ready is done once. What the second lab pays for is its own tasks and its own hardware, which is why one integration can become several revenue lines.
16 October 2026 · 3 min read