The second lab costs less than the first — and the studio keeps the difference
Yes, unless it has granted exclusivity — and the second deal is cheaper to deliver than the first. Making a game run headless, exposing an observation and action space, and wiring up resets and seeds is done once and carries over. What each new lab pays for is its own scored tasks and its own dedicated hardware, which it needs anyway because the environments are kept physically separate. That is why exclusivity should cost a lab a clear premium: it is asking the studio to give up every deal after the first.
Studios hear the integration fee and assume it recurs per customer in full. It does not, and the difference is where this becomes a business rather than a project.
Making a game agent-ready has two layers. The first is structural: running headless on servers, exposing what the agent sees and what it can do, wiring up resets, seeds and snapshots, getting the clock under control. That work belongs to the game. Once it is done it is done, and the next lab inherits it.
The second layer is specific: the scenarios that lab wants, scored the way that lab wants them, varied along the axes that lab cares about. That does not carry over, because no two labs are researching the same thing.
What the second lab actually pays for
- Its own scored tasks, designed with it
- Its own dedicated hardware, which it needs regardless
- Whatever the structural layer still lacks for its particular interface
Which is a smaller number than the first lab paid, delivered faster, against work that is already proven to run. The studio's share of it is close to pure margin on engineering it never funded.
Why this makes exclusivity expensive
If the second deal is cheaper to deliver and worth roughly as much, then granting one lab exclusivity is not a clause — it is the studio selling every deal after the first. That should carry a clear premium and a limited term, and it should be priced against the number of labs plausibly interested rather than against the first lab's fee.
It also makes isolation commercially load-bearing rather than just reassuring. The only reason several labs can hold copies of the same world is that none of them can observe the others. How that separation is built is therefore a revenue question for the studio as much as a trust question for the lab. The contract checklist covers how to write the exclusivity term.