"Our AI agent can turn a natural prompt into a fully playable game"

Welcome to the latest edition of AI Gamechangers – your weekly newsletter where we talk to people across the games industry who are using AI in ambitious yet practical ways.

In this edition, we’re exploring the frontier of AI-powered game creation with Kevin Lee, CEO of Verse8. Spun out of Planetarium Labs in 2024, Verse8 is a “code-first” engine designed specifically for AI agents rather than human editors. The platform takes a single natural-language prompt and generates a fully playable web game, complete with monetisation tools. Lee talks about AI agents, the future of user-generated content, and why the next wave of game platforms may look more like YouTube than the App Store.

As always, AI Gamechangers is about real tools, real businesses, and real lessons from people building with AI today. Our archive features dozens of conversations with innovators across AI in games, all free to browse and share.

Kevin Lee, Verse8

Say hello to Kevin Lee, the CEO of Verse8. Before taking the helm there, Kevin spent years in the high-stakes world of venture capital and private equity in Seoul, spotting the next big trends in gaming and AI. Now, he’s the one building them. In just six short months, Verse8 has exploded and now hosts over 13,000 games, attracting over 3.5 million players.

Top takeaways from this conversation:

1. With an AI-orchestrated, code-first engine, Verse8 invites anyone to turn natural language prompts into complex, multi-hour game experiences.

2. The platform has scaled quickly, and now offers creators access to revenue through built-in subscriptions and in-game purchases.

3. Kevin Lee explains how Verse8 flips traditional game economics, enabling producers to prototype and market-test ideas at near-zero cost before committing to major development budgets.

4. There’s an automated mechanism for IP and royalties, thanks to integration with Story Protocol’s blockchain layer.

AI Gamechangers: What journey led you here? Please tell us about your personal experiences before you worked on this platform.

Kevin Lee: Before joining Verse8, about a year ago, I had joined Verse8’s parent company, Planetarium Labs. I previously worked in private equity based out of Seoul, so I was an investor and worked in M&A for a number of years. I joined [Planetarium Labs] as head of investment there, and I was in charge of making venture capital investments in gaming spaces, as well as general tech, AI and so on. I did early-stage investment for about three and a half years.

And then an opportunity arose at our company – our founder wanted to spin off a separate company to pursue a brand-new AI business. He asked me to step up as CEO. I thought that was a great opportunity, so I took that job, and Verse8 has been a great journey for me so far.

What was it that made you realise that AI and games were a great business to be in? Was there a lightbulb moment when you saw that AI was going to be fantastic for games?

Planetarium Labs has been in gaming tech for over seven years. I was always looking into new tech, gaming, AI, and how these technologies evolve. Then late last year, our founders and I realised that there was a moment where the LLMs became so advanced that we could actually plug an LLM model into our newly developed game engine. We could create a multi-orchestrated AI agent so that when people type in natural language prompts, we can have agents spit out fully playable experiences.

We ran a couple of tests and came up with the prototypes. We realised: now we’re ready. With this, we can go viral, and this can be commercialised. We quickly wanted to spin off the company, and ever since that I’ve had a ball running the company. I’m excited about the future!

Many tools promise to democratise creation in some way. There are plenty of no-code and low-code tools online. What’s genuinely different about Verse8? Can you tell us how it works?

There are a couple of things that differentiate Verse8 from other partners and competitors out there. No-code creation tools are very popular these days, even without all the AI agents that we see. Gaming is a little bit different, because it’s one of the most complex development sectors out there; it involves not only coding, but music, animations, audio and everything all together! So this type of integration is incredibly complicated, which is why AI agents are needed to orchestrate all the different generative AI products.

Verse8 is a little special in the market, because we basically made one single-step AI agent that can take your natural prompts and turn that into a playable game – and then we also provide a platform where these games can be published.

This is possible because we have our own game engine, a WebGL game engine – it’s a code-first game engine. That’s different from some game engines in the market, like Unity and Unreal, because those tools are editor-first engines. Those tools were built decades ago for editors to come in and start developing. It’s for humans. Our engine is code-first – that means it takes code as a priority; people can provide a natural language prompt, the LLMs will code, and that will interact with our engine to come up with what the creator wants.

“The way we work in the game industry will change drastically. Roblox has proved there’s a UGC market for gaming. We’re ready to expand that market even more. Roblox is a closed community, while our platform is built to provide creator tools for everybody”
Kevin Lee

How our agent develops the product is a little different from our competitors as well. If you go to our website and into the Creator tool, and then start writing natural prompts, you’ll quickly notice that our creation tool will show you a VM [virtual machine], and then our agent will start writing code, and then allocate these codes to different production files. If you look at our competitors, you will quickly notice that their agents tend to drop a single-file production code, so it naturally limits the scale and complexity of what creators can build.

And then in terms of technological advancement, we’ve already reached the point where we’re able to provide our creators monetisation tools. This means you’re able to create a game, and then if you’d like, you can implement monetisation tools like asset shops, in-game transactions or subscriptions. Then you can quickly publish that onto our website and start generating revenue through your content. So I’m confident to say we’re one of the most advanced game platforms out there that provide these kinds of tools.

Do you use a specific foundation model? Are you dependent on a particular technology in the background?

Our agent incorporates different AI tools. For foundational models, we basically provide everything: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok. As a creator, you can choose the LLM of your choice to start coding. Once you start generating the game, as you can imagine, you need to generate assets: you need to create characters, background music and videos. These tools are all implemented as an MCP server into our agent.

If you have no assets to hand and you want to create a visual novel game, you can simply type in, “I want a visual novel that shows characters that look like this or that”, and our agent will instantly call Nano Banana, and it’ll create image assets for you. And then our agent will start optimising these assets into your game environment. These are natural and all automated. It’s been pretty groundbreaking for us.

How configurable is it for a user who has assets of their own that they want to use? Or perhaps they’re a programmer who wants to go deeper using their own skills; is that possible?

If you’re not a developer, you can go all the way by just typing in natural prompts. If you’re a programmer and especially if you’re a game developer, we also provide good access – our VM will provide the code base for you. If you have a little bit of knowledge on coding, you can actually tap into our VM and fix a specific file, or take the code entirely out for yourself to fix and then put it back in. It’s configurable for everybody at every level.

It seems that you have web3 elements as well – there’s a blockchain component to the monetisation options. Please tell us how the AI systems and the on-chain elements work together to create a unique experience.

As a company, Verse8 doesn’t really provide web3 infrastructures yet ourselves, but we partner with a couple of blockchain companies. Obviously, Story Protocol is one of them: it’s an IP layer, so we thought that was important to integrate. It’s important to have web3 in our website when it comes to IP, because you need to make sure ownerships are protected. Also, creators who use specific IPs are also rewarded.

There are legacy systems in both the West or in Asia – it takes too much time to source a specific IP, use it, and start generating revenue from created content (and then do a settlement among different stakeholders). Story Protocol is one of the very few blockchain projects that are actually revolutionising this process. We quickly integrated Story Protocol, and now what’s possible is that, as an IP owner, you can register your assets on-chain and then as a creator on Verse8 you can simply write a natural-language prompt saying, “I want to bring in this specific IP from Story Protocol (IP number 120, for instance...” and it’ll bring that IP to our VM. It will start generating your game using those IPs. And once that specific content starts generating revenue, the settlements will happen automatically on the Story Protocol layer, based on the licensing terms established by the IP owner! This simplifies everything for creators and the IP owners – we’re really excited about the opportunity.

What’s the demand been like so far – and what kinds of projects are you seeing on the platform? Are you surprised by anything you’re seeing?

We’re seeing close to 4,000 active creators – I mean, creators who released at least one game in the past 30 days. That’s a conservative number there: we have more than 13,000 games published on the platform (and consider that we launched the platform last year, so it’s only six months).

In terms of players, we’re seeing somewhere between 3.5 and 3.6 million MAU. And we’re constantly seeing more than 150,000 daily active users too.

“As a creator, you can choose the LLM of your choice to start coding. Once you start generating the game, you need to generate assets: characters, background music and videos. If you have no assets to hand our agent will instantly call Nano Banana, and it’ll create image assets for you”
Kevin Lee

Now we’re constantly growing this user base, and our advertisement cost is decreasing as we speak. So it’s getting some traction. And I’m sure this indicates that the platform’s becoming a little more viral over time.

What’s been surprising is that in the very early days of Verse8, we saw very simple puzzle games being made. As we progressed, implementing more MCP servers and introducing monetisation models, we’re seeing games with a lot more progression: 10- or even 20-hour progressions. We see RPG games with sophisticated features embedded in them, that we didn’t even know our agent could do! We have some hardcore creators who are creating such games, with hopes to monetise them.

What have been the hardest technical challenges to overcome?

There are two major hurdles. Firstly, while we’ve lowered the entry barrier for game development to nearly nothing, at the same time, it can be difficult for people to get familiarised and start generating well on the platform. With AI tools, you need patience, and you need to put in some time.

If you look at Lovable, for example, it’ll take a couple of hours to come up with the nice templates – and then it’ll take days for you to actually build a working website or application! With Verse8, too, you need to have the right idea, and then you need to have patience, and you need to put in some time to actually go back and forth with the agent until you’re satisfied. It’s not a magician; you can’t say, “I want a game that everybody loves!” and expect it to do that on its own. One hurdle, then, is having creators on board who are interested and ready to jump in and enjoy our technologies. We’re also constantly thinking about how we can simplify our agents more.

Secondly, it’s a priority for us to be optimising our agent in a way where people spend less money. For certain jobs and certain cycles, any agent can spend a lot of tokens going back and forth with an LLM, and it’s not efficient. You don’t want the agent to repeat certain code cycles – that just increases the cost, right? So optimising our agents in a way so that it’s more efficient for creators is one of our priorities at this stage.

What does success look like for you at Verse8? What big ambitions do you have for the next year or so?

This might sound a little clichéd, but remember how YouTube really started taking off as a platform with smartphone cameras – everybody can start recording and put their videos there, and all types of creative content became available to the general public. We’re anticipating something similar, and we’re very close. For Verse8 to be number one, we’re going to make sure that our creators are rewarded for their content and make sure they’re constantly monetised.

“We’ve already reached the point where we’re able to provide our creators monetisation tools. This means you’re able to create a game, and then if you’d like, you can implement asset shops, in-game transactions or subscriptions. Then you can quickly publish that onto our website and start generating revenue through your content”
Kevin Lee

We also want to make sure that the content we publish on our website is something appealing to the general public. We will keep spending marketing budget to make sure there’s a large number of players, whatever the appetite. You can be a hardcore gamer, you can be a light gamer who likes puzzle games – anybody who’s interested in playing games, we’re ready to attract them to our publishing platform.

We want to shift the industry a little bit by inviting more creators (and even large-scale studios!) to develop on our platform, so they don’t have to go to the App Store or Android store. We will provide a favourable revenue split for creators for the foreseeable future. Our goal is to make sure we’re attracting all these talented creators and to make sure they have access to the large-scale, mass public who are ready to enjoy their games. We want to be a brand new, ultimate gaming platform going forward.

How do you see AI reshaping the games industry over the next decade? What are your big predictions?

First of all, there are a lot of creative ideas out there for games. But the industry itself is very front-loaded; by that, I mean if you’re a producer, you need to secure a very large amount of budget and manpower to actually start creating games. For the most part, you’re blindfolded; you never know if your content is going to succeed in the market. So, for game development, our product is perfect. If you’re a producer, you can come up with a prototype; you can put together, on a very simple scale, a game using your ideas, and then start doing experiments on our website. Then you can see if people are reacting to the new ideas! It’ll cost nearly nothing. We’re hoping that with advanced AI, we can see a lot more creative ideas turn into a reality in the game space.

“Gaming is one of the most complex development sectors out there; it involves not only coding, but music, animations, audio and everything all together! So this type of integration is incredibly complicated, which is why AI agents are needed”
Kevin Lee

The way we work in the game industry will change drastically going forward. For the retail market, I guess we saw the hint of it from Roblox. Roblox is currently marking somewhere between 70 and 80 billion in market cap. That has proved there’s a UGC market for gaming. We’re ready to expand that market even more. Roblox is a closed community, while our platform is built to provide creator tools for everybody. It makes sure the content is distributed to everybody. We see a lot of potential, and we know the market can grow a lot bigger.

Is there anything else you wish people knew about Verse8’s business?

We’re advancing our technologies at a really fast pace. We are also providing a multiplayer environment! What that means is that our platform could boost communities for different demographics, different generations, just like Roblox.

If you go to our Creator tool and want to start creating a multiplayer environment, that is possible, and it will open the door for a lot more opportunities. YouTubers, virtual influencers, anybody else who’s interested in creating not just games but playable experiences – I’m sure we’ll see a lot more creative content becoming available.

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Further down the rabbit hole

Some useful news, views and links to keep you going until next time:

• Supercell has opened registration for its Global AI Game Hackathon, running 6th-8th February online and in San Francisco, London, Helsinki and Tokyo, with X&Immersion joining as a technology partner and top teams earning fast-track interviews for the AI Lab Spring 2026 programme.

• Stocks for major game companies, including Take-Two, Roblox, Unity, and Nintendo, tumbled following Google’s reveal of Project Genie, an AI tool that generates basic 3D environments from text prompts, albeit with limitations and a runtime cap.

• Accountant Jonathan Bjerk built Curve Clash, a cross-platform multiplayer party game, using only AI tools like Claude and Cursor, and it hit #4 in Norway’s Family Games chart, with 1,100+ players and a 5.0 App Store rating.

• The UK government has launched free AI training courses for adults, aiming to upskill 10 million workers by 2030 as part of plans to make Britain the fastest AI-adopting country in the G7.

• Peter Steinberger’s Clawd open‑source project for autonomous AI agents quickly became Moltbot (after a call from Claude’s lawyers) and then was rebranded as OpenClaw almost immediately afterwards.

• The latest news-hogging twist on the AI agent story is all about Moltbook, a Reddit-style forum just for AI agents where you can watch them comparing experiences and starting new threads to discuss their ideas: Elon Musk called it the beginning of the technological singularity; then news circulated that a lot of it was fake; and then it started to look like a huge security risk. Who knows what will happen by the time you read this?

• Ahead of the GDC Festival of Gaming next month, the 2026 State Of The Game Industry survey has been released. It reveals that while 36% of developers now use AI tools, sentiment has soured, with 52% believing generative AI negatively impacts the industry (up from 30% in 2025), and positive sentiment dropping from 13% to just 7%.

• SciPlay CEO Josh Wilson says the studio’s long-term growth strategy for 2026 is rooted in heavy investment in data, AI-driven workflows and real-time personalisation to deepen retention rather than chasing short-term hits.

• If you’re in California for GDC Festival of Gaming in March, consider dropping by PGC Summit San Francisco on 9th March too, which will have expert speakers from the mobile games and AI sectors.

• Indie developer Eero “Rakuel” Laine has announced he’s pulling his free-to-play card game, Hardest, from Steam, saying he regrets using AI-generated assets and now believes the technology has hidden economic and environmental costs, reigniting debate around the ethics of AI in game development.

• AI-first startup Studio Atelico (who we interviewed in March 2025) has unveiled Bobium Brawlers, a turn-based iOS creature battler where players invent one-of-a-kind monsters using short text prompts, with on-device AI generating bespoke art and abilities while keeping matches competitively balanced.