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Play AI has raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round to build middleware for AI models and agents in games.
The platform, which the Las Vegas company calls a modular chain of game AI, provides developers with high-quality game data and tools to improve game content generation and reward users for their gameplay through data contributions. In this way, Play AI introduces a new revenue stream for gamers around the world, allowing them to contribute and earn revenue from their gameplay data. This funding round values Play AI at $70 million.
The company was founded six months ago and has been growing quietly over the past three months. Play AI has attracted the attention of a number of institutional investors, including P2 Ventures, Jump Crypto, Alphawave, Zentry, MH Ventures and Tykhe Block.
“Artificial intelligence is the future of games and virtual worlds, but the cost and complexity of development have long been a major barrier to adoption,” said PS Ramees, CEO of Play AI. “We're ushering in a new era of gaming by making adoption incentivized, simple and secure. Any developer can choose from a range of pre-trained models or submit requests to the network to easily add AI elements such as non-player character (NPC) agents, procedurally generated worlds, auto-dialogue, story trees and more.”
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They support the company's goal of accelerating the adoption of AI in games. The platform uses blockchain to create a decentralized network for training AI models and data attribution. In an interview with GamesBeat, Ramees emphasized the importance of attribution and value accumulation in the network, and used blockchain to ensure transparency and fairness. Additionally, the company can use non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to create new revenue streams for gamers outside of the game economy, he said.
Play AI encourages gamers to share their gameplay data on the Play Collective platform and uses that data to build and train AI models and agents based on the behavior and engagement of top-ranked players. These models and agents are then made available in Play AI's Game Agents Marketplace, enabling developers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy rich AI models into their game titles.
In recent years, many game companies have been looking to leverage AI to create more responsive procedurally generated environments and NPCs that adapt to each player's decisions. One of the key elements to making this happen is the existence of a marketplace that can capture real-world data from top players that can be used to optimize and personalize the game's narrative throughout the game.
Developers currently rely on centralized systems to access data and AI models, but these systems have inherent limitations, require significant computing resources, raise privacy concerns, lack transparency and are susceptible to censorship.
The PlayAI ecosystem is designed to overcome these barriers and provide game developers with the tools to create immersive real-time experiences tailored to players' preferences and skill levels, ultimately making games more dynamic and engaging.
Play AI has three services: Play Markets securely aggregates and verifies users' gameplay data and creates a marketplace for gaming datasets, Play Dojo provides a sandbox for developers to train gaming AI agents using distributed computing and trustless evaluation, and Play Hub is an SDK that integrates gaming AI agents that are ranked and rewarded by gamers.
Play AI is further secured as an Actively Validated Service (AVS) on the Eigen layer, with Play nodes deployed for the validation process.
Play AI has launched a collaborative platform for users to share and monetize their gameplay data. Join the Play Collective today to earn exclusive rewards: Collective.Playai.network.
Ramez started creating gaming VR experiences for brands like Adidas, Prada, and Walmart a few years ago, offering glimpses into engaging gaming worlds with great gaming content and personalized online experiences for players. He then began to focus on AI and combining it with virtual worlds. He was a big fan of Ernest Cline novels. Ready Player One.
Long term, he believes the world will become virtual and immersive experiences will dominate, but first those experiences will need to be built with the intelligence of AI to personalize them for each user, he said.
“Play AI wants to build technology in the middle that can power these experiences,” he said.
The company has 14 employees split between the US and India.
“If you look at the market today, there are two ways to approach this. One is to create the game yourself. Then you train an agent or a model or get the data from the game itself, which is great. But it takes hours or even years to get that up and running, and that's just for one game. What's different about what we're doing is we build within existing virtual environments and games. And we collect data from all of this – personalized user data,” he said.
This will result in aggregated data and a model for targeting users across multiple games, he said. Blockchain is important for establishing attribution, or where a player comes from. Attribution is crucial for the entire network as it can lead to rewards for the source of attribution.
The company hopes to have the dashboard ready soon and then release games afterwards. He's initially targeting open-world player-versus-player shooters, but the technology could also be applied to simpler hyper-casual games.
“It doesn't matter if the game is Web3 or Web2,” he says, “we're starting with Web3 games because that's where our team is comfortable with this kind of approach to launching networks. But our relationship with gamers is very simple.”
He said gamers will now have a way to earn income from the games they play without disrupting the game's economy.
