Christophe Gomez

I could not agree more regarding AI in gaming specifically (and for life, more generally)!! Excel’s impact on Accounting, sure, but how about… Internet impact on Commerce Smart Phones impact on Gaming Social Networks impact on Media (or Elections 😉) Humans rarely utilize innovation in the most effective way at first, but we do get there eventually.

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I spent the past 3 months working on AI agent development - but I'm back for now - and integrated Unreal 5.6 into my local Unreal codebase today.    Integration of new Unreal Engine versions is significantly easier with a proper integration pipeline set up. The attached image illustrates the method I've found works best, from almost 2 decades of working with Unreal and Perforce.   It trades adding a few extra steps in exchange for avoiding the "Reconcile offline work" operation - which can take many hours to days to run on the complete Engine folder, if it doesn't fail - and reducing the amount of manual integration work to the bare minimum required, while still ensuring any actual conflicts will get looked at/engine changes don't get stomped.   For this to work properly, the engine release streams should be filtered to include the Engine folder and related files only, and only vendor code/data should ever exist in the vendor folder or streams below the engine integration stream.   If main is being worked in during integration, you may have to do step #4 again one or more additional times before step #6 can be completed, as the integration needs to be fully up-to-date before the copy to main.   Special note about UE 5.6 - This has come up before with a different engine version upgrade, but UE 5.6 replaces a Unix file named "__tuple" with a directory of the same name. To deal with that in Perforce, first rename the __tuple file to something like __tuple_DELETED, and then you can go ahead and delete it. Integrate that change up the integration hierarchy before copying/integrating in the new version to avoid conflicts. Doing the rename before deleting prevents the deleted file from blocking re-use of its name as a folder.

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Showing some advanced techniques for having creative control over the various layers of animations you can do directly inside of Unreal Engine. In this setup we have 3 separate layers running where you can have 1 for authoring the core humanoid performance animation, 1 for controlling each section of the transformation and 1 for fine tuning the final animation per bone. With this setup, you are no longer bound by the limitations of a static transformation animation and can adjust each layer to suit each performance scenario with macro and micro controls that can be concurrently animated. It's one of our more complex setups and Eugene Flormata does a fairly quick high level coverage of how it's all linked up in this video. If you have more questions or are interested in setting this up, feel free to reach out or try out some of the tools we used to make this happen. More control rig goodies and animations demos on the way.

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72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games. Conducted by Atomik Research, 306 industry executives were surveyed across the UK and USA. 75% of respondents were senior managers or C-suite level, with 77% from studios with more than 50 employees. The study found that for most studios, Steam accounts for over 75% of revenue. In US law, you’d need to either control the production pipeline top to bottom, or hold a dominant share through acquisitions of competitors. Steam does neither. Valve hasn’t bought out rivals and it doesn’t own all the studios that make the games sold through its store. What it does own is competence, and that’s where this whole argument starts to fall apart. Almost every other storefront has had years to compete, and almost all have stumbled. This isn’t a case of Valve killing competition. The competition just keeps shooting itself in the foot. Steam spent years refining features that now define the PC ecosystem: cloud saves, remote play, Workshop mods, forums, reviews, refund policies, and Proton support for Linux users. It built hardware, an OS, and a handheld that all tie back into the same ecosystem. Most importantly, it kept the service stable, predictable, and user-focused. That level of reliability became its moat. What developers call a monopoly is often just a reflection of consumer trust. Steam is where people go because they know their games, progress, and friends will still be there in a decade. It’s not market manipulation it’s consistency. If studios think they “rely too heavily” on Steam, that says more about their alternatives than about Valve itself. No one forced them to abandon their own launchers or build weak ones. Consumers simply migrate to what works best for them. It’s worth remembering that monopolies aren’t defined by popularity or market share alone. A monopoly becomes illegal when it restrains competition. Steam hasn’t done that. It hasn’t blocked other stores, locked content, or acquired rivals. It just runs the best version of what everyone else keeps trying to make. The day someone builds a better, more reliable, more feature-rich service, Steam will finally have a real challenger. Until then, calling it a monopoly is just a way to avoid admitting the obvious: they aren’t trying to kill their competition. Their competition is almost non-existent.

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Layers of Engagement in Games Together with Xsolla, we break down the core systems that drive player retention. 𝟭. Second-to-Second Fun 🕹️ • Optimize controls for low input latency • Add impact feedback and layered VFX • Ensure readability with clear telegraphs • Keep micro-loops fast and friction-free • Allow instant restarts and fast loads 𝟮. Short-Term Objectives 📍 • Frame tasks with clear win conditions • Track progress using pins and breadcrumbs • Add in-session variety with side goals • Use start and end rituals to fight fatigue • Offer small rewards to maintain momentum 𝟯. Mid-Term Goals 🧭 • Plan progression with steady power growth • Provide multi-vector progress and upgrades • Balance reward economy and pity thresholds • Manage difficulty with smart return paths • Gate dynamic difficulty assists by content 𝟰. Long-Term Mission 🚀 • Build deep fantasy and emotional stakes • Break content into chapters and milestones • Create social-competitive arcs and leagues • Add return mechanics with gentle FOMO • Reward milestones with exclusive titles 𝟱. Player's Anchors ⚓ • Hide lore secrets and alternate solutions • Build a sense of ownership via persistence • Reward personal commitment and long streaks • Foster social bonds with clans and co-op • Use fair monetization as a post-fun amplifier — Boost your game profits with an Xsolla Web Shop integration, launch in days and keep more revenue

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I decided to leave the video game industry and become a K-Punk music producer. Youtube video here: https://lnkd.in/ek2nrZcb Meet Kiri, my new star. More seriously, I had been curious for a while to test what today’s AI video generators are really capable of. The trigger was being offered two weeks of access to the Runway platform. The best way to evaluate a tool is to build a real project with it. To be honest, this was not something I had been planning for a long time. It was more a case of “I need to try something, I need an idea quickly.” I already had the music for my next dome game, generated with Suno, so creating a music video felt like a great opportunity. That meant building a persona and a short story from scratch. Keep in mind, I am a programmer with zero experience in making this kind of content. I still invested a lot of time and energy into it. I worked on this for days. I learned a lot along the way, but it definitely takes time to create something like this, even if from the outside it may look like “just AI.” I could have polished it further, but I wanted to stay below a $200 USD budget. Tech stack: • Lyrics: ChatGPT • Music: Suno • Keyframe generation: Nano Banana and Kling Image • Video generation: Grok, Kling 3, Veo 3.1, Runway 4.5 • Lip sync: Wan and LTX for close-ups, Pixverse for the rest • Editing: manually in DaVinci Resolve • Subtitles: custom Unity code What I learned: There is no silver bullet. Every video generator has its strengths and weaknesses. Grok is surprisingly good. I do not understand why more people are not talking about it. It is cheap, very fast, and the results are exceptional. For me, it provides the best frame-to-video quality. Kling is not as strong as Grok in raw output, but it supports end frames and references, which is extremely useful for character consistency. I probably should have used it more. It is slower and more expensive, so I only used it when other tools could not achieve the shot. Character consistency could definitely have been better. Using Kling more often would have helped. Using Kling Image instead of Nano Banana for keyframes would probably also have improved stability. Sometimes the difficulty is not where you expect it. Some shots worked on the first try. Others that looked simple on paper turned into a nightmare. Frame-to-video is less magical than I initially hoped. If your character is too small on screen, consistency quickly breaks. For example, Kiri swimming sometimes turns into a mermaid after a few frames. If the character is too close, important parts of the outfit go off screen, and the model has to guess what is missing. It often guesses wrong. End of message in the first comment.

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Sounds like an interesting panel for Brand/IP management at External Development Summit (XDS), love those takeaways and wholeheartedly agree with them... "In games, just as in film, the most successful universes come from centralized IP stewardship. Without a clear vision holder, franchises fracture — one sequel emphasizes mechanics, another shifts tone, and external spin-offs feel disconnected. " "Stewarding IP" is an exciting ride but as it's not a purely fact based/data-based endeavor, it's also about dealing constantly with emotions and opinions... not for the faint of heart and definitely leave the ego at the door (paging Vicky Malineau 😆)

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I was chatting with Verena Puhm about how Luma AI Modify video / V2V could be used in a podcast so we thought we’d pretend to have a podcast to explore the ideas.

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I've recently revisited Chaos RBAN (Rigid Body Animation Node) and was quite impressed by its high lateral linking accuracy and stable behavior. As its integration with Control Rig continues to improve, I expect it will offer even greater flexibility in animation setup. RBAN is shaping up to be an increasingly viable option for handling dynamic motion in Unreal Engine 5, and I believe its potential applications will continue to expand moving forward. #UE5 #UE5Study

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I've written for games in a number of genres at this point and am always thinking about the differences in what the gameplay needs from the story. This certainly isn't an exhaustive list, but a few thoughts on several of the most popular genre's we've had experience work with @ Pergamon Narrative #narrativedesign #gamegenre #gamedev

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62% of the job loss in games has come from the US. 70% of that from California. If you look at LinkedIn, this gets spun as “the rise of Asia” narrative, but that’s just part of the story. Like Hollywood, the video games industry is being decimated by a high cost of living, an environment increasingly hostile to business, and a culture that got out of sync with audiences. Federal R&D tax credits will help with the competitiveness, but the fact that no one wants to admit there’s a “California problem” doesn’t make me hopeful it will improve any time soon.

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Everyone's arguing about whether DLSS 5 will "YASAFFAY" game characters and ruin artistic vision. Late take, but: this is the wrong conversation. Remember when ray tracing first showed up? Games that shipped without it got RTX patches later. People panicked about "unintended lighting" breaking the developer's vision. Turned out fine. Devs who cared about lighting already knew what pipeline they were targeting. Everyone else got a nice optional upgrade. DLSS 5 is the same pattern. It's an optional feature in a mature upscaler stack. Game developers aren't accidentally going to lose control of their art direction because Nvidia ships a better reconstruction model. They know what tech their game supports. They build around it. But here's what's actually wild about DLSS 5 that nobody seems to be talking about. The img2img consistency. Frame to frame coherence at that level of reconstruction is genuinely hard. Anyone who's tried to get stable diffusion to produce two consistent frames in a row knows the pain. Nvidia apparently just... solved a huge chunk of that? At real time performance? That's the story. Not "will my characters look weird." The fact that we now have inference based image reconstruction that holds together across motion, camera cuts, and varying scene complexity. At playable framerates. The character smoothing discourse feels like complaining about JPEG artifacts on the Hubble telescope.

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🐔 I’m not easily impressed by chickens. But this one surprised me. KRAFTON Inc., the company behind PUBG, just announced Project Windless, an open-world single-player RPG based on the Korean fantasy novel series The Bird That Drinks Tears by Lee Young-do. And that’s the interesting part. A major global publisher is betting on a Korean literary IP, not a sequel, not a live-service clone, but a deep narrative world rooted in a non-Western mythology. This isn’t just adaptation. It’s cultural export through interactive storytelling. When a novel becomes a game at this scale, it’s not about retelling the plot. It’s about expanding the universe, translating lore into mechanics, and giving global players a new entry point into an existing world. That’s how modern franchises are built. Not format first. World first. Mark my word: Project Windless might end up being more than a game. It could be the gateway that turns a national fantasy saga into a global transmedia ecosystem.

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Great opportunity for emerging developers. IGDA Foundation's Questline has opened applications for two programs designed to help people grow in games. Questline: Online is a six-week virtual experience with coaching, mentorship, and career support, while Questline: Gamescom is a small cohort focused on supporting studio founders. If you are looking to build skills, expand your network, and connect with the global games community, this is well worth a look.

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IP as an infrastructure: what it means for how games get made. The games industry just closed a year that should feel like a victory lap. Revenue up. Engagement up. Record spending. And yet.... 45,000 people lost their jobs in three years. The middle market is hollowing out. Revenue is concentrating around franchises that figured out something the rest of the industry is catching up to: IP isn’t a product. It’s a platform. IP became multi-vector delivery: The biggest moves of the last 18 months aren’t game deals — they’re IP infrastructure deals. Netflix spent $82.7 billion on Warner Bros. Entertainment . not for game studios, but for IP it can exploit across streaming, interactive, and merchandise simultaneously. Sony proved the model with The Last of Us: a game franchise that became a cultural event through television, feeding back into game sales. Games Workshop turned #Warhammer into a licensing empire across tabletop, video games, TV, and film. In every case, the game is one vector of a multi-surface strategy. This reshapes what gets greenlit and what “success” means. Sport is the ultimate multi-vector IP. In December 2025, sports titles held half the top 10 console revenue positions. But the real story is the capital structure behind them. The Saudi PIF consortium didn’t just take Electronic Arts (EA) private for $55 billion. They’re simultaneously investing in football clubs, #F1, #boxing, #golf, and #esports. They’re treating sport itself as an IP — the game is one monetization surface alongside broadcast rights, live events, and merchandise. Netflix is running the same playbook on cultural IP. DC, #HarryPotter, #GameofThrones — each franchise now feeds streaming, interactive, and live experiences under one roof. Games become a permanent surface, not a licensing afterthought. The production volume this generates is enormous. And structurally recurring. Production evolved — harshly Game production moved from centralized-in-studio to managed-with-multiple-partners. Not because studios wanted it — because 45,000 jobs didn’t come back, games got bigger, and content cadence accelerated. Every major production now coordinates across internal teams, co-dev partners, and specialist studios. That’s growing external production at 7.5–10% annually. But it’s not overflow anymore. It’s structural. #AI landed — but not where you think. 36% of professionals use generative AI. Most common application? Research and brainstorming — not production pipelines, not shipped assets. And 52% of creatives view the technology negatively. Not fear of change — they’ve seen what happens when tools outpace governance. So: IP is becoming infrastructure. Production is becoming distributed. The industry is spending more while demanding more from every partner in the chain. What does a production partner built for this world look like? ->That’s my next post... Heading to GDC next week. If any of this resonates, let’s talk. #GDC2026 #GameDev #CoDecv #IP

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This isn't the matrix, it's Steam. Every single AppID since the beginning of time. In total, 25 years worth of PC games coming in at 253,105 unique entries to date. What's even more fascinating is being able to see which were the first ever games available, at the inception point of one of gaming's biggest platforms.

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Are you struggling with your Demo Reel? Try this. Aaron McGriff is now teaching on www.anim.works If you do not know Aaron, he has spent 20+ years as a feature animator, including a long run at Pixar on films you have already seen. He runs the CGRIFF channel and quietly drops some of the most useful animation knowledge on YouTube and LinkedIn. His first masterclass for us is live this week: the Animation Demo Reel Bootcamp. Nearly three hours of teardown on what makes a film grade reel land, what to cut, and the choices most animators get wrong before they hit record on a playblast. If film work is what you are aiming for, watch this one before you queue up another shot. A second, deeper masterclass with Aaron is already in production. Four more drops this week: Animate Suite for Blender, by David Hallows . A serious animator focused toolkit for the graph editor and beyond. There is a 30 minute walkthrough on the page so you can see how far it goes before you commit. Four standalone Maya plugins by Thibault Pansiot , sold separately so you can buy only the one you need: • 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿, for cleaner constraints that do not break your animation. • 𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗖𝗮𝗺, one click camera follow on any controller. A lifesaver for cinematics and long walk cycles. • 𝗜𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗥𝗲𝗳, image plane on a camera in seconds instead of ten clicks deep in the attribute editor. • 𝗦𝗻𝗮𝗽 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹, one of those small tools you install once and never animate without. The Pokemon rigs competition is also still running this month on the forums. Badges, prizes, community submissions. Jump in: https://lnkd.in/eGZFDjt7 If you are a student, studio make sure to bookmark Animworks for future drops! Links in the comments. #animation #gameanimation #filmanimation #maya #blender #demoreel #animationreel diedev #gamedev

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The "Fractional Executive" is becoming the secret weapon for scaling studios. Not every studio needs a full-time, high-cost C-suite member from day one, but every studio needs executive-level strategy. Hiring "fractional" leadership allows studios to access top-tier talent for critical growth phases without the overhead. It’s the ultimate surgical recruitment move for the modern, agile studio. #GamingIndustry #Startups #Leadership #FractionalExec #GameRecruiter

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Behind Solaris stand The Unsung Hero of USD Rendering, usually when people think of USD rendering, the spotlight usually falls on Karma, Hydra, or Storm. But behind the curtain, there’s a quiet powerhouse doing the heavy lifting: Husk. Husk is Houdini’s command-line USD render delegate, the bridge between your USD scenes and the renderer. OK it’s not flashy but it’s fast, robust, and absolutely essential for automating renders across a pipeline. What Husk Actually Does It reads .usd, .usda, or .usdc files directly. And executes the Hydra render delegate (like Karma, Storm, or others). it handles frame-range rendering, overrides, and AOVs — all headless, no UI. Integrates beautifully with PDG/TOPs, enabling large-scale distributed rendering. You can run it from a terminal as so: husk myscene.usd -f 1 100 -o $HIP/render/beauty.$F4.exr Or wire it into PDG for batch rendering, versioning, and automation. Now why It Matters for Tech Artists USD-Centric Workflows its Husk is your link between Houdini’s stage and production render farms. Pipeline Integration Ideal for render farm hooks, automation scripts, or cloud jobs. Automation & Validation Perfect for procedural validation (auto-render previews, shot tests). Headless Efficiency No GUI, minimal overhead — great for render nodes or CI/CD. A quick Pro Tip you can even switch render delegates via command line: husk -R KarmaXPU myscene.usd This makes Husk a flexible entry point for any Hydra-compliant renderer — including Karma CPU, Karma XPU, and third-party USD renderers. Husk might not get the spotlight like Karma does, but it’s the backbone that makes scalable, procedural, USD-driven rendering actually possible. #Houdini3D #USD #Husk #KarmaXPU #PipelineTD #TechArt #Proceduralism #Automation #RenderFarm #PDG #Hydra #VFX #CGPipeline #OpenToWork

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