Andrew Kertesz

I'm happy to welcome Adam Orth, Charlotte Cook, and Cisco Maldonado to our Midwest Games team. As we grow the business and global opportunities to help game publishing and dev teams succeed, adding even more experienced leadership expands our capabilities in many exciting ways. Ben explains the details well in his post below, but as a final point I'll just say it is great to have this momentum and extra horsepower heading into GDC. Can't wait to talk with folks there about the opportunities that may come from partnership!

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For those of you who might be interested, I am giving 3/4 of a talk at GDC this year along with Brad Hendricks, the CEO of Blind Squirrel. Our talk is about "building a global development team" and my part of the exercise details some of the production practices we use to manage our different teams in different locales around the world in a consistent manner. In particular, I'll be deep diving into how we capture and utilize KPI's from our teams to try and avoid issues in advance of them occurring. The date and time of this extravaganza is: Thursday, March 12 | 11:50am - 12:50pm. Location: Room 3002, West Hall. I hope to see you there!

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In her opening letter, Asha Sharma said she wanted to bring about a "return" to Xbox. Jez Corden asked exactly what that means, since it effectively implies that Xbox has begun to stray from what Xbox "is."

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What a phenomenal RDC 2025!🔥 This year’s Roblox Developers Conference (held Sept 5–6 in San Jose) was packed with major announcements, and I couldn’t be more excited by the direction the platform is heading: • Roblox Moments: A built-in short-form video feed for capturing highlights and instantly sharing them across the platform, think a TikTok-style discovery tool tailor-made for Roblox. • Creator earnings boost: DevEx rates increased by 8.5%, putting more cash back into creators’ pockets. • Huge growth metrics: Over $1 billion paid out to creators in the past year, with daily active users climbing toward 112 million. • Emerging tech & safety upgrades: From acoustic simulation and hydrodynamic enhancements to emissive mapping, CSG on meshes, and server authority for anti-cheat measures • Infrastructure & community support: A new data center in São Paulo is now live, improving latency for Brazilian users, and the platform is reinforcing its commitment to safety with over 100 updates and better age-based moderation. This year, Lootbloc turned up with some unforgettable moments: • Partner Dinner: We hosted a special dinner for our 60+ partners, an opportunity to connect, eat great food, and relax after a long RDC weekend. • Claw Machine: We partnered with the Roblox Commerce team to have our Lootbloc-branded claw machine featured at their booth, where attendees could win merch • Luau Plushie Launch: We unveiled an exclusive Luau whale plushie with Roblox, themed after the Luau logo that attendees could earn by completing a scavenger hunt at the Luau booth • Co-hosting Quataun party Friday night at RDC where we gave away thousands of plushies, shirts, hats and more to fellow developers. Lootbloc is only continuing to grow by bringing on new partners this year like Piggy, Pls Donate, Murderers vs. Sheriff Duels, Twin Atlas and more! Bottom line: RDC 2025 wasn’t just about big tech announcements, it was a celebration of community and all of the successes this past year. I’m so excited by the possibilities ahead, and inspired by how platforms like Roblox and partners like Lootbloc continue to grow together. Here’s to next year, bigger, bolder, and even more connected.

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GDC 2026 Wrapup (2 of 2): A Shift in the Craft In Part 1 I covered what I learned at GDC this year. This one's more personal. I've spent 30+ years working professionally on traditional game AI. Behavior trees, GOAP, utility AI, finite state machines, genetic programming, neural networks, battle pattern matching and tactics, etc. That was my craft. GDC used to include a two-day AI Summit with multiple overlapping sessions to choose from throughout. This year you could count the traditional game AI sessions on one hand and still have fingers to spare. In the Game AI Roundtable, one of the few surviving AI sessions, people kept steering toward ML and LLMs while the host kept pulling it back to traditional game AI. It felt like watching our community process the loss in real time. I know I was. The Fireside Chat with Damian Isla and Jeff Orkin hit the same note. Veterans reminiscing about what felt like the golden age of traditional game AI. I knew some of those people from previous GDCs. Worked at some of the same companies. Bittersweet is the right word. But the PUBG Ally session I mentioned in Part 1? An AI buddy that learns your play style, remembers your favorite weapons, talks to you in combat through two-way voice? That's where it's all heading. And honestly, it's exciting even for someone who grew up in the old school. What I'm Taking Home Between the two posts, here's what I'm bringing back to the studio for The Realm: Return Home: - AI companions and villagers you can actually talk to and who learn from you - Adaptive music that matches gameplay, layering tracks and crossfading between themes so the soundtrack reacts to what's happening in real time - Polish and marketing fundamentals so our players can actually find us on Steam - VR gesture-based interactions that skip the controller entirely - Steam localization to reach a wider audience - And a personal favorite throwaway: texture-trained neural network shaders that dramatically improve both compression and fidelity at the same time 25 sessions. 20-30 pages of notes. A head full of ideas and a craft that's changing under our feet. It's a strange place to be, but exciting at the same time. What sessions stood out to you? #GDC2026 #GameDev #GameAI #IndieGame #VR

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We've been implementing Neural Texture compression in #Assassinscreedmirage. The overall benefit results in better quality textures for less GPU memory usage (links in the first comment). If you followed the topic since our GDC2024 presentation ,this a very practical application of La Forge's mission to bridge the academic world with Ubisoft. #ubisoft #ubisoftlaforge #innovation 👇 "If you've been thinking, like I have, that we're still some way off seeing AI being used in games for more than just upscaling or frame generation, then it's time to think again" (...) "Enter stage left, neural texture compression to cut down on that memory demand. Given the state of the DRAM and SSD market right now, you can bet your last dollar that a whole heap of game developers will be looking closely at what Ubisoft has done to see if it can help out in their games, too"

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Just wrapped up an inspiring day at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Exec Offsite for Games in Irvine. Truly an informative event for navigating today's dynamic industry landscape. Key insights: With 77% of studios embracing generative AI, it's clear this tech is revolutionizing content pipelines and player engagement. Amid stagnant markets dominated by live service titles, strategies like DTC unlocks, transmedia tie-ins, and brand-formance marketing are essential for growth. AWS's ecosystem (from SageMaker for cost-efficient AI workflows to efficiently hosting game servers) offers scalable tools to build, run, and grow at pace. Grateful to the AWS team (with a special thanks to John D’Eufemia) for curating such a forward-thinking event, packed with unfiltered trends and actionable sessions. Shoutout to the speakers (like Jen Donahoe) and fellow execs (great to see you J. Aaron Farr) for the vibrant discussions that sparked new ideas for our roadmap. Excited to implement these takeaways and collaborate more deeply! #AWSGames #GamingIndustry #GenerativeAI #GameDev

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As I read more and more reports about the recent Xbox layoffs one thing becomes clearer about MSFT’s intent in this round: This wave was not driven by a desire to replace workers with AI as some have speculated. Instead I believe the intent was to “improve” a Span of Control KPI. What I notice is that a great number of the layoffs occurred among quite senior employees level 64-66 at the Director and Senior Director level. That is middle management. If this had been an AI replacement exercise MSFT would have kept more experienced people and fired mostly junior people as AI replacement tends to produce better results with more experienced humans in the loop. The driving out of experienced middle management, and I’m talking about some absolute legends in the industry, points to a different organizational goal: Span of Control. MSFT and many other tech firms have in recent years looked at the ratio of management to direct reports and sought to increase the number of reports each manager has as some measure of organizational efficiency. Misguided or not this is a trend that has been widely reported on before. It also doesn’t hurt that middle management is paid better and makes a juicer target for cost cutting when a business unit’s targets are not met. If you don’t make the margin goals Corporate needs you to make, you have to offer a tribute or face their wrath. And that is what I believe this is all about. Just my opinion. #xbox #gameindustry #gamedev

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Remember when NVIDIA was all about those GeForce RTX you could not buy? Well, they still do them, but at CES 2025, Jensen Huang revealed a whole "new" game plan! While gaming cards still make a piece of the pie (9% of revenue last quarter), NVIDIA already went deep on AI, but they also explore robotics and autonomous vehicles - a massive $1 trillion market. Just a few examples: Cosmos: The "world's first physical AI model" for robotics, trained on a mind-blowing 20 million hours of video! Toyota Partnership: NVIDIA is teaming up with Toyota to develop their next-gen autonomous vehicles. Project DIGITS: Want your own AI supercomputer? NVIDIA's new Project DIGITS, starting at $3,000, puts serious AI power on your desktop. BTW: As of May 2025 NVIDIA has a market cap of $3.001 Trillion USD already.

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Unity 6.3 LTS is here! This release delivers the long-term stability, verified ecosystem, and real-world performance optimizations developers need for confident production development. With two years of dedicated LTS support (three for Unity Enterprise and Industry), consistent updates, stable platform coverage, and smoother upgrade paths between Unity 6 versions, Unity 6.3 LTS is built for the way teams develop today! For the full technical breakdown - including how 6.3 was production-verified - check out our blog: https://lnkd.in/eJubt26g

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Grateful for the chance to demo Powder at the Intel booth during Microsoft Build—huge thanks to Tonya, Bryan, and the entire Intel Corporation team for making it possible. Powder is shaping the future of real-time, edge AI content creation for gamers and creators worldwide. It was an honor to showcase what we’ve been building, live and in action, to so many talented developers in the Microsoft community. Special thanks to Nicolas, Jay, Eric, Shaun, and the entire Ubisoft team for letting us feature the breathtaking, cinematic world of Skull and Bones in the Powder demo and breakout sessions. Excited for what’s next as we continue pushing the boundaries of AI and gaming together! Catch a quick look at what we're building at Powder in the video below #Intel #Ubisoft #Powder #MSBuild #AIEditing #Microsoft #Windows #AIFoundry #EdgeAI #NPU #SkullAndBones 

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