For those who hate blockchain and generative AI, the future looks bleak.
Certainly, JC Kim’s vision of the future is that genAI will reduce game development costs by up to 90%, also allowing studios and individual creators to iterate very quickly and test product-market-fit at orders of magnitude hitherto unknown.
And it’s not a pie-in-the-sky vision, either.
The Planetarium CEO and his team have been working on their Verse8 platform for over a year. It’s been live for consumers for a couple of months. But its main focus is professional developers who get deeper access to its various components, which as well as a multiplayer game engine includes 2D and 3D asset generative and audio too.
The cost of creating a simple game is estimated to be less than $20.
And that’s why Kim is now also the co-CEO of fellow South Korean developer Delabs Games, heading up its AI strategy. This will see Delabs leveraging its access to IP — its previous game was based on the Ragnarok license — and plugging it into Verse8. The debut AI-enhanced titles from the now “AI-first game studio” are due in 2026.
In the meantime, however, anyone can get hands-on with Verse8’s beta, which has a particular focus on allowing users to remix or “spin” existing projects to create their own games, which are distributed and ranked through a simple curated frontend.
Of course, there is also a crypto element as the platform will allow users to launch their own tokens, effectively memecoins.
As Kim points out, this is in contrast to the vast majority of gaming tokens, which have been sold to raise money to make a game. Now, however, you don’t need any money to actually make a game, so you can use the token for pure rewards and sentiment creation.
Check out the beta version of Verse8 here.