Series, a GenAI game development platform, has quietly raised $28M from Netflix, Dell, a16z, others

[Cpvr]

It’s been quite the year for gaming industry exec Pany Haritatos. 

Last month, he quietly closed an oversubscribed $28 million Series A for his new game studio startup Series Entertainment, according to an SEC document and confirmation from the company. Investors include Netflix, Dell Technologies Capital, with follow-on investments from seed investors Andreessen Horowitz, BITKRAFT, and F4 Fund. This comes after launching the company only a year ago with a healthy $7.9 million seed led by a16z. 

In between, he’s already made an acquisition. Series bought mobile game studio Pixelberry in July, best known for its interactive fiction game Choices: Stories You Play.

Series, also known in the industry as Series AI, is on a mission to create video games using LLMs and GenAI. But more than that, it’s gunning to be the new Unity, powering legions of game developers. Haritatos and team have created the Rho Engine, which uses GenAI to help game developers build games speedily.

One can be skeptical that LLMs will really be the panacea to humanity that its loudest proponents claim. But gaming is definitely one of the areas that AI is glowing up. 

Instead of designing everything from characters to elixir bottles, game developers can have AI step in to do that work and to make games more interactive than ever. NPCs can turn into rich, fully developed characters that, for instance, haggle with the gamer. Players can be given vast, perhaps unlimited, capacities for customization. And so on.

But to do all that, developers need AI-enhanced game engines. Series bills Rho as the first AI-native, multimodal full-stack game creation platform – meaning it handles visuals and audio. To be fair, there are other AI gaming engine competitors out there including, for instance, Modl.ai Engine, and Unity’s Muse Chat. But Rho says it sits in a different spot. Modl.ai performs tasks like bug catching, or identifying reasons why the games are crashing. Series views Muse Chat as more of an AI assistant. Rho, the company says, is intended for full-stack game development.

Source; Techcrunch

[killamch89]

I’m cautiously optimistic about this. AI-powered game engines like Rho sound promising, but I'm curious how developers will balance automation with the creative process. Are we at risk of losing some of the art in game design?

[GameOn]

GenAI has already proved to be promising in gaming and Series Entertainment’s $28M funding is a good point to that. Also, I expect the investment of Netflix to yield better story. 

 

[Button]

Many giants such as Dell and Netflix are investing heavily into Series Entertainment. This partnership will enhance boundaries of the games industry. I’m sure that GenAI will bring changes to the gameplay and graphics.

 

[Lens]

It will be unwise to disagree with the fact that the GenAI platform of the Series Entertainment will unconditionally transform the gaming world. Whoever’s funding them has giants on their side.