Pixel P&L: Tim Sweeney Fires Shots at Sequoia’s Investment in GenAI Gaming Startup

Steam Game Recording is now Available to allGood morning. It’s Thursday, November 7th. At the start of the month, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire excitedly announced an investment in DecartAI. Epic Games’ founder and CEO Tim Sweeney pulled no punches when reacting to this. Today’s newsletter takes a deeper look at this exchange, along with other interesting developments like Steam ringing the deathknell for NVIDIA Shadowplay and Prime hinting at an India launch featuring a star studded lineup of global and Indian influencers.

Plus, IGDC 2024 approaches and the curtain has been lifted on the Agenda - filled with a star studded lineup of speakers who will be in attendance.

Tim Sweeney versus Sequoia and DecartAI

This was Tim Sweeney’s response to Sequoia’s investment in DecartAI - a genAI startup that launched a “warm-up” called ‘Oasis’ which claims to be a fully playable version of Minecraft with no game engine. 

“Imagine a video game entirely generated by AI, or a video you can interact with—constantly rendered at 20 fps, in real-time, with zero latency”. DecartAI’s words, not ours. Now we're no genAI experts but this sounds deliberately vague. Oasis’ public demo essentially remade Minecraft as a playable video stream, using videos of Minecraft - a game made using LWJGL. Is this not just a glorified (albeit super-efficient) plagiarism simulator!? Perhaps this is what led to Tim Sweeney’s seemingly impulsive outburst on X.

Meanwhile, Sequoia’s blog post about this investment in DecartAI draws parallels to Google’s relentless focus on optimizing performance on existing consumer hardware. Little has been said about Decart’s ability. Instead, it seems like Sequoia’s conviction to invest rested largely on the founders’ prowess in solving complex problems in the field of AI.

IGDC 2024 Announces Event Agenda with Power-Packed Speaker Panels

The India Game Developer Conference 2024 (Hyderabad, November 13th to 15th) has unveiled the event agenda. This year’s conference packs a punch with over 250 speakers, and 150 sessions. Some of the speakers that will be at the conference include:

The full list of speakers can be found on IGDC’s website. Grab your passes here.

Steam Game Recording is now Available to all

Steam’s built-in system for players to create and share gameplay footage has exited beta and is now available to all users. Key features include continuous and background game recording, replay, clipping and one-click sharing. All of this is accessible within the Steam overlay itself, leaving players on the platform with little incentive to continue using third party software like NVIDIA’s Shadowplay. To top it off, Steam Game Recording also comes with a neat timeline and event markers - both player added and game added (automatic), making things easier for players to find, clip and share key moments.

Global Internet Celebrities Set to Launch Prime and Feastables in Mumbai

Logan Paul, Speed, MrBeast, KSI and CarryMinati will be visiting the Jio World Drive Mall in Mumbai, India this Sunday to launch the Prime range of drinks and Feastables chocolates. In a recent video posted to Instagram, MrBeast (in collaboration with CarryMinati) announced that he was living up to his promise of visiting India if CarryMinati’s recent parody video of him crossed 10 million likes. At the time of writing, the video currently has over 62 million views and 8.4 million likes.

Netflix Announces New Games Initiative Powered by AI

Nearly two weeks after reportedly shutting down its AAA game studio, Netflix’s former Vice President of Games Mike Verdu has announced that he will be taking on a new role - VP, GenAI for Games. In a LinkedIn post announcing his new role and what’s next, Verdu also stated, “Pay no mind to the uninformed speculation in the media about the changes in Netflix Games. What you've seen over the last several months was actually a planned transition.”

A Scottish children’s hospital charity has introduced a ‘gamer in residence’ role in order to play video games with children to help them prevent boredom. A BBC video on the subject opens with the hospital’s gamer in residence Steven Mair wheeling out a portable gaming setup to a young patient’s bed with an offer to play some Mario Kart with them. The full video is filled with heart warming moments and is a must watch for anyone that needs convincing that gaming continues to be a force for good in this world.