GameMakers

Ask ChatGPT for the best mobile puzzle game and it does not say Candy Crush. It says Monument Valley, a game from 2014 that is not on any top grossing chart.Kalie Moore has spent the last year working out why, and this is the version a game studio can act on.I keep getting the same question from studios: how do you get found now that players ask an AI instead of searching. So I asked someone who does it for a living.Kalie Moore runs High Vibe PR, a boutique PR agency for gaming, AI and frontier tech companies, with offices in the USA, Europe and Asia. Clients include Pocket Worlds, the publisher of Highrise, and Overwolf, who she has worked with for six years. She also started PRCoverage.AI, a PR reporting platform she built the first version of herself after a dev shop quoted her $60,000 to $80,000 for an MVP, and then brought on a co-founder and CTO to make it something other agencies could use. In this conversation she walks through the work, the data, and the parts she says she cannot prove yet.Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of getting a brand named in AI answers, the way SEO gets you ranked in search results. For a game studio that means tracking which games and studios ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name for a given prompt, then building the earned media those answers are assembled from.WHAT YOU GETHow game studios actually get recommended by ChatGPT, and why app store rank and AI recommendations measure two different things. When Kalie checked, Monument Valley sat at number 11 on US App Store paid and neither it nor the sequel appeared on free downloads or top grossing, and ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity all still named it first.Which sources AI engines actually cite for games. On the prompt she tested, 18 of ChatGPT's 24 cited sources were best-of listicles, 5 were Wikipedia and 1 was Reddit. Gemini used four sources for its whole answer, one of which was the game publisher's own blog.How Pocket Worlds' Highrise took 10 of 12 target prompts off Roblox in the US, including best mobile virtual world, and the earned media base that made it possible in a month rather than a year.Why you do not need IGN. Niche genre roundups, a publisher blog and creator videos all get cited, and for cozy games a single 500,000 subscriber YouTuber outweighs the games press.Whether ranking in AI actually converts to players. Kalie is direct that she cannot yet tie an AI ranking to paid users. What she can cite: AI platforms pulling 9.5 billion visits a month globally, up 70% year over year while Google search stays flat, AI's top pick becoming the user's pick in 74% of cases, and 88% of people accepting the shortlist without a second prompt.How fast a citation source can disappear. Reddit accounted for close to 4% of ChatGPT's search citations until 14 August, when PromptWatch measured an 86% drop.How a boutique PR agency ended up shipping software, and the one job Kalie will not let AI near: executive positioning. Including the client media list, clearly generated by a chatbot, that had a dead journalist on it.CHAPTERS0:00 What PR Actually Does3:47 How AI Decides Which Games Get Named8:50 Case Study: Outranking Roblox12:18 Does AI Ranking Convert?14:07 Building High Vibe on Word of Mouth18:36 Building PRCoverage.AI24:12 The Gaming GEO Leaderboard28:46 Founders Going Direct34:13 Six Years of Overwolf Comms37:48 Listicles, Reddit and the Citation Crash41:17 Start Narrow, Start Now45:09 Get Your Founders Writing47:23 Why AI Makes Everyone Average49:37 Where to Find KalieKALIE MOOREHigh Vibe PR: https://highvibepr.comPRCoverage.AI: https://prcoverage.aiLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaliemoore/Gaming GEO leaderboard: https://www.highvibepr.com/gaming-geo-leaderboard?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=gamemakers

Unity just made direct-to-consumer payments free for every developer on its IAP SDK. No take rate, no fees. So what's the catch?
I sat down with Steve Ganem, VP of Product at Unity, to unpack the real strategy — and it turns out the story isn't about payments at all. It's about data.
Steve brings a rare vantage point: 19 years in games (EA, Activision's Tony Hawk franchise, 11 years running his own studio through the free-to-play transition), then a decade at Google Analytics. In this conversation we cover why "free" is a rational move rather than a giveaway, why going D2C without Unity could actually cost developers ad signal, the conversion tradeoff most coverage skips (web checkout is harder than Face ID), and how this connects to Unity's advertising business and its AI platform, Vector.
Whether you're a developer weighing D2C, a PM modeling the conversion math, or an investor watching Unity's turnaround, this one goes well past the announcement.
📖 Full written analysis: https://www.gamemakers.com/p/the-most-important-number-in-unitys

Epic spent five years and over $100M breaking the platforms' 30% tax — then cut V-Bucks by 20% to "pay the bills." If the company that won the fee war still gets squeezed, what does that say about everyone else?
The answer isn't about fees. When AI makes content infinite and attention stays finite, the only asset that appreciates is the direct relationship with your players — the one distribution channel that gets cheaper the stronger it gets. And a nearly invisible economy of community-run game servers has been proving its dollar value for fifteen years.
I sit down with Liam Wiltshire, GM of Tebex — the merchant-of-record platform behind direct payments for Rockstar, Take-Two, Hytale, and FiveM — to unpack it.
In this episode:
Why "is 30% dead?" is the wrong question
Creator codes: how trust drives 50–227% more spend
The BNPL and crypto data that surprised even Tebex
Why 35% of desktop game purchases happen on a phone
How Hytale launched off Steam and secured two years of runway from pre-orders alone
The £20, 16-year-old origin story behind a company that's processed $1.5B
Read the full breakdown and subscribe at gamemakers.com.
Chapters
00:00 — Epic cut V-Bucks: why it's really a margin story
03:47 — When content is infinite, what's actually scarce?
07:38 — The shadow games industry: Hypixel, FiveM & a $1.5B economy
10:13 — The data: creator codes, BNPL & buying on a second screen
13:33 — Liam Wiltshire joins: the state of the industry
16:35 — Why every player purchase is a "CapEx decision"
18:50 — Is the 30% platform fee dead?
21:00 — Who really owns the player relationship?
23:27 — D2C across mobile, web, PC & console
34:59 — Treating the platform as an acquisition channel
42:57 — UGC servers & what a "merchant of record" actually does
1:00:40 — Creator codes: how trust drives more spend
1:19:04 — BNPL & crypto: the numbers that surprised Tebex
1:31:20 — Payment optimization & one-click checkout
1:40:43 — The £20 origin story & the $29M exit

AI is making it cheaper to build games. It's doing nothing for the cost of building the right game. That distinction is about to crush more studios than any technology shift in the past decade.                                   
Ran Mo is the CEO of Proxima and creator of Suck Up — arguably the first commercially successful game to use AI at runtime. The game generated over 100 million YouTube views with zero marketing spend. Before founding Proxima, Ran led product teams at EA on The Sims franchise and spent time at YouTube and BCG. 

In this episode, Ran live demos AI-assisted coding in Unity, breaks down his "trunk and leaves" framework for where AI helps (and where it destroys your codebase), and makes the contrarian case that AI in actual gameplay is overhyped — even though he built the first game to prove it works.                                  

We go deep on: why vibe-coded games are architecturally unusable at scale, the power law that's about to eliminate mid-tier studios, why Ran hired a marketer with 1M TikTok followers, and the Taoist philosophy that keeps him sane while Silicon Valley burns out around him                                                                        

Whether you're a game dev, studio head, or just trying to understand where AI actually moves the needle in creative industries, this conversation will sharpen your thinking.

🔗 Ran Mo's newsletter: newsletter.ranmo.me                                              🔗 Proxima: proxima.gg                                                                                  

Outline:
0:00 Intro
1:15 Ran Mo's background and founding Proxima
4:38 How Suck Up actually uses AI                                                                     
8:49 Why Proxima won't use AI for art or design                                     
12:32 Live demo: AI coding in Unity                                                                   
22:33 Vibe coding gone wrong — the Stardew Valley test
25:14 The trunk and leaves framework
29:24 Real productivity numbers (not Twitter hype)
34:57 The technically capable designer                                                  
38:58 Power law distribution is coming for games                                
43:48 Suck Up's $0 marketing playbook
46:04 The Courage to Do Nothing
52:35 The velocity trap                                                                                 
58:13 Hot take: AI in gameplay is overhyped
61:01 Ran's personal story                                                                              
66:15 Go your own way                                                                                   
69:15 Final advice: slow down to speed up

Last month, I sat on a panel about where the gaming industry is headed. The conversation was good — but there was one thing I didn't say out loud.
In this episode, I break down the key trends I think will define gaming in 2026:
The noise problem is about to get much, much worse — and it's hitting from both sides
Small teams aren't an anomaly. They're the new default.
"Nobody codes anymore" — what AI-or-die actually means for studios right now
Why the industry is losing its moat and most people don't see it yet
 Plus: the progression compression paradox that nobody's solving — why the attention economy is forcing games to speed up in ways that might break long-term engagement.
Whether you're running a studio, building a game, or trying to figure out where this industry is going — this one's for you.
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