by 
Antstream made its name with a cloud streaming service that lets you play classic games, but the company has recently hit the headlines for its involvement with The James Pond Legacy, which was pulled for its egregious use of GenAI assets.
It seems that the company is very much focused on AI in the future, as a new service has just been launched that promises to turn "everyone" into a game creator.
Slice is pitched as an "AI-powered short-form competitive gaming platform" where "a single prompt becomes a short, competitive game anyone can play, remix and monetise. Content creation has been democratised everywhere. Gaming is next."
The Slice site says that "AI made everyone a creator in music, video and writing. Gaming is the last major medium — and its category leader has yet to emerge." The service aims to tackle "every kind of game" on "every kind of screen", and even promotes the use of "licensed IP" in these AI-generated games. Pac-Man is one such IP mentioned, so it seems Bandai Namco is on board with the venture.
A big part of the service seems focused on giving IP owners a way to promote their product, be it a film, TV show, or music artist, through "short, competitive content that promotes the original." The premise is firmly dialled into the short-form market, where brands like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have dominated the conversation, dopamine-delivering throwaway entertainment that many experts have labelled 'brain rot'.
Slice is built on Google's Gemini AI framework, but Antstream, which proudly claims it offers "5+ years of behavioural data, any-device cloud delivery and an established pipeline of licensed game IP", is doing the heavy lifting. Slice's site lists Antstream CEO Steve Cottam and company CTO Oliver Woods as key staffers. Between them, they boast "55 years of operating and technical leadership across gaming and technology."
Slice's Advisory Board includes individuals who "scaled Roblox into a multi-billion-dollar gaming leader" and "built platforms at two major gaming companies", but the one that sticks out for me is a venture capital partner "backed by Peter Thiel" – you know, the antichrist guy.
As readers of this site will know, Generative AI is one of the most controversial technologies to emerge in decades. AI models – like Google's Gemini – have been trained on human-made images, music, video and text without permission or remuneration, and the multiple lawsuits in process are evidence that the legal playing field is not yet set in stone; that hasn't stopped companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft from exploiting the hard work of real people in order to train models which compete directly with human creatives.
GenAI is theft – a Microsoft executive even admits it – and it's hard to see Slice as anything other than a hugely exploitative venture which will only siphon work away from real developers and designers, many of whom may even have unwittingly helped train the models involved.
Slice isn't alone in this field, sadly; Google and Unity are creating AI-powered game creation tools of their own.
As we've seen in the world of literature and Music, lowering the barrier to entry doesn't suddenly mean we've got a world full of Hideo Kojima-level developers – in fact, real devs are increasingly concerned that AI will lead to a race to the bottom and flood the market with low-quality products.
Sadly, thanks to sites like Astrocade, that's already happening – it has over 10 million monthly users, mainly children.
Thanks to Stefan Helm for the tip.