【GamePea Exclusive】Krafton has been making aggressive moves in the AI space recently. Its in-house large language model brand Raon open-sourced four models earlier this year, signaling that the company now views AI capabilities as a core strategic pillar for the next phase.
Against this backdrop, subsidiary Overdare recently announced that it will fully integrate its proprietary AI Agent technology into Overdare Studio by April 2026, launching a feature called "Studio Agent" that extends AI capabilities into the game creation layer.
New Gameplay: Command the Game Engine via Chat
Simply put, Overdare is a mobile UGC game platform, essentially a Roblox competitor. Players are both content consumers and creators. The platform is built on a deeply customized version of Unreal Engine 5 for mobile environments, allowing creators to use powerful UE5-based development tools and a Lua sandbox engine to build their own games, 3D assets, and avatar content.
From a gameplay perspective, Overdare users can experience a wide variety of games created by others on their phones, including action RPGs, shooters, and party games. Through a partnership with Naver Z, the platform also features a Create-to-Earn system settled in USDC stablecoins, enabling high-quality content to be directly monetized. Social features include avatar customization and in-game chat, while NFT and blockchain technology ensure transparency and security for digital assets. Currently, the game is not available in Korea but is being tested in markets like the US and South America.
Based on virtual currency, Overdare's business model closely mirrors Roblox: the platform provides tools and traffic, creators produce content, and users consume within this ecosystem. But Krafton's key differentiator lies in integrating the AI Agent directly into the core control layer of the game editor, rather than just offering a plugin for asset generation.
After all, the existing UE5 toolchain poses a high barrier for ordinary users: Lua scripting requires programming knowledge, and UE5's engine structure is a professional-grade complex system. "Studio Agent" aims to tear down that wall. This new feature allows creators to input natural language commands in a chat window. The AI then parses these commands and directly controls the game editor to implement game functions.
In simple terms, the AI agent communicates with the editor to create, edit, and apply objects (including scripts). Creators can see results in real-time and continue issuing commands. The whole process feels more like conversing with an engine-savvy partner than struggling alone in front of a code editor.
Alongside this, the "AI Clothing" feature works similarly: creators input a desired style description, and the AI automatically generates and applies clothing textures for avatars without any additional modeling steps. According to Korean media reports, Overdare plans to further expand AI production capabilities, with the goal of having AI handle art asset placement and level design in the future—features currently in live testing.
The Global AI-UGC Platform Battle Heats Up
Krafton's rush to enter this space is easy to understand. The UGC track has been proven critical and important by countless products across various categories. The underlying business logic of UGC game platforms is not new: the platform provides tools and traffic, creators produce content, and users consume within this ecosystem, forming a positive flywheel. Roblox has been practicing this logic for twenty years.
But the accumulation of the past two decades has now reached a tipping point thanks to new technology. The maturity of AI toolchains has dramatically opened up the "creator supply side" bottleneck. In the past, content production was limited not by creativity, but by technical barriers like modeling, programming, and level design. When AI starts taking over these tasks, the pool of potential creators no longer grows along a slow curve—it can leap forward. A qualitative change in content supply directly determines the ceiling of the platform's ecosystem.
This explains why Roblox, NetEase, miHoYo, and many other companies have all chosen to make their moves within the past year or two. Whoever can first establish an AI-powered creator ecosystem will likely seize the initiative on the supply side in the next content cycle.
The approaches and technical paths each player takes, however, are subtly different. Globally, Roblox remains the undisputed pioneer and benchmark on this track. Over the past year, Roblox has significantly accelerated its integration of AI capabilities. It built a foundational model called "Cube" to drive 3D object generation, and has since pushed further into more complex full-scene generation.
Most recently, Roblox unveiled "4D Generation" technology, which it calls "4D Creation." This refers to models that simultaneously contain geometry, behavioral logic, and interactivity—not just static visual assets. In other words, when a creator inputs a prompt, they don't get a dead 3D model; they get a car that can drive or a dragon that can swim.
Additionally, Roblox Studio now includes a full suite of AI capabilities, including an Assistant feature that can generate code, build worlds, and help creators learn and debug. It also supports the MCP client protocol, meaning third-party AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor can directly call Roblox Studio to execute creative workflows. This positions Roblox not just as a game platform, but as an open creative infrastructure that any top-tier AI tool can plug into.
On the creator economy front, Roblox paid creators over $1 billion through its Developer Exchange program last year, and has set a target for AI-generated game content to account for 10% of all content on the platform.
China's Contenders: NetEase and miHoYo
In China, GamePea sees strong Roblox candidates with equally impressive data. NetEase's Eggy Party, for example, has over 500 million registered users, and the number of UGC maps on the platform has already surpassed 100 million.
In terms of AI integration, Eggy Party has taken a pragmatic approach, embedding generative capabilities into its editor step by step. Earlier, leveraging NetEase Interactive Entertainment AI Lab's 3D model generation technology, Eggy Party became the first game to achieve text-driven model generation. Players can input any prompt and automatically receive a matching model within seconds—a feature already used by over 53 million players.
In its latest update, the "AI Model Generation" feature was introduced in partnership with Hyper3D.ai, a leading 3D generation algorithm company. Using Hyper3D's self-developed Rodin algorithm, the feature enables instant, large-scale deployment of 3D generation technology within a mobile game environment. According to reports, the partnership began with a technical handshake at GDC, followed by nearly a year of internal refinement within NetEase's art pipeline before being released to ordinary creators.
Furthermore, Eggy Party launched an AIGC Creative Challenge in early 2026 in collaboration with Kling AI, exploring the combination of video effects and game IP, extending the value of AIGC into content distribution. Along the complete "tools-creation-distribution" chain, Eggy Party's layout is already quite systematic.
While the above players emphasize "lowering the barrier to creation," miHoYo's moves on this track carry more dramatic tension. On one hand, the company is making steady strategic deployments; on the other, its founder has made a radical departure.
In August 2025, miHoYo unveiled "Genshin Impact: Thousand Star Realm" during a special program for Genshin Impact's fifth anniversary. This is a player-driven standalone gameplay module. Using the "Thousand Star Sandbox" editor, creators can freely access nearly all of Genshin Impact's gameplay features and assets, designing and building their own game levels from scratch. The supported gameplay types are extensive, ranging from simulation management and party games to competitive battles and adventure challenges.
But even more striking than Thousand Star Realm, in GamePea's view, is the pivot of Genshin Impact's core creator, Cai Haoyu. In September 2023, Cai officially stepped down as miHoYo's chairman, handing the reins to longtime partner Liu Wei, and moved to Silicon Valley to found a new company, Anuttacon, exploring game worlds that "can not only be played, but also lived."
In July 2025, Anuttacon quietly released the demo of its first game, Whispers from the Star, an AI narrative experiment centered on voice interaction. In the game, players guide the protagonist Stella through a planet escape mission via free-form dialogue. Stella's behavior, emotions, and responses are all driven and dynamically generated by an AI model in real-time.
The significance of this game extends far beyond a mere demo. Cai has publicly stated that his goal is to turn this AI model into a platform akin to a "game engine," where developers only need to set preconditions to generate interactive NPCs and build any game on top of them. This represents a fundamentally different AI+game path from Overdare or Roblox: not enabling ordinary people to build with AI tools like blocks, but having AI directly generate the very "soul" of game interaction.
The Essence of the Track: Who Holds the Key?
Looking at the moves of these companies, two distinct technical paths are emerging in the AI-UGC game platform space.
The first is the tool path: embedding AI capabilities into the creative workflow, outsourcing professional skills like 3D modeling, scripting, and level design to AI, and allowing creators to focus on the creative vision itself. Roblox's 4D generation, Eggy Party's 3D model generation, and Overdare's Studio Agent all belong to this category. The essence of this path is using AI to lower technical barriers while retaining the creator's control over the final content.
The second is the engine path: having AI directly generate the operational logic of game content, including NPC behavior, narrative progression, and world rule generation. Cai Haoyu's Anuttacon is exploring exactly this direction. This path is more radical and harder to implement, because there is still a considerable gap between a "fun" game and a game that "AI can generate."
At GDC 2026, Bitmagic co-founder and CEO Jani Penttinen shared a cautionary tale: "We built a product where users could input a prompt and generate an entire game. We thought people would love this form of expression, but almost no one used it. Real creators want to iterate and polish repeatedly, not just throw out a prompt. And more consumption-oriented users don't want to write prompts at all. We made a product with no real audience."
This lesson is worth careful consideration by every company betting on this track today. For now, each path offers a different answer. But there is only one question: What shape is the key that unlocks "everyone can make games"?
Tags: AI, Roblox, UGC, miHoYo, NetEase