The Party Is Full: Inside MMOs, Game Development, & AI

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson is the CEO of Fenris Creations, formerly CCP Games, the Icelandic studio behind EVE Online. He joined CCP in 2000 as Chief Technology Officer, leading the engineering work behind the game’s persistent universe, and became CEO in 2004. Since EVE’s launch in 2003, he has helped sustain a world where players build economies, form alliances and fight wars that become part of its shared history.His career in virtual worlds began in the 1990s at OZ Interactive, before he joined CCP. Today, his work includes EVE Frontier, a space survival game that takes the studio’s interest in risk, cooperation and worlds shaped by players further. Drawing on around three decades of experience, Hilmar also explores how AI could change the way games are made, helping developers improve their tools, test ideas and revisit ambitions that once seemed beyond reach.Chapters:00:00 Intro00:22 How EVE Online began03:55 EVE Online and the metaverse09:38 Why players seek risk15:01 Loss, survival and EVE Frontier20:02 Building EVE with its players25:03 Running an MMO like a city29:37 Why EVE outgrew its original plan35:00 Supporting SpecialEffect35:59 Back to the conversation36:17 Growing an MMO without losing its identity41:16 Why EVE shares one universe47:21 AI and the future of game development53:17 Could AI make impossible MMOs possible?59:00 AI tools, prototypes and refactoring1:03:46 Modding and remixing games1:08:30 Why creative judgement still matters1:19:31 Rediscovering the thrill of building1:28:49 Who builds the next metaverse?1:34:33 Advice for building online worldshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/hilmarveigar/https://fenris.com/Books mentioned:Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0553380958Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307887448The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140447555The Poetic Edda: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199675341Proud to support SpecialEffectThe Party Is Full donates space on the podcast to help raise awareness of SpecialEffect’s work. They help people with physical disabilities play video games through bespoke gaming setups, with support that is free of charge and for life.https://www.specialeffect.org.uk/donate

Paul Hellier is the founder and CEO of Engineered Alchemy, a boutique game engineering studio headquartered in Cyprus. The studio makes its own games and helps other developers and publishers ship theirs through porting, optimisation, feature development, Unity and Unreal work, and custom engine development. Before founding it in December 2025, Paul was Vice President of Technology at King, where he led the engineering team on Candy Crush Soda. He spoke at GDC about the team's rewrite of the Switcher, a core part of the game, and how it prepared Soda for its next decade.Paul started making games in his bedroom in the late 1980s, writing assembly language for the Atari ST and later for the NES, Game Boy and Super NES. Over the next decade he worked at Viacom New Media and Konami, then became Director of Technology at Atari. His own company, Nuevo Retro Games, worked on Ultima Forever with BioWare Mythic and built the SmartGlass experience for Fable Anniversary with Prima and Lionhead. He later led technology for Disney Imagicademy at Disney Publishing Worldwide and for NCSOFT's mobile studio Iron Tiger, then oversaw engineering for NaturalMotion's racing games, including CSR2. Paul is also a full BAFTA member.Chapters:0:00 Intro1:13 Can you trust AI code?5:04 From assembly to AI12:22 Reviving old games with AI15:36 Why fundamentals still matter19:46 How Paul hires engineers23:46 Why engineers won't be replaced29:31 AI can't find the fun32:26 How studios should use AI35:13 The AI backlash41:31 Go indie or join a studio?45:28 Tech debt at Candy Crush Soda49:41 How Paul leads engineers55:58 Tokens aren't productivity1:02:08 Why mobile is so hard1:08:22 Startup vs big studio1:16:01 Learning to lead the hard way1:19:40 Ask the dumb question1:25:17 Advice for getting into gameshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hellier/Support SpecialEffect: https://www.specialeffect.org.uk/donateSpecialEffect help people with physical disabilities play video games. They create bespoke gaming setups, and their support is free of charge and for life. UK registered charity 1121004.

Molly Sheets is a game designer, studio founder and engineering leader with more than 15 years of experience where games and cloud technology meet. After starting her career on film sets, she moved into games when the iPhone arrived, earned a games degree and released her first game in 2011. As lead designer at Thrust Interactive, she worked on a dozen games, including Words & Cards. Molly then founded Ker-Chunk Games in Georgia and ran it for six and a half years, balancing consulting work with original mobile games such as PrinceNapped and Call Me Phrasy! In 2016, Mattel consulted her on Game Developer Barbie.In 2019, Molly joined Amazon Web Services as a Principal Games Solutions Architect, helping studios build and run their games in the cloud. She later moved to Zynga, one of her AWS customers, as a Director of Engineering for platform and cloud infrastructure. A speaker at GDC, AWS re:Invent and KubeCon, she also writes about game funding, studio culture and infrastructure on her blog, SEV 1 Party.https://mollysheets.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollyproffitt/Chapters:0:00 The Napster moment1:00 Molly's path into games3:42 Is AI the new Flash?10:49 How the cloud changed games15:02 Where AI falls short20:16 Why funding is so hard25:14 Marketing and discoverability31:46 Test before you launch41:43 Being honest about AI45:47 Should games work like film?53:48 The flood of new releases57:40 How Ale got into games1:03:19 AI can't make people care1:10:06 Startup life with AI1:18:42 Job hunting advice

Stephen Clarke-Willson is the Game Director of Guild Wars at ArenaNet. He joined the studio in 2004 as a contractor, adding music to the original game. He then moved into server programming, where he worked on Guild Wars Factions and its observer mode. Later he led the server team and became studio technical director across Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Today he leads the original game, which recently relaunched on Steam as Guild Wars Reforged.Before ArenaNet, Stephen was a producer at Virgin Interactive. His games there included The 7th Guest, Dune II, Cool Spot and Disney's Aladdin for the Sega Genesis. He holds a PhD, and his first job was building mission planning systems for the B-2 bomber at Northrop. In this episode, he explains how Guild Wars updates while people are still playing and what happens when a release goes wrong. He also covers bots and exploits, and what a real Ready Player One world would need to run.Chapters:00:00 Intro and the Ready Player One vision01:17 Focusing on one live game06:48 How Guild Wars began10:22 Updating a game while it's live13:31 Hotfixes and keeping the world running18:57 Rollbacks and lost items23:28 Player behaviour and stress tests30:38 Exploits and moderation34:07 Why MMO players stay36:18 How MMO servers work43:43 Building the first online worlds47:28 Imagining Ready Player One50:43 Discoverability and algorithms54:08 Proximity chat59:15 Botting and cheating1:06:13 Early database setup1:09:29 Backups and restores1:10:31 Keeping an MMO alive1:12:54 AI in MMO development1:22:46 Advice for new game developershttps://www.linkedin.com/in/drstephencw/

Julien Wera is Chief Operating Officer and Head of Publishing at Shiro Games, the independent studio behind Northgard and Wartales. His career began in online games and community management before moving into marketing, product strategy and studio leadership. Along the way, his work has included Tom Clancy’s The Division, Battlefield, Mirror’s Edge, Crusader Kings and Cities: Skylines. Career backgroundBefore joining Shiro in 2026, Julien served as Global Brand Director for EA’s Battlefield and Mirror’s Edge franchises and as Chief Product Officer at Paradox Interactive, where he led the company’s games portfolio. He also co founded and ran Moon Rover Games in Stockholm. At Shiro, he now oversees studio operations and publishing, drawing on experience inside major games companies and building a studio of his own. Current biographyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/juwera/https://shirogames.com/

Robin Boyar is the founder of thinktank research and strategy, a boutique consultancy in the San Francisco Bay Area that has spent close to two decades telling companies whether the thing they are building will actually work. Her practice runs on segmentation studies, concept surveys, focus groups, interviews, UX testing and games playability sessions, and her games clients include 2K, Activision Blizzard, King, Sony, Supercell, Tencent, Wargaming and Zynga. Across 25 years she has worked on more than 100 video game franchises, alongside projects in healthcare, media and consumer technology for companies including Adobe, Amazon, Disney, Google and Microsoft.Before founding thinktank in 2008, she led consumer research at Electronic Arts from 2001 to 2007, where she built the company's first centralised research department and ran yearly research plans across more than 30 franchises, among them Madden, The Sims, Need For Speed and Medal of Honor.Chapters:00:00 Intro01:00 Fun is a byproduct05:04 What a researcher actually does07:37 Testing a game before launch12:42 IP half lives and nostalgia19:18 Remakes, scale and small teams26:47 How the market split34:01 The original sin of free to play37:49 Attrition curves and life stages41:34 Core versus growth audiences46:40 Where new genres come from51:43 Nintendo, Palworld and IP54:42 What kids actually play58:20 Breaking into gameshttps://www.thinktankresearch.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-boyar/

Anthony Westerfield Kondeati is a brand strategist and gaming marketing leader focused on how ideas shape player behaviour. He is Vice President of Gaming Strategy at mindGAME Data, where he leads marketing strategy services built around mindSHARE, the company's share-of-attention metric connecting attention to sales, player numbers, and campaign outcomes. mindGAME's data can predict player behaviour roughly fifteen weeks in advance, and Anthony turns those predictions into strategies that change outcomes. He also writes Share of Mind, a weekly Substack on mindGAME data.Across his career, Anthony has worked with some of the biggest names in games and entertainment, including EA, Activision, Blizzard, Xbox Game Pass, Epic Games, 2K, Riot, CD Projekt Red, Square Enix, Larian, and Wizards of the Coast, most recently as Senior Brand Strategist at EA and Strategy Director at 72andSunny on Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. With a background spanning brand strategy, behavioural science, creative planning, and audience research, he brings a rare mix of lifelong player instinct and strategic rigor to helping studios, publishers, and brands understand what players care about and how to move them.https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonykondeati/https://substack.com/@awkondeatihttps://akondeati.com/

Motleyorc is a gaming creator whose YouTube channel combines rhythm game performances, Geometry Dash creations and experiments with World of Warcraft. His uploads include Cytus II and Cytoid runs, alongside Geometry Dash level showcases and videos explaining how he builds his projects. These include HEAVENSWARD and a breakdown of how he made a movement engine inside Geometry Dash, giving viewers both finished creations and a look at the work behind them. His recent video, Me, 1472 Bots, and the World of Warcraft, explores playing WoW on a locally hosted server populated by bots. He has continued the experiment through livestreams tackling Molten Core and Nefarian, discovering what happens when one person has to lead an entire raid of programmed characters. A lifelong WoW player, Motleyorc approaches the project as a way to experience content he missed and play at his own pace. His conversation with Ale covers the surprising moments, technical frustrations and human experiences that bots still cannot replace.https://www.youtube.com/@UCBk4xz5h06zP7fWdIUpR_iAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEf-KFO8HkI

Amir Satvat is the founder and leader of ASGC, Always Supporting the Games Community, a volunteer led initiative he began in November 2022 to help people navigate careers and layoffs in games. What started as a LinkedIn spreadsheet now provides free job listings, career coaching, CV and portfolio reviews, mentorship, community support, and access to industry events. GamesBeat reported in June 2026 that ASGC had helped more than 5,000 people find jobs.Alongside ASGC, Amir is a Business Development Director at Tencent Games in North America. He has spent two decades working across games, technology, and healthcare, including roles at Amazon, Veeam, VMware, Dell EMC, and Goldman Sachs. At Amazon, he led business development and strategy for Prime Gaming and later worked as a Principal Producer for Amazon Games. In 2024, The Game Awards presented him with its first Game Changer Award for his work supporting people across the industry.Chapters:00:00 Amir Satvat and ASGC01:09 Amir's unconventional path into games06:34 How games hiring has changed09:07 Why thousands of games roles go unseen10:39 The pressures reshaping the games industry13:09 How to improve your chances of getting hired16:52 What AI tools can and cannot change18:44 A games career beyond a full time job21:59 What more can the games industry do?25:22 How to build real industry relationships27:25 Inside ASGC's free career resourceshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/amirsatvat/https://asgc.gg/

Ramit Pahwa is a Senior Research Engineer at Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, where he works on speech, language and multimodal AI. He led Rivian’s wake word detection programme from research through production, training the model on 20,000 hours of audio. His profile reports a 50 per cent reduction in false negatives and a 90 per cent reduction in false positives. His current work includes speech language models, German speech synthesis and video understanding.Ramit also led the team behind Audio2Tool: Speak, Call, Act, a benchmark of around 30,000 spoken queries for testing how well AI assistants turn speech into actions. The work was accepted at Interspeech 2026. Before Rivian, he worked at Secta Labs and Adobe. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and studied mathematics and computer science at IIT Kharagpur.Chapters:00:00:00 Ramit on the evolution of voice AI00:05:13 Building Rivian's voice assistant from scratch00:09:34 Why voice assistants still fail00:15:20 The LLM brain behind voice AI00:19:43 Emotion, memory and the privacy line00:22:53 Personal AI assistants that remember everything00:26:10 Security and the limits of AI agents00:31:24 Voice cloning, watermarks and human verification00:36:51 Designing voices people actually want00:41:09 Voice AI, NPCs and expressive avatars00:45:56 Why game NPCs need small local models00:49:32 Edge AI, GPUs and the shift from cloud00:54:36 Proactive agents, robots and multimodal AI00:57:31 How to start building AI for gameshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ramitpahwa/