game-art
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You've Played Their Games. You've Never Heard Their Name.
Side, formerly PTW, is the roughly 3,200-person, 40-studio contractor that tests, translates, voices, and co-builds games for Activision, Ubisoft, and EA - then hands over the credit.
Concept Labs
Concept Labs (formerly Concept Art House) is a San Francisco-based creative and Web3 studio that builds NFTs, digital collectibles, and games for the world's biggest brands and IP. Founded in 2007 by James Zhang, the company spent over a decade producing art for AAA game franchises before pivoting to Web3, and has shipped more than 1,000 games and collectibles for partners including UFC, the NFL, the International Olympic Committee, Gucci, and Frank Miller's Sin City. It raised a $25M Series A in 2021 led by Dapper Labs.
Volkan Gurel
Volkan Gurel is the co-founder and CEO of Layer, an AI operating system for creative teams in gaming and entertainment. An MIT-trained engineer who has built distributed systems and machine learning pipelines at Hunch, eBay, Airware, and Coinbase, he holds four UAV patents from his drone-engineering years. In 2023 he co-founded Layer with Burcu Hakguder to let game studios generate performance-ready images, video, 3D, and audio without scaling headcount or outsourcing. The company is backed by a board of gaming heavyweights including King co-founder Riccardo Zacconi, and serves studios like Zynga, King, and Peak Games.