ugc-games
(2)
Genies Burned Through Three Internet Eras to Make AI Wear a Face
The Los Angeles startup began with animated news, found money in celebrity cartoons, rode the NFT wave, and emerged with a more practical bet: persistent, game-ready AI characters. The lesson is not to predict the next platform perfectly - it is to keep the expensive technical core while replacing the story around it.
Manticore Games Inc.
Manticore Games is a San Mateo game studio behind Core, a free platform that lets people build, share, and play online multiplayer games without deep art or coding skills. Founded in 2016 by industry veterans Frederic Descamps and Jordan Maynard, the company built accessible creation tools on top of Unreal Engine and raised roughly $164M from backers including Epic Games, Benchmark, and SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 to power what it calls a 'games multiverse.'