unreal-engine-5
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emptyvessel’s Small Team Takes On a Very Big City
The studio behind DEFECT is testing a practical idea: experienced developers, faster production tools and a tightly held vision can give a small team room to build a richly unpleasant world.
Nitrode
Nitrode is a San Francisco AI research company building the evaluation, data, and post-training layer for game development. It started in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch as a Godot-based AI game engine that let anyone prototype a 3D game in a day, then pivoted toward frontier research: it runs GameEngineBench, a benchmark that scores how well AI models handle real game-engine coding tasks, and produces expert-labeled datasets and reinforcement-learning environments (including Unreal Engine 5) for AI labs and enterprises. Nitrode's bet is that game development will be handled by systems of specialized models working together, not one general-purpose model.
Emperia
Emperia is a London-based immersive commerce platform that lets brands and retailers build browser-based, cross-device virtual stores that blend e-commerce accessibility with gaming-style engagement. Founded in 2019 by Olga Dogadkina and Simonas Holcmann, its no-code, SaaS platform has powered virtual retail spaces for Dior, Bloomingdale's, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss and Christie's, reporting sharply higher conversion versus traditional online storefronts.