January 2022: WildMeta update
Six months have already passed since our previous update and Alex and I are ready for 2022 and excited to share our progress in this new update blog post.
In a nutshell, we’ve spoken to more events (online and IRL), announced our new library, and new Unreal Engine and Unity integrations and demos, we’ve released our first PR, got featured as #CreaTechUK Ones To Watch 2021 by the Creative Council and spoke to many more game studios.
This year, our focus shifted from developing to selling. I mainly highlight here our public appearances, events and talks but for obvious reasons, that doesn’t cover the rest of our business development efforts and all the meetings and discussions we’ve had with game developers and studios!
SUMMER JULY/AUGUST
We released our last update blog post early in July just after my interview on the Weekend Catchup Club Podcast went live and the Show Code summer hackathon. After that, I have been nominated for VentureBeat Transform 2021 Women in AI award and joined some friends from IGGI for a discussion on game AIs (video available here).
As expected, August was quiet and enabled us to focus on preparing for the storm of September! Still, we got featured in Nvidia’s Female-led AI startups part of the EMEA Nvidia Inception programme.
SEPTEMBER
As soon as we reached September, we released our very first press release to announce our new library and Unity and Unreal Engine integrations. The objective of these three components is to facilitate the integration of our machine learning technology with most games and studios’ tech stacks.
Read the full press release here.
Following our PR efforts, we got featured in about 5 publications and a few newsletters. I also gave an online talk for Geekle Gamedev summit available here and took part in IGGI’s annual conference for a panel discussion on starting a business in the game industry.
Last but not least, WildMeta has been named as one of Creative Industries Council’s #CreaTechUK Ones To Watch 2021 — a showcase of 100 UK CreaTech businesses working at the intersection of creativity and technology.
Still in September, we have been accepted into Microsoft for Startups programme and shortly after joined one of the initiatives run by the team at Microsoft. We haven’t been very much public about this yet but will certainly share more later on.
OCTOBER
October was even busier than September, first, both Alex and I gave online talks respectively at Wonderland AI summit and We ❤ Games conference. I’ve been shortlisted for We Are The City #TechWomen100 award and interviewed in The Maiker Show podcast. October also marked our come back to a few offline events with EGX London and Develop:Brighton.
It was our first time at Develop:Brighton and not only this was an amazing opportunity to meet people we’ve been talking to for months and expand our network, but it was also a chance to give our first talk in front of a real audience. Alex took the stage on the last day of the conference for a technical deep dive and Q&A!
NOVEMBER
Back to London, we thought about sharing Alex’s slides from his presentation and decided instead to dive further into some of the machine learning aspects mentioned in his talk. The series of blog posts started in November and addressed the use of imitation learning to train bots. Alex is currently working on his next post tackling self-play which should be available later this month!
On my end, I have been quite busy following up with everyone we met at Develop but managed to take part in a fire chat at Epiphany’s Game X conference and joined David Savage from TechTalks/Harvey Nash group for a professionally recorded interview (full video here).
DECEMBER
This year, we didn’t forget WildMeta’s anniversary and celebrated our 2-year milestone since incorporation!
We were also excited to see WildMeta included in the video trailer of Dragonpunk: Infestation alongside Unreal Engine, AWS Game Tech and other great actors of the game ecosystem!
Right before the holiday season, we managed to squeeze in one last podcast with Ben Byford from the Machine Ethics podcast including Dr Tommy Thosom from the AI and Games Youtube channel and Dr Richard A Bartle.
As we conclude another year, Alex and I have been reflecting on the past few months. At this time of the year last year, we were about to officialise our new B2B approach with a brand new website and business model. We were excited to kickstart our business development efforts, be more public about our technology and directly engage with game studios.
A year later, we’ve given countless talks, been featured in many podcasts and talked to CTOs from large and small game studios. While spreading the word about machine learning in games has been key for us, meeting with studios, and more importantly, listening to their questions has been the real priority. It also shaped how we prioritised our time and developments, especially our new library and Unity/Unreal Engine integrations. With a rising interest in what we do and more developers asking us about machine learning NPCs, we see that all our efforts were fruitful and can’t wait to pursue these discussions in 2022!
Now, game studios have long sales cycles and are slow to adopt such new technology. That’s why we’re constantly looking for new approaches to facilitate the adoption of ML game AIs and have a couple of things in mind for 2022.
But before we can share anything about it, you’ll hear from Alex for another deep dive blog post on self-play.
If you are reading this, it means you are part of our journey and supporting us in some ways, huge thanks to you for that! Alex is joining me to wish you all the best for 2022.
Do you want to explore how we can help you level up your game AIs with machine learning or are you curious to hear more about what we do? Drop us a line anytime at contact@wildmeta.com.
Or you can follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn where we regularly share our progress, latest blog posts and interviews!
WildMeta, AI for video games.
