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Korea's game industry went AI-native in one week ​

ICML, one of the world's top machine learning conferences, ran at COEX in Seoul from July 6 to 11, drawing around 15,000 attendees and a record 23,918 paper submissions. Korea's game industry treated it like a home game. On opening night, Krafton and the world-model startup Odyssey co-hosted the official AI for Games event, and about 500 researchers and industry people showed up. Krafton also landed 10 main-track papers, 20 counting workshops, its biggest haul ever at a top AI conference. Then, two days after ICML closed, four smaller Korean firms ran a free conference teaching indie devs how to ship games with AI. One city, one week, and the whole industry from research lab to solo dev moved in the same direction.

PUBG Ally, Krafton's co-playable AI teammate, revealed with NVIDIA at CES 2025 and now live in PUBG as ALLIE

Three fronts, one aimed at engines ​

Krafton's chief AI officer Lee Kang-wook laid out three fronts. The first is in-game AI agents, and PUBG ALLIE is the flagship: an AI teammate you talk to and squad up with, with latency low enough that, in Lee's words, it feels almost like a real friend. A three-layer memory stack, in-context memory, in-session summaries, and cross-session retrieval, lets it remember you across matches. Krafton trained it on data gathered from thousands of internet cafe players to make it behave more like a human. The second front is interactive world models, which Lee positioned as a possible challenge to traditional game engines. The third is production AI for the pipeline itself, and Lee was blunt about why: a single game today takes four to five years and massive costs.

The panel pushed back on the engine-versus-world-model framing in a useful way. A game engine is already a transition function, so in a sense everything is a world model, and the likelier future is neural networks integrated with physics and graphics engines rather than replacing them. Kim Min-jae, CTO of NCSOFT's AI arm NC AI, added the counterweight of the night: "AI is not the protagonist of the stage, but a supporting actor." The protagonist is always the gameplay.

Two days later, the indies got their turn ​

AMPLIFY 2026 ran on July 13 at D.CAMP Seolleung in Seoul, co-hosted by Com2uS Platform, Anchor Node, UModeler, and Changjo Gongjakso, free for the first 130 registrants, with Unity Korea and the Korea Mobile Game Association sponsoring. No keynote theatrics, just working sessions: how Anchor Node shipped nine games in two years with AI tools, AI 3D asset workflows, AI sound design, and taking a game global. The tagline was "overcoming my limits with AI."

The context makes it land harder. KOCCA data shows generative AI adoption among Korean game companies hit 70% in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 41.7% just two quarters earlier, and the government is now subsidizing AI tool subscriptions for about 500 small studios. This is also the country that already requires AI-content labels in games by law. Korea isn't debating whether AI belongs in game development anymore. It's teaching the workflows in a free event hall above a startup hub.

What it means for builders ​

The interesting tension in Seoul wasn't AI versus no AI. It was Krafton's research Seoul, where world models get framed as a rival to game engines, against AMPLIFY's indie Seoul, where AI is just the way a two-person team ships nine games. Both point at the same collapse: the four-to-five-year, massive-cost pipeline Lee described is exactly what's dissolving. That's the ground Cinevva builds on. We think the world-model thesis is right in spirit, the engine stops being the moat and generation becomes the workflow, and we're pushing that all the way down to a browser and a prompt. And Kim Min-jae's line is the right compass for everyone building here: the AI is the supporting actor. If the gameplay isn't the protagonist, no amount of infrastructure saves you.

References ​