Infinite Realms wants to turn beloved fantasy books with big followings into living, breathing game worlds.
The company, which was born from the game studio startup Unleashed Games, wants to license fantasy books from bestselling authors and then turn their creations into games, said Irena Pereira, CEO of Infinite Worlds. It’s not unlike part of the plot of Electronic Arts’ new game, Split Fiction.
Pereira said she came upon the plan with chief marketing officer Vanessa Camones while talking with a seasoned venture capitalist. Unleashed will continue to build a World of Warcraft-like adventure fantasy game called Haven. But Infinite Realms bring together the worlds of fantasy authors, the creativity of small game developers (or even players), and the speedy development of AI tools, Pereira said.
Infinite Realms started out as the back end for Unleashed, but now it is being spun off on its own.
“Infinite Realms is a backend AI-driven engine that can intake book manuscripts and turn them into living, breathing worlds that you can play,” Pereira said. “We’ll be able to license out these intellectual properties to any game studio for them to make their own games based on these IPs. It’s essentially a AI-driven licensing engine for IPs.”
Addressing the industry’s biggest creativity problems
Pereira said the company is addressing some of the industry’s big problems. Making games is too expensive, original IP is risky, and gamers are getting tired of sequels. Platform fees are taking the profits out of the business. The result is layoffs among game developers and unhappy players.
“The way to solve this problem is to literally hack distribution, by finding new ways to get to players in terms of connecting them with their favorite worlds. These might might not have the economics that are considered worthy of investment by an EA or a Microsoft because the revenues are too small, but they’re the right size for us to get access to the IP that have large built-in audiences,” Pereira said.
She added, “We want to connect fans with their favorite authors.”
And she said that some of the authors are her personal friends. They have sold as many as 40 million books, their IPs have won awards and they’ve been on the New York Times Bestseller lists. Some fans have been obsessed with these IPs for decades and consider them to be core to their own personalities.
“The people who love these books are mega fans and would jump at the opportunity to play any of these stories,” Pereira said. “So we’ve built an engine that can take these books and turn it into a game experience, and then we create this wonderful virtuous cycle where these book lovers go into our game, and then we use that to drive a bigger audiences, which turns back and drives more book sales to properties that we know resonate but might have been sitting on a shelf collecting dust for the last 20 years because they’ve been lost to time.”
Reigniting forgotten worlds
The company knows that those communities and the fandom still exists and it’s possible to reignite this in a new generation using games. Using AI, the company can shorten the game development time and lower the costs by leveraging large language models (LLMs) that are custom tailored to each world.
Infinite Realms can take the author’s work and put it into a custom LLM that is partially owned by the author and by the company. That LLM can be licensed out not only to other game studios but to players who want to make their own custom experiences.
It’s also interesting to test how small and efficient an LLM can be and still have intelligence. The LLM has a bunch of lore in it, but it also needs to have a base level of intelligence, or enough data to create a subconsious awareness so to speak so that it knows how to have a conversation about the lore. The LLM can have conversations with the fans, and the fans can feed more data and create more lore for the LLM.
“The possibilities are endless, and the same workflow and partnerships that we developed with Unleashed Games for creating worlds pretty much on the fly can allow us to build games super fast, in as little as six months, because we already have the gameplay sorted out,” Pereira said.
She said that in the past, people would buy books and maybe those books would be adapted into movies and television. Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time are some great examples.
“But with Infinite Realms, we’re building AI powered worlds that you can step inside and interact with some of these characters that you fell in love with when you were 15 years old,” Pereira said. “And by doing that, we create what we’re calling the Netflix of living worlds.”
I noted that the Wheel of Time’s owners have put all 14 books in the series into an LLM that they can make available for user-generated content and players. It can have encyclopedic answers for the fans questions, but it can also serve as the canon police for anyone creating a new experience with the lore.
Things that players create with the tools can be as simple as an ambient video or screensaver on a TV. Or it could be used to create a full game — the full range of potential experiences.
“We can see how this scales, as there are so many other IPs, and you can see us becoming a digital bookshelf,” she said. “You could go from one world to the other on the fly, and we open that up to players to be able to collect these books. So we, in turn, become a digital publisher, where we take these properties that have had them in print, and we’re essentially using them as the start of our transmedia strategy, and then turning them into playable experiences.”
Being respectful of IP
All of it will be done with the authors’ approval, and the LLMs themselves can govern what the players can or can’t do. Of course, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the biggest fantasy franchise, but there are others like Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, which has reached 40 million fans, down to smaller ones that have sold a few million. The latter are easier and less expensive to work with.
“We essentially become a digital publisher,” Pereira said. “We can deepen our relationships and use the data” to make better decisions on marketing and choosing new IPs.
She added, “This is a great cycle to where we could use our platform to help revive the book publishing industry.”
Pereira is raising a funding round and hopes to be able to accomplish that by getting traction with some of the fantasy authors.
Unleashed Games will likely seek its own money for Haven and Infinite Realms will grow its own business. The companies can use the same technology but still be positioned separately. Infinite Realms has 18 people and it has a partner among AI developers that is also helping.
To judge the market, Infinite Realms is creating ways to test the market for IPs by doing tests with fans.
“I’ve worked with IP holders, and that’s like the No. 1 thing that I’ve been hearing from a lot of IP holders is that they’re trying to find game studios to develop games for their IPs, but they’re unwilling to provide funding for it,” Pereira said.
At the same time, Pereira said, “We’re trying to find a way to re-architect how we think about AI so that it’s respectful of copyright and is constructed with the intention of protecting people’s work.”
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