Can Gaming Be the Killer App of the AI Era?

Three days. That's all it takes to hit 5,000 GitHub stars these days.

Ship an open-source AI dev tool and the developer community will amplify it overnight. Drop a product demo and the reposts follow — along with sponsorship offers, speaking invitations, and grant money. In that moment, everything feels like it's working.

Then reality sets in.

Can this actually become a sustainable company? Can it drive retention, generate revenue, and still exist in three years? The more seriously you ask those questions, the harder the answers become.

Early momentum in AI is often noise — driven by the word "AI" itself, not by product-market fit. The real question is simpler and harder: does what I've built earn a place in people's daily lives? Most teams, if they're honest, don't have a satisfying answer yet.

As a VC focusing on early-stage companies, I regularly meet teams still searching for their vertical. What surprised me was how many were looking at the same place.

Gaming.

Why AI Founders Are Gravitating Toward Gaming

The question that consumes most AI founding teams isn't technical — it's strategic: which vertical do we go after?

Every day brings news of vertical AI reshaping another industry. Healthcare, legal, education, finance — each sector is being disrupted. But these markets share a common set of friction points: heavy regulation, long enterprise sales cycles, and a brutal dynamic where rapidly evolving foundation models can render a specialized product obsolete almost overnight. Teams have pivoted hard after months — sometimes years — of development, only because a model update made their core value proposition redundant.

Gaming looks different through that lens.

No matter how fast AI models advance, they don't replace the act of making games. The vertical itself isn't at risk of disappearing. On top of that, gaming offers something rare: a user base that actively welcomes new experiences, short feedback loops, and — critically — session times that dwarf every other consumer vertical. It may be the only sector where content generation, real-time UX personalization, and monetization experimentation can run simultaneously at scale.

One company I'm actively supporting in its fundraise illustrates this well. Their AI analyzes player behavior in real time — adjusting difficulty, shaping NPC responses, auto-generating quests and levels, and surfacing personalized item recommendations based on individual play patterns. No other vertical is running these kinds of experiments at this pace.

Teams with multi-agent experience are arriving at the same conclusion from a different direction. Building agents with distinct identities operating within a simulated environment is, structurally, not that different from designing a simulation game. The architectural overlap is drawing technically sophisticated teams into the gaming vertical almost organically.

Gaming Has Always Moved First

When the internet arrived, gaming was the first content format to build on top of it. Browser-based games made the concept of online multiplayer tangible for mainstream audiences — not as an abstract idea, but as lived experience.

Mobile followed the same pattern. The early killer apps on the App Store were games. Gaming was the first category to productize the intuitiveness of touch interfaces. Every time a new technology platform has emerged, gaming has been the first to define what a genuinely new experience looks like — not by explaining the technology, but by making people feel it.

That momentum hasn't faded. Despite years of headlines declaring mobile gaming growth stagnant, games still dominate the top revenue categories on both the App Store and Google Play. As of 2025, there are 3 billion mobile gamers worldwide. Platform shifts come and go. Trends cycle. But gaming remains where people consistently choose to spend their time and money.

If that pattern holds in the AI era, the implications are significant.

I find myself imagining what the AI era's killer app looks like — and finding it hard to dismiss the possibility that it comes from gaming. What's particularly striking is that the loudest voices making this case tend to come from outside the gaming industry. Insiders, perhaps too close to the day-to-day, may be the last to see it.

The one question I can't yet answer: what does an AI-native game actually look like?

The casual tap-tap of a mobile game, the precision inputs of a hardcore PC title — how does AI transform either? I've been spending time with AI character chat services lately, and honestly, I'm not sure what to call them. They feel like games, and like webtoons, and like interactive fiction all at once. The dopamine loop is real. Hours disappear. Whether that counts as gaming is genuinely unclear to me.

What form gaming takes in the AI era may need to stay an open question for now. But I'm increasingly confident that the team that figures out the right form first will capture disproportionate value.

Investors Don't Have Consensus Yet — And That's the Point

From a VC perspective, the gaming × AI intersection is one of the most compelling spaces I've seen — and one of the hardest to bet on. The technology is moving faster than conviction can form. Which team will define this vertical first isn't yet visible. Whether what looks exceptional today remains defensible in six months is genuinely uncertain.

But that's also precisely what makes it interesting.

Whoever establishes a strong position at this intersection first will have an advantage that compounds in ways few other verticals allow. Gaming is a global market with unmatched user engagement and monetization models that have been stress-tested and refined over decades. If AI layers new experiences on top of that foundation, it won't just be a better game — it could be the moment AI finally earns mass-market conviction.

That's why I'm not stepping back from this space — even when it feels lonely. The possibility is too visible to walk away from.

But neither the gaming market nor the AI market is something one person can fully hold in their head. Both are moving too fast, too broadly. The conviction that's been building needs to be tested in conversation with others who are thinking about the same questions.

Two Industries That Have Never Shared a Room

Here's the structural problem: the AI teams interested in gaming have almost no direct access to the people actually building games. The networks are completely separate. The conference tracks don't overlap. When you're developing a thesis in isolation, it's easy to start questioning whether your conviction is insight — or just wishful thinking.

The same disconnect exists on the other side.

Gaming companies trying to build internal AI teams quickly discover that finding AI talent with real game development experience is harder than it looks. Hiring on credentials alone means a long, uncertain process of alignment between technical capability and product intuition.

What this means is that the people who need each other most have never been in the same room. AI teams need mentors who understand games from the inside. Gaming companies need guides who can translate frontier AI into applied practice. Given the right environment, each side could be exactly what the other is looking for.

That's why I've decided to create that room — bringing both communities together in mid-June for a direct exchange.

I'm genuinely curious what conversations emerge. This is a space for ideas that have been developing quietly, finally meeting others who've been having the same thoughts. Something new can start here.

About Kakao Ventures

Founded in 2012 and backed by Kakao — Korea's leading tech platform — Kakao Ventures is one of Korea's most active Seed-stage venture capital firms, with approximately $280M USD in AUM. We partner with founders before the path is fully defined, when conviction in people matters more than proof in numbers.

Our portfolio includes Lunit (AI cancer diagnostics), Rebellions (AI semiconductors), and Dunamu (operator of Upbit, one of Asia's largest crypto exchanges).

If you're building at the edge of what's possible — we'd like to hear from you.