AI, UGC, and Interaction: Who Can Become the 'TikTok' of the Future Gaming World?

This article is reprinted with permission from “Game Artist Game Art”

​Every technological revolution will give rise to a new wave of application opportunities. The explosion of AI is rewriting the rules of content creation and distribution. It is not only reshaping the video track but also having a profound impact on interactive entertainment, especially games.

The ever-richer AI technologies and tool platforms are gradually lowering the barrier to game development, opening the door for many creators to build interactive experiences in a UGC manner.

Over the past year, products like Aippy, Loopit, Astrocade, Rezona, Sekai, and Yoroll have emerged, each more or less triggering discussions about “playable TikTok” or “the TikTok of the AI gaming world”. These products share a similar core logic: using AI to lower the barrier to entry for game creation so that ordinary people can become creators, and then distributing these interactive contents to users just like short videos.

The capital market has also taken notice. In May this year, Astrocade, co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, completed a $56 million Series A+B financing. Loopit secured three rounds of funding in the first three months of the year, totaling nearly $100 million. Behind Aippy is the listed company Chizicheng Technology, which has a natural accumulation in the overseas social market.

However, although the core logic is similar, the six representative platforms currently exhibit three different forms in terms of specific technical routes and product models.

​Aippy、Loopit：Vertical feed, lightweight interactive mini-games

When you open Aippy, you see a page similar to TikTok: a vertical screen with like, comment, share, and follow buttons. Swipe to the next video, and a parkour game with nearly 20,000 likes appears on screen. You try it for a few seconds, Game Over, then swipe away – the whole process feels very close to browsing short videos.

Besides playing others’ games, Aippy also has a “remix” feature. Users can see a game someone else made well and modify it with one tap – change a theme, tweak a rule, add a line of dialogue – and after editing, it becomes “your” new work. According to the company, about 40% of Aippy content comes from the Remix path, and the quality score of Remix works is higher than that of original creations.

After the content volume grew, a distribution mechanism began to take shape. Aippy’s recommendation system does not simply rely on popularity ranking; instead, it comprehensively considers the quality of the game itself, user preferences, behavior of similar users, and a certain proportion of new content exploration. This design not only prevents top content from monopolizing traffic but also retains exposure opportunities for long-tail creators. Many users, when recommending Aippy to friends, compare it to “TikTok but for games”.

Aippy was initially incubated by Chizicheng Technology and has since become independent. Its founder and CEO, Evan Ye, is also a co-founder of Chizicheng Technology. He started teaching himself programming in middle school and independently developed software and small games. During college, he embarked on the mobile internet overseas entrepreneurship journey together with the other two founders of Chizicheng Technology. In June this year, Aippy completed its first round of financing of tens of millions of dollars, invested by Glowill Capital, with a post-investment valuation of $250 million.

Loopit (Yongyue Intelligence) is the product on this track with the fiercest recent financing momentum. In February this year, Musk commented and retweeted a 9-second video: a cartoon Musk character stood in the center of the screen, with the question “Which is the best LLM in the world?” above, and two options below: “Grok” and “Others”. But the “Grok” button was so small it could barely be clicked, and it would dodge every tap.

This distinctly self-deprecating content quickly went viral, bringing the AI interactive platform behind it, Loopit, into the public eye overnight.

Loopit’s co-founder and CEO, Chen Weipeng, is a former co-founder and head of the large model team at Baichuan Intelligence, where he led the training of models like Baichuan 1-4. Previously, his career path revolved around distribution and the evolution of content forms. Since 2026, Loopit has completed three rounds of financing, totaling nearly $100 million. The latest round was $50 million, led by global top gaming company Garena.

In February this year, Loopit officially launched. Two months later, its global registered users approached 2 million. Similar to Aippy, Loopit also emphasizes an “instant-play” interactive experience. However, the growth logic of the two differs.

Aippy mainly relies on users’ secondary creation during content consumption and “imitation-driven creation” to stimulate viral spread, forming a community self-cycle. Loopit, on the other hand, focuses on producing “shareable interactive content”, achieving breakout via the widespread dissemination of single lightweight gameplay on external platforms like TikTok and X, and then maintaining user retention through frequent updates.

In simple terms, the former emphasizes community depth and creator relationships, while the latter values gameplay virality and content update efficiency.

However, the issue of content homogenization has begun to erode this growth story. In app store reviews, some users have complained, “This game is fun for about 5 minutes, then you realize it’s the same content over and over again.” This is not a predicament unique to Loopit; it is a common challenge across this entire track: the lower the generation barrier, the higher the risk of content homogenization. How to enable creators to continuously produce differentiated content will be a new problem all platforms face.

​Astrocade 、Rezona：AI-native creation engine, UGC content community platform

This category of platforms emphasizes the ability of AI to lower the barrier to creation itself. The platforms provide the ability to generate games using natural language. Users can create a variety of gameplay ranging from light to medium. It is also more like “YouTube for games”, with richer content and higher creative ceilings.

Astrocade is the representative of this direction and currently the most technically prominent product on the track. It is co-founded by “AI godmother” Fei-Fei Li, who also serves as the Chief Scientist. In May this year, Astrocade completed a combined $56 million Series A+B financing, roughly equivalent to 400 million RMB, jointly invested by Sequoia Capital, Google AI Futures Fund, NVIDIA, and others.

Astrocade has proposed a “wish to game” vision: users do not need to write code; they only need to describe their idea in everyday language, and the platform will generate a complete interactive game within minutes, complete with gameplay, interactive controls, and even music and sound effects.

On the Astrocade homepage, game content is categorized into multiple vertical sections: “Strategy”, “Puzzle”, “Horror”, “Simulation”, etc. In addition, the platform has a “Creativity” column, where the games listed are all works with over ten thousand clicks.

In terms of interface design, Astrocade is also very close to TikTok: only one game is displayed at a time in the center of the screen, and users can swipe up and down to switch. Each game is accompanied by buttons for sharing, commenting, liking, saving, and following the creator. This design clearly transplants the interactive logic of short videos into a UGC game community.

Public data shows that within six months of launch, Astrocade accumulated 20 million users, with over 20,000 new UGC game works added each month.

Rezona is currently one of the fastest players on the distribution side. Like Astrocade, it also tends to be a UGC content community platform. However, unlike Astrocade, which focuses on “generating any game with one sentence”, Rezona’s most distinctive difference lies in its content entry point: it specializes in turning internet memes and jokes into playable interactive games, and distributing them via a TikTok-style vertical feed.

Founder Zhang Jian was previously a product manager at TikTok. In his view, memes are “content compression packages”. For example, the once-popular “crazy husky meme” or “Trump meme” – users often only need to see the image or keywords to evoke the corresponding context and emotion. This content form, with high information density and low comprehension barrier, is naturally suited for early-stage propagation and fission in new media.

Rezona’s growth logic unfolds from here: when a meme erupts on social platforms like TikTok, a large number of related interactive games emerge in the Rezona community. After users enjoy a fun game, they actively share it back to social platforms, forming a new round of dissemination.

This tactic has yielded significant results. Public data shows that within less than four months of launch, Rezona’s weekly active users exceeded 1.5 million. By January this year, monthly downloads surpassed one million.

​Sekai、Yoroll：Deep immersion, long-form content / film-game fusion

If the first two categories follow a relatively lightweight interactive route, then the next category seeks more “immersion and sense of presence”. Here, most content consists of AI-driven role-playing, long-form narrative interactions, or branching storylines. Users can enter a story world generated by AI and experience interactive content with greater narrative depth and emotional involvement.

Sekai is the representative of this direction. Its official positioning is “fun interactive experiences”, characterized by immersive role-playing and world co-creation. The platform features a large amount of AI-driven character interactions and long-form storylines.

AI can turn users’ ideas into playable, shareable “mini-apps”. At the same time, the platform provides deep customization tools: from gender, appearance, and clothing to personality traits, backstory, and catchphrases, all customizable. Users can also save complete chat logs and plot developments, and export them as TXT or PDF files, allowing them to revisit key plot points at any time, which is convenient for long-term character development and complex story arc tracking.

Sekai’s founder, Lucky Zhang, is a seasoned serial entrepreneur. Sekai is his fourth company: the first two were acquired by Apple and TikTok respectively, and the third is Vietnam’s largest music streaming platform, still in operation today. This experience of going “from 0 to 1 and then being acquired by giants” has led investors to have high expectations for Sekai. In June this year, Sekai completed a combined $26 million seed and Series A financing.

However, compared to lightweight mini-games and memes with inherent buzz, long-form plots and immersive experiences are obviously less suitable for viral dissemination. The conversion rate of user acquisition and retention is an ongoing problem that immersive content platforms need to solve.

Yoroll, on the other hand, enters the space of AI-native interactive video game platforms. Creators can automatically generate a playable branching interactive film game from text, images, and short videos. According to the official description, the entire story, characters, gameplay, and storyboarding of the game are all generated by AI, making the creative process more like directing a movie.

Yoroll’s founder, Heath, was previously a core member of the social interactive direction at Douyin (TikTok) and later served as Technical Director at FunPlus. He explained the realistic judgment behind this choice: in the short term, it is still difficult for AI to completely replace large-scale 3D game pipelines, but the maturity of AI generating a “watchable” video is already significantly higher than generating a stable 3D game world.

Based on user feedback, Yoroll performs quite well in maintaining visual consistency and demonstrates strong capability across different game styles. The platform currently features themes such as space exploration, post-apocalyptic zombie survival, Eastern mystery puzzles, and all are complete products with full storylines, saveable progress, support for branching choices, and replayability.

A noteworthy case is the gender-bent version of the classic Chinese drama “Empresses in the Palace” made by a UGC creator – “The Legend of Hua Jun”. In this game, palace intrigues and emotional power struggles are replayed under a matriarchal world setting. More importantly, from concept to a shareable game clip, it took less than a week. Currently, this work has gained hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views on Douyin.

The breakout of “The Legend of Hua Jun” verifies Yoroll’s practical value in lowering the barrier to creation. On this basis, Yoroll has begun recruiting AI creators in the short-video field, and has already signed dozens.

In the AI era, when production costs and complexity drop significantly, the industry is seeing not just faster versions of old games, but an entirely new content category. Such game products may be completed in just one weekend. They build interactive experiences around a single moment, a meme, or a cultural event, and the way they are created and shared is as casual as a TikTok short video.

Looking across these game platforms, the founding teams generally have backgrounds in the short-video track. This experience enables them to systematically transplant the proven traffic distribution logic and content operation methodology from the short-video field into AI interactive content platforms.

Of course, for these platforms to truly become “the TikTok of the AI gaming world”, there are still many hurdles to overcome. For example, most platforms can currently only produce games with simple mechanics; the generated works are generally rough in quality, and frequent failures occur when loading long narrative content. How to leap from “playable” to “fun”, and from “usable” to “reliable”, will determine whether they can truly replicate the TikTok moment.