Last month, Layer joined forces with Fortune Mine Games on stage at the Mobidictum Istanbul Conference. As a sponsor, Layer connected with over 1,000 gaming pros, all gathered in Istanbul, Turkey, for what was one of the city’s most engaging industry events yet. From the buzzing atmosphere to high-quality talks, Mobidictum brought out the best in the gaming community.

During our panel with Fortune Mine, we covered a range of topics and dug into some great questions from the audience. For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a quick recap with a few of our own takeaways and what we see on the horizon for 2025.

How did Fortune Mine’s journey in AI begin?

“Fortune Mine is no stranger to AI, specifically Generative AI, or Gen-AI in short. We have previous experience with AI at the co-founder level, especially on B2B applications of machine learning.

At the beginning of our startup journey, we explored the possible usage of Gen-AI on mobile gaming, about marketing & UA side. Then we decided to move our focus on building a long-lasting mobile game in social & casual space.”

What kind of game is the team working on and where does gen-AI fit? 

“In mobile gaming your genre defines what you are doing and your product development requirements. Since we wanted to build a good product in the coin looter category, it needs a lot of content.

If your game has great retention, players consume the content very quickly. So if you want to have good retention and good monetization KPIs, you need to develop a lot of content. This means tons of art production. Our genre requires a specific visual language - stylized cartoon. This means the art production should be top quality, and to increase our production output we worked with nearly every supplier for new ways to improve.”

What did the initial use cases for gen-AI look like? 

“We were excited to offload some of our content needs to AI and met Layer and their amazing team who were very supportive of our onboarding. Initially, we saw a 4 to 5 times increase in production output using it for backgrounds, icons, slot designs.”

“Down the line, we also have increased capability on character design as well which really sped up things further since characters took us the longest originally. The bonus benefits of AI has been: 

The custom styles allow junior artists to get onboard much quicker to be able perform at desired level and keep style consistent.

Product Managers can use the custom styles now to communicate their vision “

How did AI evolve during the past year?

“The AI we knew in 2023 and 2024 looks very different from each other. AI models have been improving and at each update the quality is improving. A use case which didn’t work well before now works so well that it’s removing a lot of the doubts.“

What’s your advice to other studios? 

AI is no doubt the present and future. In this competitive market, studios will have to be using AI or risk falling behind compared to studios using it effectively - this is a fact. Yet since it’s a new tech it’s important to remember it may not be perfect.

OUR PREDICTIONS

Many AI tools are relying on a single model, yet they should all compete for game studios. Like cloud providers or ad networks, these tools should compete for you.

Since Dalle 2 & 3 (OpenAI) and Midjourney (Fine tuned on top of Stability AI) we saw many tools launched which showed what’s possible with AI art. But despite the hype, look at what happened.

Stability released multiple models within a year, then ex-Stability employees released FLUX - arguably the best performing model to date. Then just last week we saw the phenomenal team at Recraft beat them all in a competition with their V3 model. Then we have BRIA, who took the most diligent approach and released their fully copyright compliant model that licensed their data and is rewarding the contributors. So what happened? The studios who tried to build in-house tools had their efforts already outdated by the time they had things set up. This was just speaking about image generation models…. There’s a lot more with video, audio, and 3D. 

“There is going to be many phenomenal AI labs releasing best in class models across many modalities (2D, 3D, video, audio) and games studios shouldn’t have to keep retooling to keep up with them.” - Volkan Gurel, Layer CEO, MIT Alumni

“Volkan has been in AI since the early days, and his vision around building Layer as model-agnostic application was a no-brainer especially knowing how game studios do not want to be locked in without options” - Burcu Hakguder, Co-founder & CRO, Unity Alumni

AI has existed in game development for a long time - mostly around player engagement and procedural content generation. This will expand as studios adopt AI for more workflows.

Game studios, regardless of size, deal with art production being slow, time consuming and expensive.

Upfront costs for making a successful game are steeper than ever, not to mention the marketing costs needed to scale the games across different platforms. Then you have live-ops, critical for a consistent revenue stream and player engagement. There is amazing talent producing top quality game art manually but the realities of game production are challenging. Many studios are already very excited about having “infinite” game art pipelines that are built by and can complement their art teams, not replace them. 

Many AI tools are going for mainstream use or consumer focus, vertical tools are needed for maximizing productivity gains

Accessing information or visualizing  ideas is now a few prompts away, yet professionals have always had different needs. These needs are beyond a simple image, video, or 3D model and instead need to exist inside workflows to truly take advantage of this new tech. Gaming needs a focused tool which is built for specific needs of professionals so the true potential of AI can be unlocked in the most meaningful way. At Layer we’re working on this part with laser focus. We know that once we execute on our mission with  game production, efficient adjacent industries would naturally benefit from our work.

AI requires a new interface and the best UX will win. 

Just like Adobe won big with GUI by providing a great tool for artists that seamlessly integrates with other tools - AI represents a similar opportunity. There is a strong need for intuitive interfaces to make the most of its potential.

AI has the power to dramatically enhance productivity across industries, but the challenge lies in keeping user experience at-pace with AI’s rapid advancements. To build tools that endure, the UX has to strike a balance—it needs to be accessible enough for new users but sophisticated enough for professionals. As gen-AI becomes integrated into our daily workflows, this seamless UX will be crucial.

“The goal is to enable everyone, regardless of their skill level, to leverage AI in ways that genuinely enhance their work.“ - Joona Rahko, Founding VP of Engineering, Layer

Regulations will catch up at some point. People are underestimating the importance of respecting IP and copyright

Like with any new technology, legal issues are the elephant in the room. Many creators are suffering due to lack of clarity around compensation or accreditation concerning their art being used in training foundational generative AI models.

As studios start leveraging generative AI, it’s important to focus on using AI as a tool to multiply your team’s abilities and accelerate their art production abilities. Additionally there are providers like BRIA AI who are starting from fair grounds, training models with licensed data sets and paying the contributors of the model. We love what they are doing and offering this to our customers who choose to work with that. 

Conclusion

Looking ahead, it’s clear that the gaming industry is in the midst of a powerful shift, with AI tools evolving at an unprecedented pace.

For game studios, staying agile and open to new models—across 2D, 3D, video, and audio—is becoming essential, not just a bonus. Studios that leverage AI thoughtfully, integrating it as a complement to their creative teams, stand to benefit from faster production cycles and scalable art pipelines.

As more studios adopt these advancements, respecting IP and copyright will remain a central focus. For those in the industry, the future holds enormous potential—and at Layer, we’re excited to be part of bringing these possibilities to life.