Atlas partners with Google Cloud as its AI platform enters closed beta

• Atlas' AI tools aim to create "living worlds".
• The closed beta is available to qualifying studios, with early users including Square Enix.

Atlas has partnered with Google Cloud to power asset pipelines, adaptive AI tools and living virtual worlds.

Available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, and built entirely on Google Cloud’s infrastructure, Atlas’ AI platform has launched in beta and has been designed to integrate with Unity, Unreal Engine and Houdini.

The platform is also looking to stand apart from the competition with its focus on multi-agent systems rather than generating assets as one-offs. Its goal is to enable developers to co-create game-ready assets, environments and more, achieved through natural language prompts.

On the AI train

Atlas’ closed beta is available to qualifying studios and developers, offering access to the platform’s full generative AI pipeline and enabling AI-native development. The tech is already in use in stealth by select studios, including Square Enix.

"We believe AI-native games will define the next chapter in interactive entertainment," said Atlas CEO Ben James.

"These experiences will be dynamic, personalised and constantly evolving - and they’ll require a new creative infrastructure. Partnering with Google Cloud gives us the compute foundation and orchestration support to bring that vision to life."

We at PocketGamer.biz also spoke with Google Cloud global director for games Jack Buser, who said: "If you haven't started putting AI in your development pipeline, you should probably do that, because if you don't, the train is going to pass you by.

"Even if you look at very large and sometimes very conservative development studios, they absolutely have put AI into their production pipeline, if only for pre-production, just getting ideas out there. But increasingly we're seeing it used for full production, everything from asset generation, dialogue generation, you name it.

"Mobile developers are actually in a very, very good position to leverage their pools of data for AI use cases, not just in development, but also in player experiences."