Saga’s Rebecca Liao on how AI agents can power mobile game retention

• Saga unveiled AI agents that bring game characters to life, including Titanus from mobile hit Hero Hunters – the first mobile game character to become an interactive AI agent.
• The blockchain-powered platform aims to boost UA and retention through smart agents.
• AI agents provide a cost-effective alternative to traditional marketing campaigns, offering deeper community engagement.
• CEO Rebecca Liao says AI-driven game characters are evolving personalities, not just scripted NPCs.

Rebecca Liao, co-founder and CEO of Saga, hosted a dedicated event called Sidekick at GDC last month. The activity saw a flurry of announcements about the Saga ecosystem, including partnerships with big IPs.

We caught up with her recently to chat about the overlap with mobile games and the company’s AI reveals. 

Saga is primarily known as a blockchain protocol, a “base infrastructure in the blockchain space, focused particularly on gaming and entertainment,” as she explains it.

It’s scalable, and has taken away a lot of the less user-friendly aspects that blockchain was famous for, like “gas fees”, meaning with Saga there's no direct charge to the user for using the system, like there was on older web3 platforms. 

AI has been hot for a few years now, but AI agents are the next big buzz, especially in Silicon Valley circles. They are autonomous programs that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specific goals – often without needing constant human input, making them more than just chatbot NPCs. 

From blockchain buzz to AI action

At March’s Sidekick event, Saga unveiled AI characters for existing games, one of which is from the mobile hit Hero Hunters.

Taking the character Titanus, one of the 3D shooter’s newer heroes, and working with Saga, Super Company created a persona that players can interact with.

“This is the first mobile game character to become an AI agent,” claims Liao. The plan is that Titanus can interact with players and create personalised experiences for those in the Hero Hunters community.

“This is an edgier character,” explains Liao. “The studio head, as well as the fans, were able to have a conversation with Titanus [live at our event]. When people first saw that, they thought, ‘Wow. This is not a chatbot! This can think for itself.’ It’s been trained on the gameplay and the lore of the character, but so much of the interaction feels natural because it’s absorbing conversations it’s had with the fans.”

The company also unveiled an AI character of Karl, a popular Spirit Animation and Disney XD Latam character who spreads healthy eating messages, and of Shalune from the Metaphora universe. Metaphora is from OV Entertainment and Liao confirms that this is “the first time that a new game has come out with an AI agent attached to it.”

Saga also revealed an AI mods platform compatible with titles like Fortnite, Elden Ring and Minecraft (the event had an AI generating Minecraft in-game assets on its own).

Keeping AI agents on-brand

All this talk of independent behaviour, especially when it comes to Hero Hunters’ “edgier character” raises the question of whether AI can stay on-brand. In the past, big companies might have been hesitant to hand over their IP to AI in case it goes off the rails.

“Huge credit to them: all the studios we've worked with so far have been very open-minded about the agent potentially going rogue!” observes Liao.

“Obviously they're not going to do anything that's brand destroying, especially when it comes to a company like Disney, but at the same time, they wanted to see just how strong the learning capabilities of these agents were.

“The end of the day, they’re based on AI models that are meant to mimic human learning. An agent has a personality to start with. They have a history based on the content, lore, gameplay – all of that is fed into the large language learning model. They have a certain base to start with. That character evolves over time, and that's something we've been monitoring.”

In the tech checks for Titanus during rehearsals, apparently the Hero Hunters character surprised the team.

“Before the GDC event, he did let out an X-rated comment!” laughs Liao. “But for Titanus, that’s not out of character. It's an agent, so it's going to continue to evolve. It's not quite as simple as putting on a lock so it won’t say seven particular words or avoid certain topics. The magic of it is that they become sort of living things. But you can influence their personality, and right now we're testing the levers for that.”

What was the response like from the assembled mobile games fans?

“There is something to actually touching technology, to experiencing it for yourself,” says Liao. “The [AI] market is incredibly frothy, but a lot of people do not know how to actually experience the products themselves, other than, say, ChatGPT.”

Real business wins in AI and web3

Saga’s approach to both AI and web3 is refreshing in that it sees UA and retention as the biggest opportunities of new tech. Where previous blockchain enthusiasm may have been around user ownership, or the long-term decentralised persistence of the game, Rebecca Liao is keen to stress practical, immediate wins for publishers. 

“In terms of solving the immediate problem in front of the gaming industry,” she says, “that really is user acquisition and retention. Crypto rails have actually been proven to increase retention from users. And so I think average [web2] user fall off after day one is pretty horrendous, it never reaches 50%. Whereas with crypto rails, typically, players will stay within the game for three to six months down the line. 

“And once you bring in the AI, user acquisition becomes a lot cheaper as well. Instead of budgeting hundreds of millions, in some cases, for ad campaigns across Meta, Insta, Tiktok, instead you’re putting out an agent which is very cheap to put together. It takes about three days and then you’re able to use this agent for a lot of organic community building.”

The road ahead

AI technology has “exploded in a big way” on Saga, with the goal of giving gamers a deeper community engagement experience, ultimately leading to better UA and monetisation for the IPs they embody. 

“Some of the agents are even more sophisticated than that, so they are able to run infrastructure on their own,” adds Liao, hinting that between now and Gamescom we will see more announcements from Saga, pointing at their ambitions to scale and bring on more existing IPs. 

You can read the full, long-form Q&A version of this conversation, covering other uses of AI on the Saga platform, on our free AI Gamechangers newsletter right now. Rebecca Liao was recently placed in BlockchainGamer.biz’s list of the Top 31 people in blockchain gaming.