Gaming’s renewal of vows with Hollywood and more on UGC/generative AI | The DeanBeat

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I worked a couple of days in Santa Monica, California, this week to get a fresh perspective on games. It was my third visit to Los Angeles in recent weeks and a fruitful one, as Southern California has become a vibrant hub for the gaming business in the Golden State.

It’s vibrant because we’ve seen gaming and Hollywood get married again, thanks to the huge success of The Last of Us television show on HBO, which continues to see millions of people watching every week and boosting sales of the game series.

Jon Goldman, partner at Skybound and head of his Tower 26 venture capital fund for virtual and mixed reality projects, told me that what’s different this time compared to years past is that games and video entertainment have now become one ecosystem. This is a theme we will explore at our GamesBeat Summit 2023 event on May 22-23 in Marina del Rey.

Movies are using the same tools as games, with game engines such as Unity and Unreal becoming part of the workflow for TV shows and movies. And in the past, film directors didn’t know anything about games. They saw games as an excuse to make a movie, just as comics were strip-mined for films.

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But now many film directors and producers are just as savvy about games as they are about other kinds of entertainment. They’re part of the gaming generation. JJ Abrams started Bad Robot Games as a division within his Bad Robot entertainment company and he hired gaming veteran Anna Sweet to run