The Party Is Full: Inside the Games Industry

Gengis
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The Party Is Full is a games industry podcast hosted by Gengis Ale Penno. Through thoughtful conversations with developers creators and industry leaders the show explores how games are made how careers are built and where the future of games and online worlds is heading.

  1. 5d ago

    Why Nobody Leaves Their Forever Game | Anthony Westerfield Kondeati

    Anthony Westerfield Kondeati is a brand strategist and gaming marketing leader focused on how ideas shape player behaviour. He is Vice President of Gaming Strategy at mindGAME Data, where he leads marketing strategy services built around mindSHARE, the company's share-of-attention metric connecting attention to sales, player numbers, and campaign outcomes. mindGAME's data can predict player behaviour roughly fifteen weeks in advance, and Anthony turns those predictions into strategies that change outcomes. He also writes Share of Mind, a weekly Substack on mindGAME data.Across his career, Anthony has worked with some of the biggest names in games and entertainment, including EA, Activision, Blizzard, Xbox Game Pass, Epic Games, 2K, Riot, CD Projekt Red, Square Enix, Larian, and Wizards of the Coast, most recently as Senior Brand Strategist at EA and Strategy Director at 72andSunny on Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. With a background spanning brand strategy, behavioural science, creative planning, and audience research, he brings a rare mix of lifelong player instinct and strategic rigor to helping studios, publishers, and brands understand what players care about and how to move them.https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonykondeati/https://substack.com/@awkondeatihttps://akondeati.com/

  2. 5d ago

    Inside a WoW Server Where Everyone Else Is a Bot | Motleyorc

    Motleyorc is a gaming creator whose YouTube channel combines rhythm game performances, Geometry Dash creations and experiments with World of Warcraft. His uploads include Cytus II and Cytoid runs, alongside Geometry Dash level showcases and videos explaining how he builds his projects. These include HEAVENSWARD and a breakdown of how he made a movement engine inside Geometry Dash, giving viewers both finished creations and a look at the work behind them. His recent video, Me, 1472 Bots, and the World of Warcraft, explores playing WoW on a locally hosted server populated by bots. He has continued the experiment through livestreams tackling Molten Core and Nefarian, discovering what happens when one person has to lead an entire raid of programmed characters. A lifelong WoW player, Motleyorc approaches the project as a way to experience content he missed and play at his own pace. His conversation with Ale covers the surprising moments, technical frustrations and human experiences that bots still cannot replace.https://www.youtube.com/@UCBk4xz5h06zP7fWdIUpR_iAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEf-KFO8HkI

  3. 5d ago

    The Games Industry Reset: Where the Jobs Are | Amir Satvat

    Amir Satvat is the founder and leader of ASGC, Always Supporting the Games Community, a volunteer led initiative he began in November 2022 to help people navigate careers and layoffs in games. What started as a LinkedIn spreadsheet now provides free job listings, career coaching, CV and portfolio reviews, mentorship, community support, and access to industry events. GamesBeat reported in June 2026 that ASGC had helped more than 5,000 people find jobs.Alongside ASGC, Amir is a Business Development Director at Tencent Games in North America. He has spent two decades working across games, technology, and healthcare, including roles at Amazon, Veeam, VMware, Dell EMC, and Goldman Sachs. At Amazon, he led business development and strategy for Prime Gaming and later worked as a Principal Producer for Amazon Games. In 2024, The Game Awards presented him with its first Game Changer Award for his work supporting people across the industry.Chapters:00:00 Amir Satvat and ASGC01:09 Amir's unconventional path into games06:34 How games hiring has changed09:07 Why thousands of games roles go unseen10:39 The pressures reshaping the games industry13:09 How to improve your chances of getting hired16:52 What AI tools can and cannot change18:44 A games career beyond a full time job21:59 What more can the games industry do?25:22 How to build real industry relationships27:25 Inside ASGC's free career resourceshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/amirsatvat/https://asgc.gg/

  4. 5d ago

    Where Voice AI Goes Next: Games, Cars and NPCs | Ramit Pahwa

    Ramit Pahwa is a Senior Research Engineer at Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, where he works on speech, language and multimodal AI. He led Rivian’s wake word detection programme from research through production, training the model on 20,000 hours of audio. His profile reports a 50 per cent reduction in false negatives and a 90 per cent reduction in false positives. His current work includes speech language models, German speech synthesis and video understanding.Ramit also led the team behind Audio2Tool: Speak, Call, Act, a benchmark of around 30,000 spoken queries for testing how well AI assistants turn speech into actions. The work was accepted at Interspeech 2026. Before Rivian, he worked at Secta Labs and Adobe. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and studied mathematics and computer science at IIT Kharagpur.Chapters:00:00:00 Ramit on the evolution of voice AI00:05:13 Building Rivian's voice assistant from scratch00:09:34 Why voice assistants still fail00:15:20 The LLM brain behind voice AI00:19:43 Emotion, memory and the privacy line00:22:53 Personal AI assistants that remember everything00:26:10 Security and the limits of AI agents00:31:24 Voice cloning, watermarks and human verification00:36:51 Designing voices people actually want00:41:09 Voice AI, NPCs and expressive avatars00:45:56 Why game NPCs need small local models00:49:32 Edge AI, GPUs and the shift from cloud00:54:36 Proactive agents, robots and multimodal AI00:57:31 How to start building AI for gameshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ramitpahwa/

  5. 5d ago

    Before World of Warcraft, There Was MUD | Richard Bartle

    Richard A. Bartle is a British game designer, author, speaker, consultant, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex, where he previously served as Senior Lecturer and Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design. As an undergraduate in 1978, he created MUD with Roy Trubshaw. MUD allowed several people to inhabit the same continuing text world and is widely recognised as the first virtual world, establishing many of the foundations later developed by online games and MMORPGsBartle later helped give designers a language for understanding virtual worlds. His 1996 Player Types model introduced the familiar categories of achievers, explorers, socialisers, and killers, while his 2003 book Designing Virtual Worlds became a standard text for designers and researchers. As a speaker and consultant, he connects the history of the medium to current questions about player behaviour, identity, governance, and the responsibilities of those who operate shared digital worlds.Chapters0:00 Preview1:28 How MUD began6:55 A world beyond reality15:54 The limits of player choice20:30 Permadeath and virtual worlds25:52 What avatars reveal30:34 Why MMOs stopped taking risks34:23 The Great Schism39:21 From MUDs to MMORPGs44:32 The rise of World of Warcraft50:53 Inside social worlds52:48 Making worlds believable58:34 Voice chat breaks immersion1:01:43 Why game worlds feel artificial1:08:41 How text MUDs work1:13:40 Text as the ultimate interface1:18:12 Six tests for a virtual world1:19:01 Why MMOs refuse to end1:28:41 Freedom through constraints1:34:32 Justice in online worlds1:39:13 When griefing becomes history1:45:20 The Finger of Death1:49:07 Must MMOs be massive?1:53:01 Advice for MMO designers```https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbartle/https://mud.co.uk/

  6. 5d ago

    The 3D Pipeline Is Being Rewritten | Stefan Vaskevich

    Stefan Vaskevich is an AI 3D engineer, YouTuber and consultant with more than a decade of experience in 3D. Before focusing on AI, he spent seven years running 3D web studios and shipped hundreds of client projects. His work spans 3D production pipelines, interactive experiences and game development using tools including Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine.Through Stefan 3D AI, he tests emerging tools against real production workflows and shares both their strengths and failures with more than 150,000 subscribers. Stefan also founded Top3D.ai, a community ranking platform for 3D generators, and learn3d.ai, where he teaches AI assisted workflows from image generation through to game engine integration. His work examines what AI can automate, where professional craft remains essential, and how artists and developers can retain control over the final result.Chapters:0:00 How 3D game assets were made5:51 What AI can already automate9:17 Characters that animate themselves13:04 Why ideas matter most16:22 Will AI make games generic?20:20 Can algorithms solve game discovery?26:16 A TikTok for 3D worlds29:39 What happens to human craft?33:15 Why people want human creators40:33 When AI becomes indistinguishable43:45 The return of handmade games46:33 Ready Player One and human control49:30 Building games with AI54:54 How 3D artists can adapthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-3d-ai/https://www.youtube.com/@UCRW08KcTVjXEmBzBsVl7XjA

  7. 5d ago

    What WoW, GTA & Rust Teach Us About Modding | Jonathan Yarbor

    Jonathan Yarbor is the cofounder and CEO of Nodecraft, a game server platform founded in 2012 to make it easier for players to create and manage their own multiplayer servers. Through Nodecraft Studio, the company also helps developers add player created servers and user generated content to their games. Jonathan’s work covers the infrastructure, moderation, and business models behind those communities.A self taught software engineer and systems architect, Jonathan began by building communities and server tools for Garry’s Mod and Minecraft. He cofounded Nodecraft with James Ross after their own gaming community ran into the limits of existing hosting services. The company began with less than $600. Today, Jonathan works on how studios can give players greater ownership of multiplayer worlds while protecting players, intellectual property, and the business supporting the game.Chapters:00:00 Player ownership and community servers03:20 Modding as a path into games07:10 The IP problem studios must solve12:54 Guardrails, curation and human moderation17:07 Pokemon, Palworld and creative freedom22:58 Open mod ecosystems or selected creators?25:41 How modders can be paid and sustained29:05 When a game becomes a platform30:53 Private servers and preserving online worlds38:05 Why players are choosing smaller private spaces45:13 The warning from the games industry crash48:12 How AI changes game creation53:53 Building the Ready Player One futurehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/captainyarb/https://nodecraft.com/

  8. 5d ago

    The Five Rules of Live Service Comms | Bob Holtzman

    Bob Holtzman is Director of Franchise Marketing at ArenaNet, where he leads content, community and brand marketing for the Guild Wars franchise. He manages work across social media, creators, influencers and player communications, with a focus on growing and retaining the Guild Wars community.Before ArenaNet, Bob led global brand, public relations and communications work for TiMi Studio Group and Tencent, and previously managed North American publishing communications for League of Legends at Riot Games. His earlier career includes communications roles at Nexon, directing marketing and public relations for Kerbal Space Program, and founding the consultancy Co-op Mode Communications. Bob also spent more than two decades as a sports journalist and college football analyst, experience that shapes how he helps studios tell clear stories to players, creators and the media.Chapters:00:00 Who Bob Holtzman is, and the sports crossover04:00 Storytelling and the framework behind a patch note08:05 When the CEO had to carry the bad news11:03 The five rules of live service comms13:26 Why trust decides whether players forgive you16:42 Working with devs who see the world differently19:33 Player trust behaves like a stock price22:27 What Riot understood before everyone else24:52 You own the game, but the community owns you27:45 Blue posts, red posts and real dev replies32:20 Why you never win a fight with your community35:57 What AI cannot replace in comms38:37 Speaking the community's language41:07 The layers of PR inside a game studio43:41 How creators became part of the comms mix47:51 An influencer strategy across three tiers51:36 Is the "all boats rising" era over?54:53 From WoW to Old School RuneScape57:29 Launching a Discord before announcing Guild Wars 31:02:17 The one habit that fixes most comms1:04:50 Advice if you are trying to break in right nowhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/bobholtzman/

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The Party Is Full is a games industry podcast hosted by Gengis Ale Penno. Through thoughtful conversations with developers creators and industry leaders the show explores how games are made how careers are built and where the future of games and online worlds is heading.

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