"AI will give app stores a new experience in terms of discoverability"
Paulo Trezentos on how Aptoide uses AI to transform game discovery and create a better user experience.
Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of AI Gamechangers! It’s your weekly encounter with leaders from the games industry who are taking AI for a spin. You can read 25 of these interviews for free in the archive, so do check them out for exclusive insight into how AI is weaving its way into the fabric of games.
Our Q&A this week is with Paulo Trezentos, CEO and co-founder of independent app store Aptoide, who shares how his company is implementing AI to turbocharge game discovery beyond advertising and traditional search. He discusses the Game Genie assistant, which is changing how users can find and engage with games.
GDC, GTC, PGC and no doubt other three-letter events all took place last week in California. We’ve distilled the top news from them into a handy list at the bottom of this newsletter, so please read to the end for that. We also took the chance to sit down with some fascinating new companies in San Francisco, and those interviews will be winging your way soon. Onwards!
Paulo Trezentos, Aptoide
We hung out with Paulo Trezentos, CEO and co-founder of Aptoide, at Pocket Gamer Connects earlier this year. Aptoide is an alternative Android app store (coming soon to iOS) which offers a marketplace for mobile games.
With a PhD in computer science, Paulo started Aptoide in 2011. In this interview, he discusses how Aptoide is implementing AI in the realm of game discovery, its innovative Game Genie assistant, and Paulo's vision for how AI might reshape the games industry.
Top takeaways from this conversation:
Aptoide uses AI to solve the "broken" discoverability experience in app stores through its assistant, which provides personalised game recommendations and ongoing in-game support.
The AI assistant will follow a three-phase approach: first suggesting games, then offering gameplay assistance, and finally integrating external content like influencer videos to create a seamless user experience.
Paulo believes AI will create entirely new game genres and experiences beyond just improving productivity for developers, potentially disrupting RPG and strategy games that have "stabilised" over the last decade.
AI Gamechangers: Please tell us about your background. What’s your experience in the games industry, and how did you come to be where you are today?
Paulo Trezentos: In 2009, I was doing my PhD in computer science, and I was working with the Linux operating system to do software installation. My project was in Germany, and I had access to the first Android commercial phone, the G1. I was completely amazed at the experience. For the first time, that smartphone provided search, email and a web browser – everything like it was supposed to do!
Together with a student, I launched the idea, “Why don’t we do what I’m doing in Linux, in this operating system, Android?” Because the kernel, the core, of Android is Linux.
“Aptoide” is actually from APT, the Linux tool, and “-oid” from “Android”! That gave us the name. Over the last 15 years, we have been developing technology to make it easier for developers to reach out to the right users.
Aptoide has grown – we read online you have 430 million users now. How are you using AI in your app store?
As an app store, we link two sides: the developer side and the user side. We need to provide good conditions for developers and a good experience for users as well.
We believe the lack of innovation has stalled the app stores as a consumer experience. We are always trying to innovate and introduce new things, and one thing we are doing is to try to improve discoverability with generative AI. What we are proposing and doing – and we are open in two markets to get data points – is to provide extra discoverability beyond search, with a generative AI assistant.
Let’s imagine: if you want to discover a new game to play, you can ask your assistant, “Can you help me with an RPG game?” And the assistant, based on your preferences, and based on what it knows about RPGs, will suggest a couple of games.
But it does not stop there. Imagine when you install the game (and we have a very easy installation path to the game because you are inside the app store), you have questions about the game. You can ask the assistant, “Okay, how can I overcome level 300? How can I do that?” and the assistant will help you.
What model are you using? And is it expensive to run an AI assistant like this?
For the time being we are using OpenAI and ChatGPT, but we’re developing a way that we can change the LLM behind it. We are quite flexible with that. The results we are getting from ChatGPT and OpenAI are promising. We see very good interactions, so for the time being, we are quite happy with it.
I believe that today, for the kind of value that’s delivered, the price is fair. And I also trust that having competition in the market will be good for everybody because prices will become even more affordable. The only concern we have is that these platforms that run LLM models could have an economic advantage because they are running the models themselves. On that front, we might be at some kind of disadvantage.
Regarding your AI discovery assistant, what is the user experience like?
You will have a button navigation, a very intuitive button that says, “Game Genie”. You press it, and then you start to interact like in ChatGPT. You ask it questions; it’s [free-form] dialogue in those questions, and it teaches you what kind of games you could play. You can ask for a game suggestion, and it will then suggest three games with a call to action to install – it’s a very easy way to install with no friction.
From that point forward, you keep the dialogue, and that’s where we believe we are seeing interesting data points from our users. They keep the conversation going. “Now I’m a little bit stuck. Do you have a recommendation?” It might reply, “Why don’t you try to use this tool?” And then that’s what we call the second phase.
“With AI, what we will see is new games or new genres that will ramp up in terms of user choice. I would bet it will open new pathways for people to develop new genres of games”
Paulo Trezentos
The third phase, which has yet to be launched, is where we will include external content in the dialogue. For instance, you might say, “I am still not able to overcome the challenge. I would like to buy this weapon.” In this case, it might send you to an influencer video on YouTube, which we can embed inside the Game Genie experience. All of this is powered and enabled by the LLM.
We believe these three things in our roadmap will create a completely different experience. It’s open to Portugal and Japan as test-bed markets, and soon, it will be open to the rest of the world during 2025.
Does its advice depend on the game-maker uploading documents to your platform, or is it observing the game? How does it know what to advise you?
Great question. It uses net data on the developer side, things that we already know, descriptions, reviews from users, and so on. We use a little bit of information from the user that they’ve given us, what kind of games they’ve installed in the past and so on. In the back, we have, of course, all the documents that were loaded in the LLM. It gives a kind of a global context. These things together create a great experience.
Getting alternative app stores onto iOS has been notoriously difficult, but you are heading to iOS. What difference does it make to your business that you can do that?
iOS is something we are quite optimistic and excited about. We are one of the official app stores approved by Apple to run in iOS and the only European one. The others are Epic, and AltStore PAL, both American.
“We believe the lack of innovation has stalled the app stores as a consumer experience. What we are proposing and doing is to provide extra discoverability beyond search, with a generative AI assistant”
Paulo Trezentos
The UK and Japan pushed laws last year that gave others the chance to open alternative app stores in iOS this year. It’s only my guess, but I think it will be in iOS 18.4 in April. It will make a lot of difference, because there are new things, innovations, that we will introduce on those app stores that the iPhone user does not know about. As an example, in the next version of Aptoide, we’ll launch the possibility that you, as a user, can choose which version of the game you want to install. Your use cases might be, “I don’t like this version”, “the last version has a bug”, or “My iPhone is a little bit older than the iOS, and I cannot install this version of the app because it’s too recent, so I can install the old one”. This is the kind of innovation that we are introducing, step-by-step, in iOS.
How did you realise you wanted to integrate AI into your app store? What was the point where you knew you needed to use this technology?
For a long time, we have been struggling with discoverability because we believe it’s a broken experience for everybody. You know what you want, and you search – or you discover through advertising. We don’t do advertising in Aptoide-operated stores, because we believe it doesn’t give a good match between the user and the developer. We prefer to have total flexibility to provide a match with our algorithms. When we started to use generative AI and LLM models, we saw a jump in the quality of the results in terms of discoverability. So we believe that AI will give the app stores (we were one of the first, but we believe Google and Apple will follow us) a new experience in terms of discoverability.
What role do you think AI will play in the games industry going forward?
I think it will play a very important role in other verticals and other industries in our lives. In terms of gaming, it will bring new use cases, new kinds of games and new experiences that we have not had so far.
We are seeing a lot of game studios using AI to improve their games. I split it into two kinds of use of AI: productivity tools to ramp up the development of the game itself, and then features inside the game, for example, role-playing inside the game. We feel that more and more game studios are using it.
I think RPG and strategy games have kind of stabilised in the last 10 years. We haven’t seen much disruption. From time to time, we’ve seen a merge of two genres, right? But I think with AI, what we will see is new games or new genres that will ramp up in terms of user choice. I would bet it will open new pathways for people to develop new genres of games.
What does the future hold for Aptoide? What’s on the roadmap?
Three different things. One is AI, Game Genie and improving discoverability for the user inside the store. We are super excited with the results we are getting and the engagement of the users.
The second is launching on iOS. It’s a major platform with more than a billion users and a lot of value. We are opening in Europe, the UK and Japan, and we believe that the entire world will open, and their regulators will push up to lower the friction, creating a better environment for developers and users.
Finally, we believe that there are quite promising new markets. We challenge developers to look into them. For us, besides the tier-one markets, we are doubling down on Japan and India. We believe that Japan is a valuable market. It’s still very conservative, but there are great opportunities for developers. India is doing well economically, and that group of consumers is starting to spend, something which hasn’t happened there yet.
Further down the rabbit hole
What’s been happening in AI and games? Here’s your essential news round-up:
GPU moguls Nvidia had a token presence on the GDC show floor but hosted its own event an hour south in San Jose. You can watch the GTC keynote - with its talk of AI infrastructure, robotics, quantum computing, automotive applications and more - at the Nvidia site.
Blockchain company Saga hosted an event of its own during GDC and unveiled a barrage of partnerships, including one with Spirit Animation to bring animated character Karl to life as an AI Agent. Hot on the heels of those announcements, Saga teamed up with startup Chrono Games to deploy an AI Agent marketplace.
The Dubai GameExpo Summit is just a few weeks away (May 7-8) and features a content track dedicated to practical AI in games.
The trailer for the new Ark DLC apparently uses AI-generated content, upsetting fans and prompting the devs to distance themselves from the marketing.
Peripheral maker Razer launched WYVRN, a developer platform for immersive gaming experiences, including a suite of tools from haptics to audio via AI testing and player copilot applications.
INCYMO launched its AI-powered creative ad platform for mobile games. It demonstrated better performance than human-created ads in a case study revealed during GDC. CEO Anna Zdorenko joined the AI roundtables at PGC San Francisco, and she’ll be sharing her thoughts in a future edition of AI Gamechangers.
Roblox unveiled new AI tools last week. It open-sourced its Cube 3D model to make it accessible to creators on and off the platform and also launched the beta version of its mesh generation API.
UGC startup Liminal emerged from stealth with $5.8 million raised in seed funding. The investment comes from the likes of BITKRAFT and Riot. Liminal makes it possible for players to build their own RPG-style adventures with AI-powered tools.
The Liminal team is a group of experienced developers from companies like Riot, Blizzard, and Bioware. It’s built a storytelling creativity game that makes building playable RPG adventures accessible and fun.
