Heading into Black Friday, shoppers used the assistant in about four of every ten sessions. They made two thirds of the purchases. Almost all of the season's growth came from them. When the day is hardest, the shoppers with help are the ones who leave with something. Sensor Tower, 2025 holiday.

Shoppers who used one retailer's online assistant spent close to five times more. Part of that is intent. People who open a chat often arrive ready to buy. The rest is what the assistant does with that intent. It listens, then it shapes the whole visit around what it heard. A search bar cannot do that. A character can.

Shoppers do not leave over the product. They leave over a surprise. Among shoppers who abandon for a reason they can name, about half blame a cost that showed up at checkout. Shipping, tax, fees. The shopper trusted a price, then watched it move.

In 2018, the Philadelphia Flyers introduced Gritty. Within 24 hours he was the number one trending topic online. A 7-foot orange monster became a city symbol, a meme, and a merch machine. That's what a character with a real personality does.

🦁 Cannes Lions is underway, and Anton @BHelika and Max @bigdog_max are on the Croisette. A whole festival about creativity and what audiences want next, and we brought the part where the characters talk back. Around? Come find us.

Helika is heading to @Cannes_Lions. Anton @BHelika and Max @bigdog_max are on the ground June 22-26. If you work on brand characters, fandom, or keeping audiences engaged between releases, come find us.

Tens of millions of people now spend hours each day talking to AI characters — most of them modeled on existing IP from games, films, anime, books, and music. Almost none of it is licensed. The audience skews young, the engagement is sustained, the demand is established. These conversations are already happening. The IP holders just aren't in them.

GDC Day 4 @Xbox dropped Project Helix. @Kojima_Hideo pre-ghosted his own keynote. @nvidia keeps generating frames with DLSS (number went up again). @expedition33 is about to win everything tonight because Game Developers Choice Awards. Meanwhile the Helika team is on the floor — come talk publishing, the Publishing Engine, or how to bring your IP to life. If you bump into @AbugovIlya or @BHelika — say hi and ask away! [day four. still standing.]

Aaand it’s on! Demo Day 2026 has begun!

Monday. PGC San Francisco. We've been building toward this. Publishing Engine reveal at AM. Then two panels, live game demos, @avax x Helika Accelerator graduation and an afterparty to cap it off. This is the day. Come through. Register here: pgc.helika.io

Thanks @pgbiz for covering what we've been working on. March 9. PGC San Francisco. The Publishing Engine unveil. If you're around — come find us: pgc.helika.io pocketgamer.biz/helika-is-bu…

Game AI has had one hell of a journey — from pathfinding and behavior trees to LLMs that make characters feel alive. Time to talk about where it's going. On March 9 at PGC San Francisco, six people who've built through every era of it are sitting down to do exactly that. Alain Dessureaux · Alex Tarrand · Damian Isla · Markus Kiukkonen · Martin Singh-Blom — moderated by Susan Cummings Register here pgc.helika.io to watch the discussion yourself. #PGCSanFrancisco #GameAI #GameDev

Game publishing is broken. Time to talk about it. On March 9 at PGC San Francisco, we've got the right people in the room. Register here: pgc.helika.io Hilmar Veigar Pétursson · Bill Young · Emma Farrow · Jakub Kwinta · Kelly Kiewel — moderated by Jordan Mirrer

7 days to PGC San Francisco Demo Day. Register: pgc.helika.io On March 9, the Avalanche x Helika Accelerator cohort goes live: demos from the teams, the reveal of Helika’s Publishing Engine, and two panels on publishing + AI. If you’re building games and care about shipping, growth, and what “publishing at scale” actually looks like — be there.

10 days out. @avax x Helika Accelerator Demo Day at PGC San Francisco — March 9. Five studios take the stage, Publishing Engine reveal, panels worth showing up for. Register: pgc.helika.io

Huge shout out to @pgbiz for the write up. Come join us at PGC on March 9 for Demo Day and our Publishing Engine showcase! Don't miss it. pgc.helika.io

Getting a game in front of players is one thing. Keeping them engaged, growing the audience, running the pipeline — that still costs a fortune and breaks without the right people. Publishing hasn't had its Unity moment... yet.

"AI will democratize game development" is the new "anyone can make a game". The goalpost moved again. Both are technically true Both miss the point Making something is easy. Making something good is still hard. And making something people care about is still the entire game.

Hot take: A lot of AI “wins” are demo-grade and don’t survive real users, real latency, and messy edge cases at scale. Real authority comes from production-grade fixes for messy human data — monitoring, evals, guardrails, and boring reliability work. What’s your biggest AI deployment nightmare? Ours turned into a full one-month rollback: tracing regressions in prod, combing through code and prompt versions, and auditing logs to figure out what changed, when, and why. It was fun to untangle, but we'd rather never do that again lol.