Unity says AI is bringing more games, as the industry weighs AI-powered piracy

Thursday's AI gaming news is about what happens when making games, and unmaking them, gets a lot easier.

There are three stories. First, the engines: Unity, whose toolkit sits behind a big share of the world's games, reported its results for the summer quarter, and its chief executive spent much of the call talking about AI. Second, the worry on the other side of that coin: AI coding tools have made it far easier to take a finished game apart and rebuild it, and The Game Business asked how scared the industry should be about piracy. And third, a contest that says a lot about where AI game-making is heading: a platform offering $100,000 to whoever's games get played the most.

Here's what happened, in plain English.

Unity's quarter, by the company's own numbers

Quick background first. Unity is a game engine: the toolkit studios use to build a game, from tiny mobile puzzles to big console releases. It handles graphics, physics, sound and the editor where everything gets put together. Unity also runs a large advertising business, and that's where much of its money comes from.

On Thursday, Unity reported results for its third quarter, July to September. The full call transcript is on The Motley Fool, and all of the figures below are the company's own numbers.

The revenue Unity counts as its core business, what it calls strategic revenue, came in at $597 million, up 59% from a year earlier. Unity made a net profit of about $122 million, a 20% net margin. The Motley Fool's summary of the call describes it as Unity's first GAAP profit since it went public, GAAP being the standard accounting rules companies report under.

Most of the growth came from advertising. Unity's ad side, which it calls Grow, brought in $432 million, up 90%. The engine and tools side, called Create, grew much more slowly: $165 million, up 11%.

The standout was Vector, Unity's ad platform. Its revenue grew 126% from a year earlier, and 40% in just three months. Chief financial officer Jarrod Yahes added that the number of advertiser accounts on Vector grew 27% over the quarter.

Chief executive Matthew Bromberg described it in one line: "Vector is an AI prediction engine." In simple terms, it's software that learns which players are most likely to enjoy a game, and spend money in it, and then shows that game's ads to those people. The better the guesses, the more advertisers are willing to spend.

Bromberg also tried to keep expectations in check, telling analysts that "every quarter is not going to be a 40% quarter." For the current quarter, Unity expects strategic revenue of between $683 million and $691 million.

Coding agents move into the engine

For a show about AI in games, though, the more interesting part of the call was what Bromberg said about making games.

"AI is making game creation more approachable and more efficient," he said, "leading to both more creators and more games being launched." He said Unity has seen "a very sharp increase in the use of coding agents" on its platform.

A coding agent is an AI helper that goes further than suggesting a line of code. You give it a task, and it writes the code, runs it, sees what breaks and fixes it, while a person checks in along the way. Bromberg said Unity has opened up its editor so these agents can drive it directly, including through a command line, which is a text-only way to control software. In his words, Unity has become "a fully programmable agentic automation target," which is a technical way of saying an AI can now operate the tools the same way a developer would.

Two more numbers from Bromberg, again the company's own. He said the number of people using Unity every day is up 25% just since early August. And he repeated a claim Unity likes to make about its reach: "Nearly 3 billion people play a Unity-powered game each month."

He also gave an update on Unity Spark, which he described as a browser-based, collaborative tool for making games, built with Google. It goes into a closed beta this year, with a full launch planned for 2027. Unity's finance chief said pricing hasn't been announced.

Bromberg's own summary of what Unity is: "We are not an ad network. We are an authoring platform." Put simply, Unity is betting that if AI makes games easier to build, a lot more of them will be built on Unity, and its ad business will help them find players.

AI makes it easier to take games apart

The flip side of easier game-making is easier game-unmaking. In a piece published on Thursday, Christopher Dring at The Game Business asked the question directly: is AI-powered game piracy an existential threat?

The background is a few weeks of stunts. According to the article, Anthropic's AI assistant Claude made it easier to decompile games and rebuild them to run in places, and on hardware, they were never made for.

Decompiling needs a quick explanation. When you buy a game, you get a finished program in machine code, which computers can run but people can't really read. Decompiling turns that back into source code that people can read, change and rebuild. It used to take skilled specialists a long time. AI tools have shortened that work a lot.

The results have been entertaining to look at, and less entertaining for publishers. The article mentions Super Mario 64 mashed up with Elden Ring, and classic Call of Duty games made playable in a web browser. It also notes that Anthropic has moved to stop Claude doing this kind of thing.

Richard Leadbetter of Digital Foundry, the technical analysis outlet, was the guest on that week's edition of The Game Business Show, and he doesn't think that settles it. "People have got PlayStation 5 games running on PC," he said, adding that "the genie's out of the bottle." He reckons Chinese AI models are about 8 months away from being able to do the same thing, which is his own estimate.

Concerned, but calm

So how is the industry taking it? Dring spoke to trade bodies and IP protection teams, and his description of the mood is "concerned but calm."

Pete Mehravari, chief counsel for IP protection and security at the ESA, the trade group for American game companies, put the concern simply: "AI can accelerate work that previously required substantial time and specialized expertise." He also raised cheating, saying cheats "undermine the expectation that everyone competes under the same rules."

But not everyone sees decompiling as the main event. An anti-piracy expert the article doesn't name pointed instead to bot farming, commercial cheat software and people selling accounts as the more pressing problems right now.

Dring also brings back a well-known line from Valve's Gabe Newell: "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." The idea is that people pirate less when the legal way to play is easy and convenient, which is one reason many in the industry aren't panicking.

So nobody quoted in the piece says this is nothing, and nobody says it's the end of the business either. What has changed is the cost: work that once took experts weeks can now be started by far more people.

A $100,000 contest for AI-made games

And finally, a contest for the people making games with AI. Dexerto reports that Astrocade, a platform where you make playable games by describing them in plain language, has launched a creator competition worth $100,000.

Here's how it works. Astrocade will pick 25 creators. Applications opened on November 5 and close on November 20. The chosen creators then get three weeks, from November 30 to December 20, to make and publish games. The winner is whoever's published games rack up the most plays during the competition, and they take the whole prize. Dexerto says no coding or game development experience is needed, and creators can also earn money outside the contest through Astrocade's existing play-based payout program.

Astrocade also shared some growth figures, which are the company's own numbers: 10 million monthly active players in August 2026, doubling its audience in four months, and more than 220 million play sessions a month across more than 100,000 pieces of playable content.

The interesting detail is the rule itself. The contest doesn't reward the best-made game, as judged by anyone. It rewards the one people actually play the most. In a world where AI lets almost anyone make a game in an afternoon, getting players to show up is the hard part, and that's the skill this contest is paying for.

The big picture

Put the three stories side by side and they describe the same shift from different angles.

Unity's chief executive says AI is pulling in more creators and more games, and his company is building its tools so that AI agents can operate them directly. Astrocade is going further, paying people who may never have written code for making games that get played. Both are betting that the number of games, and the number of people making them, keeps going up.

The piracy story is the other side of that. The same kind of tool that helps a newcomer write a game helps someone else take an existing one apart. For now, the trade groups The Game Business spoke to sound concerned but calm, and some experts think older problems like cheats and bots still matter more.

Easier to build, easier to take apart. That's where AI in games stood on Thursday.