Unity buyout talks, AI clones and GTA 6, and Nexus Mods' new AI rules

Friday's AI gaming news is about ownership in the widest sense: who owns the tools games are built with, who can copy a game once it's out, and whether the people making things still get to enjoy making them.

There are four stories. First, the money: Reuters reports that two of the investors behind this year's buyout of Electronic Arts have held talks to buy Unity, the game engine company. Second, the biggest release of the year: a former Rockstar technical director thinks AI-made unofficial ports could push GTA 6 onto PC sooner than people expect. Third, the rules: Nexus Mods, one of the largest mod sites, has decided not to ban AI-made mods, but to make everyone say when they've used AI. And finally, a bit of perspective from Hideo Kojima, who thinks AI is useful but takes away the part of creating that he loves.

Here's what happened, in plain English.

Silver Lake and PIF have reportedly held talks to buy Unity

Quick background first. Unity is a game engine: the toolkit studios use to build a game, from small mobile puzzles to big console releases. It also runs a large advertising business. If you read Thursday's long read, you'll know Unity had just reported a strong quarter, with its chief executive talking a lot about AI.

Now Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that two big investors have held talks to buy the whole company. PocketGamer.biz summarises the Reuters report like this: Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) have reportedly held talks to acquire Unity in a deal that could value the game engine and ads company at around $25 billion.

Who are they? Silver Lake is an American investment firm. PIF is Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. A sovereign wealth fund is a giant pot of money owned by a country and invested in companies around the world.

According to Reuters, as reported by PocketGamer.biz, the investors approached Unity in recent weeks, and Unity has been working with an investment bank to assess its options. Silver Lake isn't a stranger to the company: it already owns about 8% of Unity.

This wouldn't be the pair's first big move in games. Silver Lake and PIF were both part of the group that took Electronic Arts private in a $55 billion deal that closed in August. Taking a company private means buying up all of its shares, so that it's no longer traded on the stock market. PocketGamer.biz also notes that in September there were reports PIF was considering merging EA with Savvy Games Group, PIF's own games company, to bring its gaming businesses under one roof.

The most important line in all of this is the caveat. No deal has been agreed, and the terms could still change. Reports like this describe talks, not a sale, and talks can fall apart.

Why Unity, and why AI matters to the story

Nobody involved has said why they want Unity, so it's worth sticking to what's on the record.

PocketGamer.biz points out that Unity has been expanding its ads business with Vector, as it aims to compete with companies like AppLovin. Vector is Unity's advertising platform, and on Unity's earnings call this week, 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.

On the same call, Bromberg talked about the other side of the business, the tools for making games. He said AI is making game creation more approachable and more efficient, and that Unity has seen a very sharp increase in the use of coding agents on its platform. A coding agent is an AI helper that doesn't just suggest code, but writes it, runs it and fixes it while a person checks in.

There's a Saudi connection, too. PocketGamer.biz notes that PIF's subsidiary Savvy Games Group has been working with Unity under a memorandum of understanding to support game development in Saudi Arabia. And it adds that while PIF has appeared to pull back on some investments this year, a move for Unity would signal that its gaming expansion is continuing.

Put simply, Unity is telling a story about AI at both ends of a game's life: helping people build games, and helping those games find players. These reports landed in the same week it told that story to investors. Whether that turns into a deal is something we'll only know later.

A former Rockstar tech director on AI clones and GTA 6

Next up, the biggest game of the year. Grand Theft Auto VI comes out on November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and there's no PC version announced.

Obbe Vermeij was a technical director at Rockstar North, the studio behind the series, and left in 2009. He's now an indie developer. In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, he suggested the PC version may arrive sooner than people expect, and his reason is AI.

A port is a version of a game rebuilt to run on a different machine, such as taking a PlayStation game and making it work on a PC. Official ports are a big job. Unofficial ones, made by fans by taking a game apart and rebuilding it, used to take a long time too. Rock Paper Shotgun writes that AI tools now allow speedy unofficial ports of console games on PC, which some in the community call "slopcomps", and notes that experienced developers of such projects warn that using generative AI this way produces messy, brute-force code and loses the community side of the hobby.

Vermeij's worry is a simple one. If he were Rockstar, he said, he would be concerned that "somebody would just take the PS5 version and get AI to change it to PC." Such a version wouldn't be as good as Rockstar's own, he added, but it could still hurt their sales. So he wouldn't be surprised by an effort to bring the console and PC releases closer together, he said, while being clear that he doesn't know what Rockstar is actually thinking.

There's some history here. Vermeij explained that Rockstar has long released GTA on consoles first and on PC later, while most publishers prefer to release every version at once because then there's only one marketing campaign to pay for.

"If it's GTA, I think people are gonna try it"

Could AI really port a game this big? Rock Paper Shotgun notes that GTA 6 is, according to Rockstar and Take-Two, an enormously complex production that took eight years. Vermeij still thinks today's AI tools could "probably" do it. It would physically take hours and hours, he said, and probably cost "tens of thousands of dollars in tokens."

Tokens are the small chunks of text an AI model reads and writes, and AI companies charge by the token. So that figure is, roughly, the AI bill. For a game that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, that's a small number, which is the point. "If it's GTA, I think people are gonna try it," Vermeij said.

Rock Paper Shotgun also points to a report from Ars Technica this week on people running GTA 6's PS5 trailer footage through a PC and Nvidia's DLSS 5, an AI graphics feature, to add extra polish.

Vermeij doesn't see an easy defence, especially for smaller developers who can't afford lawyers the way a company like Take-Two can. He told Rock Paper Shotgun he doesn't really see how anyone could protect against it. In his view, games used to take so much effort to make that nobody could realistically rip them off, and "that's completely changed now." His summary: "it's a brave new world."

It's worth adding that Vermeij isn't against AI in general. Rock Paper Shotgun says his own early access game, Plentiful, uses AI-assisted machine translation for localization, but not for gameplay content, art or audio. As for the PC version of GTA 6, the latest rumours, which Rock Paper Shotgun reports as rumours, put it sometime in early 2027.

Nexus Mods: label AI, don't ban it

Meanwhile, some new rules for modders. A mod is a fan-made change to a game, anything from a new outfit to a whole new quest. Nexus Mods is one of the biggest places to download them, especially for PC games.

As Notebookcheck reports, Nexus Mods has decided not to ban AI-generated mods, while describing itself as "pro-human creativity." Instead, new rules took effect on November 3. Here's how they work:

• The site already offered three AI labels: AI-generated, AI-assisted, and AI-generated promotional media.
• Every new upload now has to declare whether AI was used.
• Mods labelled AI-assisted must publicly explain how and where AI was used.
• Authors of existing mods have a 60-day grace period, until January 2, 2027, to bring their pages in line.
• After that, staff will contact authors whose pages are missing details. Those who still don't comply may face warnings, account restrictions or removal of their mods.

Why not ban AI mods outright? Co-owner Victor "Foledinho" Folmann explained that AI is now used throughout the whole process of creation, from autocompleting scripts to generating textures, voices and full assets, so it's hard to draw a clear line between what's acceptable and what isn't. And in his view, an outright ban wouldn't get rid of AI in modding, it would only stop people from mentioning it. The site would rather have AI use out in the open and clearly labelled.

There's also a promise to modders. Nexus Mods pledged never to use the mods it hosts to train AI, or to sell or license them to anyone who would. A new permission setting lets authors decide whether others can use their mods with AI.

Notebookcheck notes that the approach resembles Steam's rules, which require developers to disclose AI-generated content in their games, but goes further by also covering AI-assisted work.

Hideo Kojima on what AI takes away

And finally, some perspective from one of the best-known names in games. Hideo Kojima, the creator of Metal Gear and Death Stranding, talked about AI in an interview with the Japanese outlet Game*Spark, which Automaton translated earlier this week.

Kojima isn't dismissing AI as a tool. He compared it to Photoshop and word processors, which made work much more efficient when they arrived, and said AI has made things even more efficient, helping teams meet deadlines faster. He said he thinks that's great, too.

But then he used drawing as an example. "Getting a finished picture is not what's fun about drawing, it's the process," he said. Telling a computer to make something, and then telling it that's wrong and to do it differently, is not a form of creation he finds particularly interesting, he said. He compared it to model kits, jigsaw puzzles and LEGO: the finished product is the same whoever builds it, but the building is the fun part.

Looking ahead, Kojima thinks things will be fine for the next five to 10 years. But if AI remains unrestricted, he said, there might come a day when it plays a key role even in creative fields. He joked that he won't be around by then, and said the younger generations will have to decide what to do. His conclusion: "I don't want a future where that aspect is lost."

He did end on a more open note: given how easy it has become to make things, AI tools could also help build a better future, depending on how they're used.

The big picture

Put Friday's stories side by side and they're all about the same question: what happens to the value of a game, and of game-making, when AI makes building and copying so much cheaper.

For investors, the tools that sit underneath games look valuable. Unity pitches itself as the place where AI helps people make games and where AI helps those games find players, and Reuters reports that buyers have talked about a price of around $25 billion, though no deal has been agreed.

For the people who make the games, cheap copying is a new worry. A former Rockstar technical director thinks even the world's most-watched release could face AI-made unofficial ports, and that it might change when the official PC version arrives.

For platforms, the answer so far is to label rather than ban. Nexus Mods is asking every modder to say when AI was involved, much as Steam does for games, and promising not to feed modders' work to AI.

And for creators like Kojima, the question isn't whether AI works. It's whether, once it does, the part of making things that people actually enjoy is still there. That's one to keep an eye on.