AsianFin -- Beamable's Vice President Guanjan Sharman has announced that his company aims to democratize game creation by slashing backend development costs and offering smarter, decentralized alternatives that use AI to fine-tune incentive models, in an interview with Barron's China, AsianFin and ChainDD.
Beamable Vice President Gunjan Sharman is delivering a speech at the DePIN Expo held in late August 2025 in Hong Kong.
Regarding the field of "AI x DePIN," Gunjan said that many decentralized networks today are essentially a zero-sum game: funds come from demand-side partners and are then used to compensate supply-side partners. Therefore, it is essential to design a mechanism that incentivizes people to stay within the network and act in ways that align with the collective interest.
Additionally, he pointed out that the main obstacles to bringing games to market are the high costs and complex development processes. Beamable addresses these challenges by offering a set of ready-to-use APIs.
The following is the Q&A edited for brevity and clarity.
1. Old game backends are expensive and controlled by a few companies. How does Beamable’s game DePIN technology fix this?
Gunjan Sharman: As you correctly said, a lot of the backend technology today is custom made by studios, and it costs a lot of money. I come from Activision, I was the director of product on Call of Duty for 3.5 years. Activision had a studio of several hundred people dedicated to building out game backends and game live services. Similarly, if you look at Roblox, which makes a billion plus dollars in revenue, they spend 25% of their revenue and more on the game backends. So it's considerably expensive. What Beamable did to solve that is we created a set of ready to use APIs that any game studio can utilize to create the game backend very easily, quickly, and cheaply. Instead of having a lot of developers build it all in house, you just use our already made APIs and you're ready to go. That's Beamable’s core value proposition. That's how we make it easier, cheaper, and faster for a game studio to bring a game to market.
The infrastructure that game studios utilize for bringing a game to market is very expensive. We are building out a DePIN technology to reduce those costs by bringing together server providers who are willing and able to serve game studios. That's a second area where we help make it easy for game studios to reduce the costs of bringing a game live to market.
2. So I also want to know, in your opinion, What role does decentralized infrastructure play in empowering indie game developers and supporting larger-scale projects through value sharing and efficient operations?
Gunjan Sharman: I think our core decentralized model is an extension of the core business model, which is that we are offering game live services and technology very easily and cheaply. When our decentralized model is live, what it will do is it will take that one step further by making it possible for you to reduce the cost of running those game servers by about half or more. But even the core model to begin with, it is the cheapest and the most cost efficient way for a game developer to go to market. You don't have to spend a lot of money up front to hire a bunch of developers or spend a lot of money to rent a lot of data center capacity. You develop the game, you focus on building that. And as you use the backend live services, you pay as you go. So it is the cheapest, most cost effective model that we have brought to market by making the power of decentralization available to game studios.
3. Now, AI is also becoming more and more popular. Can you give a specific example of how "AI x DePIN" could be used to create a better or smarter game experience for players?
Gunjan Sharman: AI is capable of reducing frontend game development times already. You're already hearing news articles about how Netflix, for example, is using AI for generating game assets. Where I think AI can be used for DePIN is to intelligently scale the rewards that participants in the DePIN are getting. It can be used for smart network design and smartly scaling incentives, making it faster and cheaper to build up a DePIN that is scalable, secure, and efficient in terms of being fair to everybody participating on the network.
4. What future trends do you foresee in the convergence of DePIN, AI, and Web3 within the gaming industry?
Gunjan Sharman: I think the most likely immediate future trend you're going to see is, as I said, using AI for intelligent network design, and then further on using AI to implement things like yield, to implement things like token locking and so on, so that the network is not just being fair to all the participants, but also it's built for longevity. A DePIN is essentially a zero sum game. You're taking money from the demand side partners, and you're compensating the supply side partners, right? But there has to be an incentive for people to stay in the network and act in everybody's best interest. And to do that, you can utilize AI to design the protocol smartly and to incentive everybody in a way that feels fair and is targeted towards a long term growth.
5. How is Beamable preparing to lead in this evolving landscape?
Gunjan Sharman: I think our current first step is to build out a DePIN that allows game studios to bring games to market faster and cheaper. As the network starts to scale, we anticipate two things happening. On the demand side, we are currently focusing on video game live services. We expect to expand our demand pool to also serve AI customers. Therefore, that's why our Beamable network is starting off with video games, but we expect to serve a wide variety of customers, especially AI networks that need on-demand processing at scale. Then, it's quite likely that as our network stabilizes, we're going to use smarter and maybe AI-driven approaches for security, for stability, and for compensation of all the network participants on the supply side as well.
6. Does Beamable have any development plans in Hong Kong?
Gunjan Sharman: We are a 100% remotely distributed company. We have developers currently in Eastern Europe. We have some engineering and product management folks and the core team in the US. But as we scale, we are looking to strike up partnerships across the world, including Hong Kong being the gateway into the broader China and the broader Southeast Asian markets, especially given that a lot of the lessons that are being learned in Southeast Asia are being adopted across other Asian markets, like Japan, Korea, and so on and so forth.
I can certainly see Hong Kong being a great gateway for us to apply the lessons we learn in the US and then to expand to Asia, I think.
7. What are the most significant obstacles developers face when transitioning from traditional backend models to a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN)?
Gunjan Sharman: I think that one thing that the traditional business models primarily create is that it's a model of the publisher or the game developer owning all the development costs, right? Yeah. And there's very little participation from third party developers. What Beamable has done is that in addition to creating a ready to use set of APIs, Beamable has a marketplace that third party developers can offer their services to, which are being utilized by game studios.
As we bring our DePIN into the market, we will carry that forward into the web3 blockchain world so that developers do not have the traditional problems of how do they differentiate themselves, how do they make their services discoverable and so on. Instead, Beamable is solving the problem of discoverability through its marketplace. It’s solving the problem of fair participation, because we intend when our network is live, our goal is to have a creator style royalty program for all the developers so that they can participate in the network and be compensated fairly for use of their services by the game studios.
So to answer your question simply, third party developers have a problem of being discovered and being paid fairly. Beamable’s DePIN will solve all of that. Now, if you're talking about developers who are the game studio developers and so on and so forth, for them, it's very expensive to get even started because you have to spend a lot of money hiring developers, paying for data center costs and so on. But if you use Beamable’s technology today, you don't have to spend all that money up front. All of that money, you can defer those costs by using our ready to use APIs and paying pennies on the dollar. You're just paying as you go. So as a game studio developer, your money goes a lot farther, and that is a huge problem that game studio developers have today. It's very expensive to get a game to market. And we reduce that to begin with. So if you're a game studio developer, you don't have to do that anymore, because Beamable reduces a significant portion of costs. If you're a third party, indie developer, you're able to participate and be discovered by a lot of the indie game studios and the triple A game studios as well. You're able to get compensated fairly. That's how we will solve the problems of the two classes of developers in the video game world today.
