Inside FunPlus’ “AI-native” plan with Chris Petrovic
- AI now runs across FunPlus, from finance and HR to engineering.
- Its “experiment, then standardise” model lets teams trial tools, then shares what works.
- With capital tightening, Petrovic offers three pieces of advice for founders chasing investment.
- Gaming can live inside the attention economy, he says, not just compete with it.
Stay Informed
Get Industry News In Your Inbox…
Sign Up Today
“Our goal is to be an AI-native game company,” said FunPlus’ chief business officer Chris Petrovic during his ‘Navigating The New Normal’ fireside chat with PocketGamer.biz’s head of content Craig Chapple on day one of Pocket Gamer Connects Barcelona.
It was a bold statement of intent and only one part of a wide-ranging conversation. Below, we cover what he said about AI’s role at FunPlus, along with his read on a tighter funding market, the battle for attention and the collapse of the line between platforms.
AI is now an integral part of FunPlus
When it comes to making workflows more efficient, Petrovic pointed to an internal AI channel a colleague set up on Slack around a year and a half ago.
In its first year, the flow of links and tools was relentless: “The volume of information that we shared in the first 12 months was almost impossible to keep up with,” he said, “and now that channel is actually relatively quiet.”
The reason, he argued, is that the technology has become part of day-to-day operations – “it’s already assumed to be in your workflow”.
That assumption runs across the company, which marked its 15th anniversary in 2025 and employs close to 2,000 people. Finance, accounting and HR teams use AI to analyse budgets, headcount and allocation, while engineers use it for coding.
The hard part: substance over theatre
Petrovic was candid about the first challenge that FunPlus encountered with AI, which is pace. The ecosystem moves so quickly, with new models and updates landing constantly, that keeping current is a job in itself.
“You can’t just use [AI] as a brand-new tool for window dressing and not actually have substantive use cases or actual experience in using it.”
Chris Petrovic
The second is discipline. He drew a line between genuine adoption and window dressing: “You can’t just use it as a brand-new tool for window dressing and not actually have substantive use cases or actual experience in using it.”
FunPlus’ answer to this is an “experiment, then standardise” model. The company is in what he called an “advanced discovery phase,” giving teams “a lot of agency… to experiment with various tools”, but “within financial reason”, before feeding the learnings back into a standardised approach so knowledge is shared rather than siloed.
The stakes, he argued, are non-negotiable: “If you’re not doing it, your competitors will be.”
Gaming and the attention economy
When asked whether apps such as TikTok are eating into gaming’s share of attention, Petrovic argued that games are one of the few forms of entertainment that can live inside those spaces rather than just compete with them.
“I don’t think we’ll be talking any more about mobile versus PC versus console.”
Chris Petrovic
Beyond user acquisition ads, studios can build a genuine presence across Discord, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram – feeding players content and community outside the game.
The advantage is knowledge of the audience: platforms that have tried to move into games have struggled, while studios that understand their players can reach them wherever they are.
Raising money in a tighter market
Petrovic was clear: the capital environment has tightened. Funding “has gotten more and more constrained”, he said, even as the quality investors who believe in the category remain active. His advice for founders is threefold:
- AI fluency is the bare minimum and should be treated as fundamental. A leaner studio is a more fundable one.
- Come with a clear, forward-looking thesis – a sense of where audiences and the market are heading, not just a product.
- Don’t put an overemphasis on geography. Investors are “geographically agnostic”, backing the team and the idea over a postcode.
On that last point, he cautioned against chasing hotspots: on the capital flooding into Turkey, many investors are nervous about “the overheated nature”, “genre concentration risk” and “the scalability of deployment” beyond its borders.
A studio in transition
The AI push comes as FunPlus reinvents itself more broadly. Built on mobile strategy hits like State of Survival, Kings of Avalon and Guns of Glory, it’s now moving on to PC and console – most notably with Aniimo, the open-world RPG revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase as the debut title from its new Kingsglory label.
Petrovic expects the divide to disappear entirely: “I don’t think we’ll be talking any more about mobile versus PC versus console,” he said, as players increasingly expect “an any-time, any-place, anywhere experience”.
