Integration of AI and DePIN Can Solve the Zero-sum Game Dilemma in Decentr...

　　TMTPOST -- Beamables 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 exclusive interview jointly conducted by Barron’s, AsianFin, and ChainDD, Sharman said Beamable enables game studios to bring their creative ideas to life more easily, affordably, and quickly. Beamable is a backend infrastructure platform aiming to upend the costly and complex pipelines behind modern game development.

　　
 

　　Beamable Vice President Gunjan Sharman is delivering a speech at DePIN Expo.

　　At the bustling DePIN Expo 2025 held in Hong Kong on August 27–28, Sharman, a gaming industry veteran who had served as Director of Product on Call of Duty at Activision, shared his opinion on the emerging intersection of gaming, decentralized infrastructure, and artificial intelligence.

　　From Walled Gardens to Open Networks

　　Game development is an expensive endeavor. Top studios spend millions on backend infrastructure alone—Roblox, Sharman noted, spends more than 25% of its billion-dollar revenue maintaining live services.

　　That kind of expenditure is untenable for smaller studios. Beamable’s solution is a plug-and-play set of APIs for game backends that allow studios to skip costly custom infrastructure and go to market faster.

　　But Beamable’s vision doesn’t stop at efficiency. It also aims to decentralize that backend infrastructure using DePIN—Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks—which allows a distributed set of server providers to support game studios, driving down operational costs by half or more.

　　“Our goal is to make it easier, cheaper, and faster to bring a game to market,” Sharman said. “The future of backend tech isn’t owned by a few companies—it’s powered by a community.”

　　While many headlines around AI in gaming focus on asset generation or NPC intelligence, Sharman sees even deeper potential in combining AI with decentralized systems.

　　“AI can intelligently scale rewards that participants in a DePIN receive,” he explained. “You can use AI to design incentive models that are fair, efficient, and aligned with long-term growth.”

　　That’s especially critical in decentralized ecosystems, where economic design is often the weakest link. “Many DePINs today are effectively zero-sum games,” Sharman said. “Funds from demand-side partners pay supply-side participants—but unless incentives are aligned, people will just churn.”

　　Sharman envisions a future where AI is embedded not just in the frontend of game development, but in the protocol design itself—allocating yield, implementing token-locking strategies, and enforcing sustainability across decentralized gaming ecosystems.

　　A Marketplace for Game Creators

　　Beyond infrastructure, Beamable is also building what Sharman describes as a “developer marketplace,” allowing third-party developers to offer services and earn revenue from game studios. This model, he argued, helps indie developers break through barriers of discoverability and monetization.

　　“Traditional models centralize power and profits,” Sharman said. “Our marketplace solves that by giving developers fair compensation and a direct path to visibility.”

　　Beamable is planning a creator-style royalty program for its decentralized network, ensuring developers are paid fairly when their tools or code are used in live games—another example of applying Web3 principles to real-world developer pain points.

　　Beamable is fully remote, with engineering talent in Eastern Europe and core leadership in the U.S. But Sharman sees Hong Kong as a strategic gateway into the broader Asian market—particularly China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

　　“A lot of the lessons being learned in Southeast Asia are influencing the broader gaming ecosystem,” he said. “Hong Kong is uniquely positioned as a bridge market.”

　　As the company looks to scale globally, Beamable plans to strike up regional partnerships, with Asia viewed as a key growth corridor.

　　Asked about the biggest obstacles developers face when transitioning to DePIN-based backends, Sharman pointed to both structural and financial barriers.

　　“Today, developers either bear all the costs or are locked out completely,” he said. “Beamable is changing that by reducing upfront costs and allowing developers to pay as they go.”

　　By deferring costs and offering infrastructure as a service, Beamable helps small studios compete with larger players. For indie and third-party developers, Beamable’s network promises visibility, fair rewards, and a way into an industry long dominated by a few giants.

　　A Decentralized, AI-Driven Future

　　As DePIN matures, Sharman expects AI and decentralization to converge even more deeply into gaming. The next phase would be AI-enhanced protocols that adjust to behavior in real-time, smart contract systems that ensure fair participation, and tokenized economies that don’t just distribute rewards—but retain talent.

　　“Decentralization is a new kind of infrastructure. AI is a new kind of intelligence,” Sharman concluded. “Together, they’re going to reshape how games are made, run, and evolved.”

　　At DePIN Expo 2025, it was clear that Beamable isn’t just building tools—it’s building a thesis: that the next generation of gaming will be open, intelligent, and radically accessible. And for developers long burdened by high costs and closed systems, that future can’t come soon enough.