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The World is Moving Fast. Futureproof Yourself Weekly.
Your front-row seat to the Future of Business, Tech, Life, and Human Potential.
On Futurecaster with Kimberly Bates, learn through thought-provoking conversations with world-leading founders, AI experts, scientists, engineers, doctors, business leaders, technologists, investors, and everyday builders. Each episode unpacks the real opportunities shaping what’s to come and the blind spots along the way.
Kimberly Bates is a world-renowned futurist and executive brand leader. For over 20 years, she has advised some of the world’s most valuable global companies and iconic brands, from Fortune 100s to fast-moving startups, helping them anticipate change and shape the direction of their industries, customers, and culture. Her work has driven future-ready brand and business transformations, breakthrough products and services, and entirely new business models and revenue streams.
The Futurecaster® Podcast is on a mission to make future thinking available to everyone. If people can see these opportunities for themselves, they can help create them.
©2026 Futurecaster, LLC | Futurecaster© is a registered trademark
Mike Romo (00:00)
My friends have been using tools like Microsoft Copilot when they've been doing their development and being able to have real time testing of code. I was getting coffee with my friend and he showed me a website that he had created via screenshot and not even using a prompt.
So prompt-generated gaming that will happen.
I see a lot of AI tools that come to us looking for funding. I see a lot of shops that have little widgets that can plug into Unreal Engine or
the Unity game development engine to optimize certain parts of that creative process. And I'm like, all for it, 100%. The busy work, that just gets in the way. when it comes to the higher aspects of creativity where story and art are really, that's where you're playing and it's not the code, it's those things. I think it's like human touch.
Kimberly Bates (00:52)
Welcome to the FutureCaster Podcast where we give you a front row seat into the future of business, life, and human potential.
Kimberly Bates (01:02)
In today's exciting episode, We sit down with Mike Romo, VP of strategic development at Digital Development Management, where he leads consulting services that help game studios and entertainment companies scale their IP across media, business models, and strategy execution. The gaming industry is on the brink of a seismic transformation
Gaming is evolving from static storytelling to adaptive player-driven universes where every decision reshapes the experience. We'll also dive into how gaming is bleeding into other industries from education to social connection, fitness, and even mental health.
and what this means for the next BILLION PLAYERS who will live, work, and play inside persistent digital spaces.
Kimberly Bates (01:41)
Hi, Mike. been waiting to talk to you about gaming. I think the first place to start is how you got into this space and your passions around it We'd love to share that with the audience.
Mike Romo (01:52)
growing up as a kid, know, video games have this really interesting reality where the people who are playing and who are making these games, a lot of us grew up with the technology. My first console was an Atari 2600 and my first video games were the Space Invaders and Pong at the front room pizza in San Francisco, right? video games were, we were all breaking these things as we were playing them and going up.
And so if it, I mean, it definitely ages me, but my first real job was a QA tester, quality assurance tester at Broderbund, which made a load runner, but more famously made where in the world is Carmen San Diego and a lot of different print shop tools and stuff like that. And so that ended up having me sort of catapulting me into software development.
where I started working at Apple as a QA tester literally the Monday after I graduated from college.
I was able to watch this industry grow with not only technology, but with the community at large. know, in my, way I think about games is games is this balance between story, art, technology, and community. And you have to keep all of these things kind of afloat to have not only a successful business, but to drive the art form.
you know, it's like the people that grew up with film or grew up with photography. Like, I feel like I'm in this really special place to have grown up and watched this incredibly fundamental, now for audiences, fundamental art form, entertainment space, community space. And so I've always been sort of just really excited about it because it was really my peers, people who are older than me and definitely people younger than me, but I could watch their work.
fundamental dent the universe, right? I think Steve Jobs talked about that. In gaming with every console release, with every independent game, with every AAA game, it's making ripples that inspire ⁓ not only other storytellers, but move technology in a way that can have these really unexpected results. You we used to think of these things as video cards. Now, you know, they're powering crypto, they're powering AI. And it's because of gaming that required these really
strong pieces of technology to make higher fidelity experiences, well, the happy accidents are likewise world-changing. I've just really enjoyed being a part of it. And I still play quite a bit. Like a lot of folks, I don't get to see my friends as often, but I do try to play with my friends online once or twice a week,
Just given my work, it's really ⁓ important that I understand not only what audiences are into, but what kinds of games developers are excited about and what they're trying to bring to market. So that's a
Kimberly Bates (04:38)
what are you doing currently at your company? Take us through a day in the life and all the excitement that's going on.
Mike Romo (04:41)
Yeah!
All the excitement. Well, the fun thing about it is that literally, so what DDM does is for the past 20 years, they have been on the side of the developer, the side of the creative community. Just like an actor or a writer might need an agent to help them negotiate a great deal to help make their film or their play or their TV show, we worked with developers to find equitable deals from their funders, usually publishers, to help bring their games to market.
And so the thinking has been, you know, if we can help developers get equitable, equitable deals, that'll help raise the entire industry and keep everybody in business. Our, our whole deal is let's make, keep the industry vibrant. Let's keep it healthy and let's, let's help people have meaningful incomes from this. Let's, let's help keep these studios in business. So that's kind of the 20 year history of the, of DDM. And as we've kept doing this, we had lots of people asking us for advice.
strategic insights, help building out their companies, and that's spun out the consulting side of the business, which is what I help drive with my team. And so people come to us either entering the games business or they're trying to make a transition, their IP from or into the games industry, or they're just trying to look at what they've got and figure out what the next steps are,
And so what we also try to do is help people find funding for their projects, whether it be public or private funds. So it's sort of a triangle of efforts. And we're all around the world.
Kimberly Bates (06:11)
2025 has been one of the largest investments into gaming and AI in many years.
Mike Romo (06:20)
This has been a time of tremendous change. A tremendous, lot of transitions are happening. What we're finding is that, you know, lots of layoffs, lots of studios being jettisoned by publishers as player habits have changed, as people's willingness to invest in content has changed. We're where, you know,
maybe the listeners may or may not know, but the top 10 games of any given year, any given month that are being played, they're being played by 50 to 60 % of all players are just playing 10 games. And over player ship, player hours, the amount of time that are spent for completely new games is about six to 7%. So the entire industry is shifting.
But when it comes to AI investment in the space, 100%, right now, what we're seeing mostly is really helping the development, the pipelines.
shrinking that development, needing fewer resources to get assets down through the creative and technical pipeline, skip from sketch to game, workflow management, all kinds of different technologies that really take out some of the busy work in game development. And that's happening across all of entertainment, When it comes to making small pieces of art, people are using generative AI to make.
those coins or those bags of gold or the shields and stuff like that. So you'll see some of the stuff that may have taken a couple of weeks, whatever it might be. Now we can see AI tools being leveraged to bring those timelines into days, if not hours, if not minutes, in some cases to create these kinds of assets. So 100 % we're seeing new studios as they pitch their products.
A lot of times what they're talking about is how they're using machine learning and artificial intelligence to augment and support a smaller team. we're seeing studios with new games that are coming out with far fewer people than 100, 300 person teams. Now we're seeing much more likely to have a five person core team where they're outsourcing to smaller groups.
But you're really seeing a focus on time saving and money savings, oftentimes using new AI technologies. And that'll continue to be a theme for the next, for ongoing, because it just makes sense.
Kimberly Bates (08:40)
that's happening across many industries as we know. Well, layering on top of that, how do you think AI, could it risk, you know, the storytelling and artistry or do you think it'll enhance it?
Mike Romo (08:51)
think it'll be both. think there's risks with any tool that makes things too easy that everything gets flattened and becomes just sort of mush. The things that excite me about AI are these persistent worlds, ⁓ NPCs that remember the last time that you entered into town or remember that you did this thing with your other player character and celebrates that win or say, or if your friend is not playing with you going, where's Chris? He was here last week.
you know, what's going on? Are you guys okay? Or is he off gallivanting somewhere else? ⁓ AI, I think, is gonna be really, really interesting when it comes to non-player characters. It's gonna blur the line in terms of interactivity with what a person is online. And I think one of the quiet and fundamental changes will be, what is it like to have an online community? ⁓ When you're playing multiplayer, it usually is...
you know, other folks, other real human beings playing with other real human beings may be augmented with bots, but I have this feeling that as, AI bots get more and more, you know, fluid and, and, and, and sensitive and have better memories and all this kinds of stuff, you'll have teams that'll be part human characters and part AI characters. And you won't even care about the difference if you can even notice it at all.
You might choose to maybe with one of your games, subscribe or purchase certain AI characters as part of your party. And that's how a company will make money. They'll have like the jokey sidekick or the sardonic elf, right? That are fully realized characters in the game that who know, maybe we'll be able to send you a text message to remind you to play, whatever it might be. I think...
That is going to be very, very interesting in terms of the stickiness of an in-game experience, so these kinds of in-game relationships.
Kimberly Bates (10:42)
Yeah, so it's almost
like having also an AI companion and coach with you to make you a better player. Yeah.
Mike Romo (10:46)
100%, 100%.
And I think that's really, really interesting. I like the idea of when you're new to a game that you can bump into a human community that'll take you along for the ride, that can sort of needle you and make fun of you, but while teaching you the basics of the game, like I've been playing a lot of Helldivers right now and it's very funny. It just came out on Xbox last week.
So you're seeing this influx of new players. But equally, there were all these great ways for people to feel very welcome and onboarded, right? So I'm always really, really curious to see just how the social mores of a game
Change when there's new populations and I'll be very very interested to see how a I can help with the onboarding or the new you know the the the fatui the first time user where you really do have a companion that comes in there's a there's there are a few games where you'll have a character that you meet once And then you never meet again. They take you through this training. It would be great to have
you know, these characters that can spin up again, return to you six months later and go up with you on a journey.
I think the great thing about what
artists and even developers and even writers are realizing is that AI can help you generate ideas and generate conversations that inspire new ideas. And that is actually the fruit of the AI. The end result of a sentence or a scene being written or a character with a shield that looks kind of soulless. I don't necessarily think that's going to be the ultimate expression of AI art.
Kimberly Bates (12:18)
what happens when NPCs really develop long-term memory and real agency and they real-time shift games or mood states while you're playing or they kind of have a mind of their own
Mike Romo (12:31)
that could be really, really cool. If you're playing as the mayor of a small town or a general or a captain of a ship that
eventually wants to go mutiny on you, like that can be really, really interesting. I think, you know, one of the things that you could imagine in a game and you're walking into a town with your friends and you're witnessing an argument that's unique to the time space in that game. That would be kind of interesting because you could try to break up the fight and you could have these really kind of interesting interactions. And then they might, like you said earlier, remember you later on, thank you for breaking up that fight, you know,
But I think if that's part of the expectations of play, play is changing rapidly every day, what we think of it, I think it could be really, really compelling.
Nick Connor (13:16)
I'm a, I'm a big fan of the Zelda franchise, one of the things that they sort of really busted open was not just the open world, but the open world where you can start making your own decisions about how you play the game, The way I look at AI is it's really sort of our intelligence partner
You mentioned story, art, community, and tech, right? It's right there. How does that intelligence partner start re-imagining and inventing and driving things in each of those areas
Mike Romo (13:47)
what we're seeing is these shorter experiences, right, that the consistency, take it for example, Grow a Garden in Roblox, which had, I think it was 23 million concurrent players on August 22. At once, was the record of any game, right. And that game was written by
I think it was a 16 year old and he or she wrote it in three or four days. And that is almost, it's basically an idle game. You plant the seeds, you leave, you come back, you see what's grown, you can exchange the seeds. There's no fighting. There's some exchanging of stuff, but it's really grow and show with your community. And those are kind of the basics. it's interesting because
Where's the AI in that, right? These, and when you look at what's very popular in the mobile games, these puzzle games and a lot of these other games which are almost meme games where you play for a little bit in Roblox, these other games that are very, very popular, they'll be done in just a couple of weeks. The crowd moves on. So it's like in a weird way, we're seeing AI being able to do all of this incredible stuff, but player habits are over here.
96 % of kids, you know, 13 and under, they want to play games on their phone, right? And 30 % of modern gamers, they want to play it on their mobile device. And so what's ironic about what's happening right now is that we've never seen games have the potential to be more high fidelity, more emotionally captivating, more realistic than ever.
But the gamers right now are really just into ⁓ these shorter, lower fidelity experiences. mean, Roblox compared to a modern AAA game, it's almost laughable. ⁓ That being said, there will always be a room for these kind of narrative games. And I wonder as the players get older and they want to have a little bit more, as they realize that their community, their friends, and even their family are doing different things.
maybe they'll start turning to these longer format narratives. But it is just this very weird paradox where there's so much investment in being able to create these bots and these companions. And right now it's that the kids could care less, right? ⁓ But to your point, I feel like the AI will give folks
a feeling of social belonging where they might not have one in their normal lives, right? Or a sense of real agency that they might not be able to achieve in their everyday life in a community that is as vibrant and hopeful and optimistic and as engaging as they could ever want it to be because the AI developers have created an experience that caters to the hopes and dreams and ambitions of their players in such a way
that there is a connectivity there with the characters that they're interacting with, which will hopefully help people to encourage to make relationships and have similar real world experiences because they've had these meaningful experiences online. I think the thing that I sometimes get worried about is that people find so much fulfillment in these online spaces that they feel less of a need to have the same kind of interactions when they're going out to get their groceries.
or get a cup of coffee or whatever it might be. I'm hoping that the opposite will be true, that they will find themselves so comfortable being able to start up a conversation that they'll find that friction slowly getting dissolved when they are actually out in the real world. But I've always been an idealist optimist and I'm often disappointed. But I do think there's a way that thoughtfully used and empathetically used artificial intelligence can change how we socialize in the real world.
Nick Connor (17:38)
you
you open the door to actually thinking about how personalization. So one of the things AI is so good at is hyper personalization at scale. Okay. You know, it can consume vast amounts of data, learn about our, us, our habits, you know, right now.
Mike Romo (17:57)
Yeah.
Nick Connor (18:02)
Not quite in real time, but pretty close to fast forward six, nine months. mean, that's going to be happening, are we going to see the evolution of games where there's maybe very few humans in the loop?
in the actual development of the games and possibly even the real time evolution of games as people are playing them.
Mike Romo (18:19)
⁓
Nick Connor (18:25)
Where's that headed?
Mike Romo (18:28)
Well, you make a really good point. That's what I tried to touch upon earlier with the smaller teams being needed to generate high quality experiences. My friends have been using tools like Microsoft Copilot when they've been doing their development and being able to have real time testing of code. I was getting coffee with my friend and he showed me a website that he had created via screenshot and not even using a prompt.
Like, you know, this, this is, this is stretching the realm of what we're thinking is possible, you know, and it's, you know, there's a, there's a lot more room left for innovation.
So prompt-generated gaming experiences, that will happen.
It's already happening. think DeepMind had some examples of this. You're seeing it where in other forms of entertainment too, where people are being able to do prompt video
I do think it's never been a harder but also more interesting time to enter the games industry because the classical roles of being in the game industry are being supplanted by AI tools.
just like in every other field, right? It's hard to get an entry job
it worries me because one of my favorite things to do when I was stuck at a problem at work was I would be able to go upstairs and visit all the artists that were working on the spaceships for the game that I was working on, right? That was doing this development for, or I could go to the first floor and hang out with the QA testers and they could show me what was, what was wrong with the game or what was right with the game. So when I went in to my meetings with the boss, I knew exactly what was really going on and
The sense of community that goes into a game, can really, really feel it.
especially when you're at a trade show and you meet all of the members of a team that are behind the demo that you're playing at the trade show booth or whatever.
Aside from writing a novel or a play on your own in your office, like a lot or painting a painting, you know, in your own studio, A lot of the entertainment that we experience today are the result of lots of people coming in and having great arguments that result in the musical chaos of storytelling, right? And ideas because people get challenged or they get agreed with in an unexpected way where some real magic happens.
the mistakes are half the fun, right? Some of the open world jank, right, that people laugh about in ⁓ Skyrim. Part of the mistakes is what makes it fun.
⁓ to be in the games industry and watch people find the bugs. You release a game, you think you got it right, and the players take you places that you would never imagine. And so I think you're absolutely right. And I think there will be studios that will produce games that are right, have been developed correctly. ⁓ But I also think there's a sense of personality behind the games that makes this industry approachable. Now, I could be wrong.
Nick Connor (21:07)
Right.
Mike Romo (21:26)
it'll be really, really interesting to see what happens to the notion of a superstar video game developer or superstar actor or superstar director ⁓ as that association between quality and celebrity or changes for these new generations. And so I do think that AI will give you the capabilities to do things as an individual and as a small team.
I see a lot of AI tools that come to us looking for funding. I see a lot of shops that have little widgets that can plug into Unreal Engine or
the Unity game development engine to optimize certain parts of that creative process. And I'm like, all for it, 100%. The busy work, that just gets in the way. But when it comes to the higher aspects of creativity where story and art are really, that's where you're playing and it's not the code, it's those things. I think it's like human touch.
which...
I really want people to try to make it happen in AI because I want to show the value of the human touch in comparison. I really want to see an AI-generated film. I want to see how bad it is, but I want to see how good it is too, me to make something, there'll be a springboard for me to try something different. So I think AI in a weird way can help us make more informed and hyper creative decisions because all of this other stuff will be
All of the gunk will be removed and we can go right for the essence of story and character
Nick Connor (23:00)
I wanted to bring you back to you were just beginning to open the door, we're talking about community and social You know, and I'd love to get your thoughts on how that really ties to sort of learning and creativity.
Mike Romo (23:12)
The draw of community in these games is really important because you have these casual games, your Stardew Valley where you can play on your own, and that's great. But then you also have your Minecraft. have a colleague of mine who plays with her partner and her dad, and they've been playing Minecraft for over a decade with those three folks. And it's a way for them to have family time. And then there'll be people who are playing with their dorm.
We always want this community and this activity. We were at, this is not a joke, was just at Hermosa Beach last week there was, it must have been 19 guys, and they're all in these chairs, and they were all in front of this large board, it looked like a large TV, and they were doing their fantasy football draft at the beach. Like 20 guys under this huge shade structure, doing it all, calling it out.
Nick Connor (23:57)
Yeah.
Mike Romo (24:01)
They they were taking it very seriously. We were there for three and a half hours and they were still doing the draft Sports fans have always found community ⁓ In their gaming
I think you touched on on the intro the relationship between mental health and education and fitness
and gaming, it's all going to blend into each other. Pokemon Go encouraged us to go outside with a screen. It didn't say, leave the screen. It said, take the screen with you and go explore. And that was an integration of technology and activity that was a really happy kind of accident. It was a way of encouraging folks to change their behavior a little bit so they could have a new experience.
in a way that was comfortable because they were still tied to the video game experience. my hope is that we're not gonna find ourselves in a chat room or a video game with a bunch of AI bots that are constantly telling us how great we're doing, but they'll give us the social cues, allow us to make mistakes, allow us to sort of rehearse what it might be like to be in a job interview or to ask an awkward question during a date. All of these things can be gamified. So when you get to the quote unquote real world,
You'll have a little bit more comfort so I think AI can be used to Lessen the stress and encourage the creativity in the everyday moments
Nick Connor (25:26)
you touched on, you know, integrating with the real You know, I think there's sort of, there's two kind of paths that are clearly happening. One is the, the AR sort of, you know, immersive that, you know, starting to become indistinguishable from reality. And the other one is a sort of, you know, the
you know, the glasses actually, you know, the ⁓ and and how maybe sort of gaming is going to get integrated into actually the real life experience. Truly. What's your view seeing for that?
Mike Romo (26:00)
I was in the room when Steve Jobs did the first FaceTime call and I don't know if you guys ever saw the video, but the last image that they showed.
in the little promo video was a deaf couple communicating. And it was like not a dry eye in the house. People were sobbing because they realized just how fundamental it was that FaceTime was actually here. So it'd be really, really interesting to see if VR and AR can have that similar kind of moment, which at its core is an emotional moment, a connective moment. So if a way, if there's truly a way, for example, this is the only thing I can think about in VR that would really blow me away.
Nick Connor (26:30)
Yeah,
Mike Romo (26:37)
that I could put on whatever the device would be. And I'm having a conversation with either my dead grandmother or an old teacher or historical figure. And I'm able to have that kind of meaningful conversation. That would be interesting. And if, and if I could have an hour long conversation to talk about Shakespeare plays.
with Shakespeare and then be asked to write about that or make a scene out of that or act some of that, that like that would be magic. So maybe I'm not thinking about VR and like I'm in really inside of a dungeon, but if I can use VR and AI, which is helping all of human knowledge compress itself into a meaningful conversation or experience like that, I find really exciting. And wouldn't that be great?
to be able to talk to a director of film and talk about an idea that you've got or talk to a painter and ask them how they solved this painting problem and they did it right next to you and they gave you live feedback as you were painting or drawing on your piece of paper, like that would be awesome.
Nick Connor (27:45)
don't think that's that far away, you
I really don't.
Kimberly Bates (27:49)
think it's going to be contact lenses, not glasses in the future. is going to be inside of us and outside of us. So we you know, brain chip interfaces where we're going to control our game with our minds. We will have contact lenses and we will have hologram experiences and the phone might not be a thing in the future. I mean, we're
It's voice UX we have to just rethink like everything we do with gaming today. It might not exist 20 years from now.
Mike Romo (28:18)
My friend is a UX designer and he was saying, my job has an end date when it's all going to be voice and
That's like that for sure.
Something that everybody has been agreeing when we were talking about gaming in the future that there will always be the opportunity to make money from it. There will always be this tie to commerce, right? You know, there'll be these gambling is already exploding in its popularity. And I don't see why that wouldn't change in future gaming. So, and it could be in association with another trend that we're seeing, which is idle games, where you're not really playing, but you're kind of monitoring and you're making changes, but the actual gameplay is happening offline.
Those kinds of idle games, I think will continue to be out there. ⁓ But I also do think user-generated content will be experiences that people are making for each other. A mixtape won't be about music, it'll be about a world that you created for Valentine's Day.
I think our relationship with sleep might forever change. I think about the idea of when we go to other worlds when we sleep, why wouldn't that be a space that could be manipulated and changed or informed? So I could opt.
to have regular sleep or maybe I wanna have three or four dreams where I'm a captain of a spaceship
or maybe we extend your REM sleep so you can have higher fidelity and more crazy dreams that are attuned to the subject matter that you wanted to subscribe to for that month,
When I think about the video game stuff, at the end of the day, there's gotta be a sense of fun, play, exploration. There's gotta be a sense of achievement and there's gotta be hopefully a thing that you learn from those achievements, whether it's dexterity or a way to get out of a social situation in the video game or whatever it might be. So I'm very, very curious when we have all this tech to, at the end of the day, what is, we gotta find the fun.
Nick Connor (30:13)
It's been super fascinating. To have your insights, you've obviously thought so deeply about a lot of these things.
Mike Romo (30:19)
thank you for bringing me on board. I just, feel very, very grateful to have a chance to talk with you about this. then, you know, fondly remember a conversation that we had, cause I guarantee you a year from now.
will be closer or farther from many of the points that we were discussed. So it'll be interesting to see where we're at. So thank you for this time.
Kimberly Bates (30:41)
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