Tencent's Interactive Entertainment Group (IEG) is reportedly reorganizing its AI game teams around two big bets: video world models and AI-native games. The restructured unit will fold ARC Lab into the existing game AI team — and keep hiring in a big way.
The two groups used to have very different jobs. ARC Lab leaned toward frontier research, working on world models, game agents, and generative AI. The game AI team was more about engineering, turning large language models and agents into usable game development tools and infrastructure.
This move effectively puts "researching models" and "getting models into games" under one roof. The new department will span audio/video foundation models, data, video world models, agents, and products — and the team-building playbook is borrowed from ByteDance's Seedance and Kuaishou's Kling, right down to talent, data, and training engineering. According to the leak, the team is currently around 100 people and could eventually grow to 400 or 500. One of the end goals? Figuring out how to use video models to generate interactive game worlds directly.