Reforged Labs launches AI ad-creation service for mobile games in open beta

Reforged Labs announced today that it’s launching its new ad-creation service into open beta. The platform uses AI to create video advertisements and is specifically designed for mobile game studios, with Reforged claiming its service will simplify what might otherwise be a complicated process. It’s powered by the studio’s AI Creative Engine, which is trained on high-performing mobile ads, and offers full-service solutions for smaller studios who don’t have as much time and money to spend on creating ads.

Reforged offers a “storefront” of templates for different video ads, generated by the Creative Engine’s analysis of successful ads. Game developers can choose a template and upload assets — including gameplay footage — of the game, and the company’s AI service will create an ad that follows said template. Reforged raised $3.9 million in its seed round of funding for this purpose, with DCM leading the round and Y Combinator, Epakon Capital, Goodwater Capital, Phoenix Fund, Asymmetry Ventures and the company’s angel investors participating.

As the company itself stresses, this service provides all of the work involved. The AI generates animations and sound effects, adds voiceovers with text-to-speech and even creates human-like avatars. It also edits the ad to ensure seamless transitions between scenes and localizes any speech and text in over 30 languages. According to Reforged, it can generate market-ready ads within 24 hours.

The changing world of mobile gaming ads

Robert Huynh, Reforged CEO and co-founder, spoke with GamesBeat about the company’s launch. “The creative engine is this crazy AI brain that takes in all the ad creatives on the market in order to learn from them, figure out why they’re high-performing, learning the structure and the visual elements. Then it generates these different templates that we humans can understand and then pick from… Instead of taking weeks to figure out what kind of ads people want and what to generate, we’ll go out there and do the hard work for you.”

According to Huynh, Reforged’s ideal customer is a small mobile studio that might only have one or two people on the task of creating ads. What sets the company apart, he says, is that their AI and ad creation service is created exclusively with mobile gaming ads in mind — all of its training and research is based around an understanding of what works within the mobile game advertising sphere.

He adds, “All of these small indie game studios want to level up the playing field, because it’s really hard to get attention… You’ve seen how much the mobile gaming industry has been hurting on the monetization side. This is a key part of how I think the industry is going to shift is through more personalized ads and cheaper, faster ads.”