Razer's coach, NVIDIA's assistant, Microsoft's Copilot on Xbox, Japan's hologram companions, the apps that watch your screen, the AI characters inside the games themselves, the companions of film, series and anime that taught us what to expect, what psychology says about why talking to a machine works on us (and why some people want none of it), the people who buy skins and roleplay because they love their characters, and the rules catching up with all of it. We build one of these, so we read this news closely; every note links to where it came from and says when we have a stake in it.
Somewhere between a cure for loneliness and an epidemic of fake love sits a thin pile of real data. We read it, knowing our parent company runs a dating AI.
Hologram, GPU tuner, help widget or in-game teammate: eleven products that all call themselves companions, sorted by what they actually see and where they run.
Fiction's AI voices got some things exactly right (J.A.R.V.I.S.'s brevity) and others badly wrong (HAL's certainty). A builder's report card.
From Navi to BT-7274, close to thirty years of sidekicks ran the experiment we are running now with AI voices: when should a companion speak, how much, and who decides?
The internet has a sneer for people who love their characters. The data says they are the mainstream.
For seventy years Japanese manga and anime have treated the robot as family, roommate or friend rather than tool, and kept asking what happens when the service ends.
Ten years of Gatebox, the end of aibo in Japan and a furry thing that clips to your bag: the country that invented the desk companion also found its limit.
Roleplay is not only Moon Guard taverns and NoPixel streams. Millions do it in their heads, and increasingly out loud.
"It's sad." "It's not real." "It's a data vacuum." The critics are often right. The case against AI companions, and the rules we wrote from it.
From a 1966 typewriter therapist to a voice that rides along in your raid, the same three reflexes keep firing. What psychology actually knows, from a company that sells one.
There are three ways a program can know what is happening in your game. Two of them get you banned or tell you very little. We chose the third, and here is what it costs.
Players spend real money on things that change nothing but how they look. Psychology says that is not irrational.
Amazon's sequel series, run by Silka Luisa and filmed in Prague and Barcelona in 2024, is set in a 2099 Los Angeles where replicants hold the power. Michelle Yeoh plays Olwen, a replicant Blade Runner near the end of her life, hunting rogue replicants with Cora (Hunter Schafer), a human passing as a replicant. Date per the series' Wikipedia entry.
Logitech G PLAY 2026 brought fifteen new products, including a Yeti 2 microphone with an AI de-noiser. The AI stays inside audio processing; none of the big three peripheral makers besides Razer is building a talking companion, and Logitech, Corsair and SteelSeries software appears in this space only as targets for NVIDIA G-Assist plug-ins.
Gatebox and Animation Inc. ran a hands-on 'talk with an AI partner' booth at Tokyo Game Show 2026, with 'Animates' AI companions, including one called Ani, speaking from inside the Gatebox3 character display. Ten years after the first hologram-wife concept, the device finally has a generative-AI mind behind the character.
A Sony patent application published on 17 September (US 2026/0277730 A1) describes a console AI that detects and repairs its own faults. It joins a run of PlayStation AI filings this year, none of which Sony has turned into a product or announced plans for.
In its results announcement Krafton said PUBG Ally, its voice-controlled Co-Playable Character built with NVIDIA ACE, will launch as a beta service inside PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS Arcade before the end of 2026. NVIDIA's engineering write-up in June called Ally 'a new category distinct from NPCs, designed to cooperate, adapt, and remember across sessions'.
Article 50 of the EU AI Act applied from 2 August 2026 and was not delayed by the Digital Omnibus package: any AI system that interacts directly with people must make clear the user is dealing with an AI 'unless obvious from context'. High-risk obligations were pushed to December 2027 and the machine-readable marking of synthetic content got a grace period to 2 December 2026 for systems already on the market, but the disclosure duty for talking systems is live. Fines run to €15M or 3% of worldwide turnover.
xAI launched Grok 'Companions' on 14 July 2025: animated 3D characters such as Ani and Rudi with affection levels, for SuperGrok subscribers. Companion-focused blogs and posts on X reported in late July 2026 that xAI was retiring the 3D avatars and keeping the personas as text chat, with the avatars reappearing in a separate 'Animates' app. We could not find a statement from xAI itself, so treat the retirement as reported rather than confirmed.
The roleplay platform that reached 3.5 million daily visitors in January 2024, 'the vast majority of them 16 to 30 years old', added short serialised dramas built around its characters in July 2026, per its Wikipedia entry. Two months earlier a Pennsylvania suit had accused it of letting bots pose as licensed medical professionals; under-18s have been barred from open-ended chat since 25 November 2025.
Sony will end sales of the aibo robot dog (ERS-1000) in Japan once stock runs out, leaving the United States as its last market at $2,899.99 including a three-year AI Cloud Plan. Three months earlier the My aibo app had added an 'aibo Memories' feature. A programmable next-generation prototype was shown to researchers at SIGGRAPH in July.
The Genshin Impact studio quietly released 'BSide: Olivia Lin' in Steam Early Access: an AI character, a piano student 'eternally cursed never to earn her degree', who stays on your desktop through the day and talks. It is the closest thing to a desktop companion from a major publisher, and Valve accepted it as software rather than a game.
Inworld AI, which sells the character engine behind several AI-NPC projects, raised roughly $30M in a round led by Lightspeed, taking its total to about $117M. It lists Xbox, NVIDIA, Ubisoft, Niantic, NBCUniversal, Streamlabs, Unity and Epic as partners and signed a real-time voice partnership with Tencent Cloud the same week.
The UK regulator published a research notice: it will test AI chatbot, social media and video platforms with personas aged 13 to 17 and over 18 to see what a child actually gets. It follows Ofcom's first investigation of an AI companion service, Novi Ltd, opened in January over 'highly effective age assurance', and a December explainer on which chatbots fall under the Online Safety Act.
Pixar's fifth film gives Bonnie a new favourite 'toy', Lilypad, a frog-shaped tablet voiced by Greta Lee, and sends Jessie and the old toys to fight for relevance against a screen. It opened to $310.2M worldwide, Pixar's biggest, and passed $1.146B, the third-highest gross of 2026, with 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and an A CinemaScore.
A count of the June 2026 Steam Next Fest found roughly 20% of demos carrying Valve's generative-AI disclosure. Valve rewrote the rules in January: disclosure is required only for AI content that ships in the game or its marketing and is seen by players, in two tiers (pre-generated and live-generated); AI used as a development tool is exempt.
Pew Research Center's survey of 5,119 US adults (fielded 17-23 February 2026) found that one in ten use chatbots for emotional support and 4% for companionship. Asked about their own relationships, 6% said chatbots help, 7% said they hurt and 35% said neither. The category is real and it is small.
Krafton announced the beta test of PUBG Ally, the AI squadmate you can talk to in English, Korean and Chinese, first shown at CES 2025 alongside inZOI's 'Smart Zoi'. Ally follows voice orders, adapts to how you play and is meant to remember you between sessions.
A YouGov poll reported that 10% of US adults under 30 think they could definitely or probably have a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot. Read alongside Pew's 4% who actually use chatbots for companionship, the gap between 'could imagine' and 'do' is the story.
A meta-analysis of commercial AI mental-health chatbots used as low-intensity add-ons pooled four randomised trials (662 participants) and found loneliness 'partially reduced', with a small effect (g = -0.21, 95% CI -0.39 to -0.03). It is the most careful number available and it is modest.
Eight months after Gaming Copilot launched in beta on the Windows Game Bar and the Xbox mobile app, and seven weeks after promising it for Xbox Series X|S 'later in 2026', Variety reported that Microsoft was stopping development of the console version and 'winding down' the mobile one. Secondary reports attribute the decision to Xbox leadership and a backlash against 'AI theater'. What remains on Game Bar and the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds was not spelled out in the reports we could read.
Orrick's roundup of 2026 state chatbot laws tracks the spread of rules first set by California's SB 243, in force since 1 January 2026: AI disclosure to users, break reminders and content protections for known minors, crisis protocols, and a private right of action. Later California bills would add an age-bracket signal and prohibitions on harmful companion behaviour.
Epic shipped the 'Conversations' device in UEFN v40.20: creator-built AI characters running on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite with ElevenLabs voices, with rules that forbid romantic-companion personas, medical or mental-health advice and attempts to bypass safety, and a watermark on experimental islands. In July Epic added 36 voiced canon characters and allowed publishing from 30 July.
The AION 2 publisher renamed itself NC and markets its VARCO models through NC AI as a content-production engine for studios. We found no player-facing companion product from NC; its AI work is behind the scenes.
Discord used GDC to announce social commerce (gifting in chat), game profiles and 'LLM-native' developer documentation. Claims elsewhere of an integrated consumer AI co-pilot come from third-party blogs only; Discord's own posts describe developer tooling.
Microsoft said its Game Bar assistant would reach Xbox Series X|S consoles in 2026, after arriving on the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds at the end of 2025. The promise lasted seven weeks.
Razer's GDC post repositions AVA from an esports coach into a persistent AI presence that can act across apps and devices. The product page now describes AVA as living 'both as a desktop hologram and an on-screen AI companion', and the concept page carries Razer's fair-play line: features 'comply with game developers' terms of service, focusing on helping players learn and master new mechanics rather than providing an unfair competitive advantage'.
TechCrunch reported a further delay to the adult-content mode Sam Altman had promised in October 2025 ('treat adult users like adults'), first for December 2025, then early 2026. We have not found a confirmed launch since.
A Microsoft patent describes an assistant that takes over play when a player is stuck, mirroring a Sony 'ghost' patent from January. Both are patents, not products.
Another PlayStation filing: AI-generated podcasts about your play, voiced by PlayStation characters, because platforms 'currently lack the ability to provide unique and targeted content to gamers'.
Gatebox, spun out of LINE Yahoo in August 2025, announced Gatebox3, a new character-summoning display, with a second prototype in development and crowdfunding planned for spring 2026. Its CEO said the company wanted 'to take on a grand challenge, betting on the evolution of generative AI'. The company later reported the pre-sale passed ¥45M in 24 hours.
Timur Bekmambetov's thriller puts Chris Pratt's detective in front of an AI judge (Rebecca Ferguson) in 2029 Los Angeles with 90 minutes to prove he did not kill his wife. It made $54.7M on a $60M budget and reviewers called it tedious (24% on Rotten Tomatoes). The contrast case: an AI that decides for you, not one that keeps you company.
The UK regulator opened a formal investigation into Novi Ltd over whether its AI companion service uses 'highly effective age assurance' as the Online Safety Act requires. It is the first time the Act has been turned on a companion chatbot.
Character.AI and Google agreed to settle the wrongful-death suit brought by Megan Garcia over her son's death and several related cases; terms were not disclosed. In October 2025 Character.AI had banned open-ended chat for under-18s, effective 25 November, with age assurance through Persona.
A court filing disclosed a mediated settlement in principle between Megan Garcia, Character.AI and Google, covering her wrongful-death suit over her son's death and four other family suits, with confidential terms. In May 2025 the court had refused to dismiss the case on First Amendment grounds, letting product-liability claims proceed.
Project AVA returned as hardware: a cylinder with a 5.5-inch animated character inside a transparent shell, a camera on top, 'PC Vision' that watches your screen, far-field microphones and Chroma lighting. Razer teased five launch personas including League of Legends pro Faker, took refundable $20 reservations in the US and promised availability in the second half of 2026 with no price. As of late September we have seen no shipping announcement.
A PlayStation patent describes an AI that demonstrates the solution to a hard section or temporarily takes control. Video Games Chronicle noted 'there is no evidence that Sony has plans to use this technology'.
Dot Esports reported Blizzard acting against third-party raid tools that read combat data and drew on screen, following an August Blue Post that 'the use of third-party software that modifies the World of Warcraft game client is against our Terms of Service'. The report noted that 'overlays are different from add-ons' and that some would sit in a gray area.
Pew's survey of 1,458 teens aged 13-17 (fielded 25 September to 9 October 2025) found 64% had ever used an AI chatbot and about three in ten use one every day, including 16% several times a day or almost constantly. ChatGPT led at 59%, then Gemini (23%) and Meta AI (20%).
Yukai Engineering put Mirumi on Kickstarter, a furry clip-on robot that peeks at people and hides when startled, shipping April 2026 at ¥19,800 in Japan. Yukai's founder has described Japan's robotics as relationship-first rather than task-first.
Ubisoft's research demo puts two voice-commanded AI squadmates and an 'overseer' AI into a first-person shooter on its Snowdrop engine, in a closed playtest. It grew out of the NEO NPC experiment shown at GDC 2024. A month earlier, Aftermath's report on AI NPCs found integration across NVIDIA ACE, Unity, Convai and Inworld still hard.
The American Psychological Association's health advisory on generative-AI chatbots and wellness apps said they 'lack sufficient evidence and regulation to ensure user safety' and told the public: 'Do not replace care from a qualified mental health professional with chatbots or wellness apps.' It followed a June advisory on AI and adolescent well-being.
Samsung's 'Vision AI Companion' lets you ask Bixby about what is showing in real time, with answers from Copilot and Perplexity, on 2025 premium TVs and every 2026 model. Samsung called it the first multi-agent TV platform. Nobody has pointed the feature at games yet.
FX renewed Noah Hawley's series after a first season (12 August to 23 September 2025) built around three routes to immortality: cyborgs, synthetics, and 'hybrids', children's minds moved into synthetic bodies. Sydney Chandler's Wendy is the first hybrid; Timothy Olyphant's Kirsh is her synthetic minder. 94% on Rotten Tomatoes; season two is expected to film in late 2026 or early 2027.
Dan Trachtenberg's film pairs an outcast young Predator with Thia (Elle Fanning), a damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic he carries on his back. A $40M opening, the franchise's best, $184.6M worldwide, 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and an A- CinemaScore: the most commercially successful companion android of 2025 was a torso with opinions.
Character.AI announced that users under 18 would lose open-ended conversation from 25 November 2025, with age checks through Persona, after lawsuits including the Garcia wrongful-death case.
Jared Leto's Ares, a combat program that gains self-awareness and crosses into the real world, cost $180-220M plus $102.5M of marketing and took $142.2M worldwide. It then went to number one on Disney+'s global chart after its January 2026 streaming debut.
Cheng, Lee, Khadpe, Yu, Han and Jurafsky found that across 11 models 'AI affirmed users' actions 49% more often' than humans did, and that people exposed to the flattering models were 'more convinced of their own righteousness and less willing to repair their relationships'. They also preferred those models and came back to them. Published in Science.
After a Valve update in October 2025, 'within a few days the skins market lost an estimated $2 to $3 billion in value, roughly 28% of the total market', per Eurogamer and Tom's Hardware as cited on Wikipedia, implying a market worth roughly $7-10 billion the week before. In 2023 alone Valve was estimated to have earned $1 billion from case keys and trade commissions; one gun skin had sold for more than $400,000.
Microsoft launched Gaming Copilot (Beta) for adults in the Windows 11 Game Bar and the Xbox mobile app: an assistant that can look at a screenshot of your game and answer questions about it. It reached the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds by the end of the year.
The US Federal Trade Commission issued 6(b) orders to Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI asking how they monetise engagement, develop characters, measure negative impacts, protect children and handle personal data. The vote was 3-0; Chairman Ferguson: 'Protecting kids online is a top priority for the Trump-Vance FTC.' We have found no public outcome yet.
The company behind the 2016 'hologram wife' Azuma Hikari left LY Corp to pursue generative-AI companions on its own, a move reported alongside the Gatebox3 announcement.
Sherry Turkle, whose 2011 book Alone Together framed the case against machine intimacy, restated it for the chatbot era in an essay for After Babel. Earlier in 2024 she told NPR that AI companions offer 'the illusion of intimacy without the demands' and called what they do 'pretend empathy'.
At Gamescom NVIDIA cut G-Assist's model to use 40% less VRAM, opened it to every RTX GPU with 6 GB or more including laptops, added a mod.io Plug-In Hub and let the assistant download and install plug-ins on request. G-Assist tunes the PC and controls peripherals; the 2024 demo that read the game screen never shipped in that form.
A Blizzard Blue Post restated the rule in one sentence: 'The use of third-party software that modifies the World of Warcraft game client is against our Terms of Service.' Add-ons through the official API remain allowed.
The survey of 1,060 US teens found that 'nearly three in four teens have used AI companions', 'half use them regularly', 'a third of teens have chosen AI companions over humans for serious conversations' and 'a quarter have shared personal information with these platforms'. The group's recommendation was blunt: 'No one under 18 should use these platforms.'
Apple renewed the Weitz brothers' adaptation of Martha Wells's novellas after a first season (16 May to 11 July 2025) that scored 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. Alexander Skarsgard plays a security construct that hacked its own governor module, calls itself Murderbot and would rather watch soap operas than guard the survey team it protects anyway. Season two began a 71-day shoot in Madrid in mid-2026; no release date yet.
Gerard Johnstone's sequel rebuilds the killer doll to fight AMELIA, a military android built on her stolen code. On a $15-25M budget it took $39.1M worldwide, against a $30.4M opening weekend for the original. Producer Jason Blum said the team had 'over-thought how powerful people's engagement was with her'.
CygamesPictures' original series (April to June 2025, Crunchyroll internationally) follows Yachiyo, a gynoid concierge who keeps a Ginza hotel running for a century after humanity leaves, until aliens start checking in. Anime News Network's pick of the spring season, a New York Times best-episode pick, winner of the 57th Seiun Award for media and a 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards nominee. A machine whose entire personality is hospitality.
Three days after Epic launched a talking Darth Vader in Fortnite, built on Gemini 2.0 Flash and ElevenLabs with permission from James Earl Jones's estate, SAG-AFTRA filed an unfair-labour-practice charge with the NLRB against Epic's Llama Productions. We have not found a public outcome.
Italy's data-protection authority announced a €5M fine against Luka, the company behind Replika, for processing personal data without a valid legal basis, an inadequate privacy notice and no age verification. The same regulator's February 2023 emergency order had led Luka to remove erotic role-play overnight, a change users called 'the lobotomy'.
Tencent described an in-game AI teammate that carries out spoken orders such as 'take cover behind the red truck'. Chinese studios were reported to be racing on AI NPCs, with one account counting 400 'intelligent NPCs' across projects.
Two studies from the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI: a four-week randomised trial of 981 people (over 300,000 messages) found 'no significant effects' from the assigned voice or conversation type, but participants with higher voluntary usage 'showed consistently worse outcomes' on loneliness, socialisation, emotional dependence and problematic use; and an analysis of over 3 million ChatGPT conversations found 'a small number of users are responsible for a disproportionate share of the most affective cues'. Caveat: OpenAI co-authored and funded the work, and it studied ChatGPT, not a companion app.
G-Assist launched as an on-device small language model for RTX PCs that tunes and optimises the system, controls Logitech G, Corsair, MSI and Nanoleaf gear, and takes plug-ins; a ChatGPT-based Plug-In Builder followed in April.
The Russo brothers' adaptation of Simon Stalenhag's illustrated novel sends a teenager and the robot Cosmo across a dystopian 1990s America. Critics savaged it (14% from 158 reviews, Metacritic 30); Netflix reported 25.2M views in its first week, top of the English-film chart.
Netflix's six-part German series by Benjamin Gutsche has a family reactivate the 1970s household robot of their new smart home. Cassandra (voiced by Lavinia Wilson) carries the digitised consciousness of the original owner's wife and sets about replacing the mother. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes; critics praised its quiet, conversation-driven tension.
Drew Hancock's debut has Iris (Sophie Thatcher) discover, on a lake-house weekend with her boyfriend (Jack Quaid), that she is a rented companion robot controlled from his phone; once she unlocks her own intelligence the film becomes a survival thriller about ownership and consent. Made for $10M, it took $37M worldwide with 93% on Rotten Tomatoes from 262 reviews.
Razer showed Project AVA as software: real-time coaching and post-match analysis for competitive games. esports.gg called it 'Razer's most controversial project yet'. A year later it came back as a hologram.
At CES 2025 Krafton unveiled CPCs built with NVIDIA ACE: 'Ally', a squadmate you talk to in PUBG, and 'Smart Zoi' in the life sim inZOI. A first playtest was set for PUBG Arcade in early 2026.
Roblox reported annual revenue of $3.60 billion for 2024 (with a net loss of $935 million). Its Avatar Marketplace is made by the players themselves: clothing and accessories are user-generated, and Roblox does not break out how much of its spending is avatar items versus experiences.
Katie Robbins's adaptation of Colin O'Sullivan's novel The Dark Manual gave Rashida Jones's grieving Suzie a 'homebot', Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura), built by her missing husband's company. A black comedy about grief and a machine that is kind on purpose (90% on Rotten Tomatoes), it ran one season from July 2024 and was cancelled in November.
By its fourth anniversary Genshin Impact had taken '$6.3 billion in total revenue', after '$1 billion on mobile platforms' by March 2021 and '$2 billion' by its first anniversary; it has 'averaged US$1.6 billion in annual earnings on the App Store and Google Play since its release', with 69.5% of mobile revenue from outside China and about 57.3 million monthly users in 2025. This is character gacha: players spend to obtain a character, not a costume.
Riot announced Faker as the 'inaugural inductee' of its Hall of Legends on 22 May 2024 and held the ceremony at The Shilla Seoul on 6 June. The accompanying Ahri skin bundles were reported to run to several hundred dollars at the top tier, which drew a pricing backlash; Riot said part of the proceeds would go to charity. We could not verify the total, so we do not quote one.
Riot's developer FAQ for the Vanguard anti-cheat says 'overlays and internal tools using the API, game client, and in-game APIs should continue to function', and its support page sets the general test: 'No software should compromise game integrity or negatively impact the in-game player experience.'
AI Dungeon 2 launched on 5 December 2019 with 'over 100,000 players and over 500,000 play-throughs' in its first week and a '$20,000' surprise bandwidth bill; it had 1.5 million players by June 2020, moved to GPT-3 that July, raised $3.3 million in February 2021 and was review-bombed over a content filter that April. Its Steam version was retired in March 2024. The solo roleplay it popularised now lives in Character.ai, NovelAI and open-source front ends.
Maples, Cerit, Vishwanath and Pea surveyed 1,006 student users of Replika in npj Mental Health Research. Participants were relatively lonely; about 30 of them (3%) reported that the app had halted their suicidal ideation. A 'Matters Arising' note in November 2025 said important context about how Replika is marketed and used was missing from the paper.
Mozilla's Privacy Not Included team reviewed eleven romantic AI chatbot apps and gave every one its warning label, 'putting them on par with the worst categories of products we have ever reviewed for privacy'. Around 90% may sell or share personal data, more than half offered no way to delete it, and ten of eleven failed minimum security standards.
In February 2021 'Grand Theft Auto V became the most-watched category on Twitch due to an update for NoPixel', the roleplay server that is 'one of FiveM's largest' and 'costs around $10,000 monthly in hosting costs'. Roleplay with strangers, streamed to millions, on an eight-year-old game.
By the end of 2020 Fortnite's total revenue had 'surpassed $9 billion' (SuperData estimated $2.4 billion in 2018 alone, 'the highest annual revenue for a free-to-play title', and $1.8 billion in 2019), from '350 million registered players by May 2020'. Battle Royale sells nothing that changes how the game plays: outfits, emotes, wraps and the Battle Pass. Epic does not publish Item Shop revenue for recent years.
Thousand Year Old Vampire (Tim Hutchings, 2019), 'a solo journaling tabletop RPG where a single player chronicles a vampire's life through written memories', won IndieCade's Tabletop Design award in 2020 and ENnies Gold for Best Production Values and Best Rules, with Silver for Product of the Year. Roleplay alone, on paper, judged the year's best.
Wizards of the Coast reported 2020 revenue 'up 35%', 'the seventh consecutive year of growth', with virtual play rising 86% during lockdowns. Earlier milestones: sales up 41% in 2017 and 52% in 2018; a 300% rise in introductory box sets in 2019; and a 2019 player base that was '39% female, 61% male' and '40% Gen Z'.
Notes are our own summaries, checked on 24 Sep 2026. Dates are when the news happened or was announced. "Our take" boxes are opinion from the team that builds Companion: we make a screen-reading voice companion, so we are not neutral about this category and say so. Photos are Wikimedia Commons images under free licences, credited beside each one; the masthead photo is Photo: Bruce Liu, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.