Since the dawn of video games, the ultimate dream for many gamers was to witness a version of themselves inside a game. Now, the ultimate dream could become the ultimate reality.

RFLXT—a new kind of studio that leverages blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to allow creators to interact with their communities through Digital Doubles, gaming and AI chat—believes it has unlocked a unique model that will eventually allow anyone to input their digital twin into a game and monetize it.

The company has already had success launching games—recently debuting Voyager Ascension on GALA, a web3 refresh of the nostalgic game Descent 3, and dropping a wishlist trailer for Chronoshot, the first game on the Epic Games marketplace to feature Digital Doubles of influencers within a game.

Now, RFLXT aims to take the tech one step further and have AI engage with gamers both as a character within games and as an AI companion during gameplay itself—a feature set to become available when the RFLXT platform launches later this summer.

The platform itself was born out of a conversation between RFLXT co-founder Les Borsai and influencer Kelly Brannigan—co-founder of the game Girl Fight—where Brannigan suggested she could live indefinitely if she existed in AI. The suggestion was a lightbulb moment for Borsai, who realized Brannigan’s idea could exist both as a game and as the basis for an entertainment company.

Borsai saw gaming as the best entry point through which to create a new kind of studio because of the regulatory protections already in place within the gaming industry. So with gaming set as the first checkpoint in his overall vision, Borsai partnered with Charles Hoskinson—a co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Cardano—on RFLXT, which became a portfolio company under Hoskinson’s IOHK banner.

“The reason I built RFLXT was to build an entertainment company in a very slow way,” Borsai said to me in a recent interview. “I’m a fan of disruption and I hate the traditional entertainment business. One winner shouldn’t pay for every loser [in terms of a movie’s success and revenue] and people shouldn’t be losers. Everyone should be able to create. It’s about the democratization of creator culture.”

In that vein, RFLXT has created and integrated Digital Doubles of Twitch influencers like Dinglederper, AllEyesOnDee, and Molly O’Malia into its games—with many more talent partnerships to be announced.

“The coolest part of RFLXT is the concept of digital twins,” Hoskinson—who’s a board member of RFLXT—said to me during a recent conversation. “While it’s actually an older concept that’s become vogue because of AI, we believe celebrities and influencers will be interested in creating digital simulacra because they’ll have an interface to stream and interact with their fans. We’re taking old-school NFT capabilities, our digital twin capabilities and capabilities within game development to create an entire economy.”

RFLXT sees the creation of its ecosystem as the evolution of what started in the mid 2010s with social media. 

“There are so many live streamers and Twitch streamers—so many people who are ‘celebrity-lite,’ people who have an audience of 300,000 or more who have created long tail markets around a niche area of interest,” Hoskinson said. “With respect to digital twins, RFLXT is building a collection of tools to allow a larger set of people to own their identity, own their fan relationships, and monetize those relationships in different ways.”

Ultimately, creators will be empowered to take the reins over themselves as a business, versus ceding power to a traditional Hollywood talent agency.

“If I’m an influencer with 50,000 followers, CAA doesn’t give a shit about me,” Eric Galen, chief operating officer at RFLXT, said to me in a recent conversation. “None of the agents are going to sign me, but I’ll be able to go on RFLXT, and as I’m building my audience, I can create my avatar and have that accessible in games. If people want to connect with it and if I want to monetize it, I can do that. The big agencies will continue to serve the top one percent. For the other 99 percent, we want to be their avenue in.”

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RFLXT isn’t trying to be a high-end AAA web3 gaming studio, rather, it’s simply trying to prove that its model works through gaming.

“Social media allowed people to become influencers through nontraditional media,” Galen said. “It kind of democratized celebrity to some extent and provided channels for fans to connect directly—whether through Twitter/X, Instagram, Snapchat—the platforms allowed for direct-to-fan connections. Once those audiences were built, we saw companies like Patreon and OnlyFans come in for influencers to monetize their audiences. What we’re doing with RFLXT is looking at that direct-to-fan-connection and building out what it will look like in web3 and the metaverse by leveraging blockchain and AI to help animate Digital Doubles.”

The bet is that by creating a suite of utility for these micro-influencers, web3 adoption will be driven as a byproduct—through new wallet creations, crypto transactions and volume within the crypto ecosystem.

“Digital twins aren’t just assets, they’re assets with identities,” Hoskinson said. “They’re assets with payment systems, intellectual property and royalty management behind them. You don’t want to be able to counterfeit these types of assets, so it’s a perfect mapping to a lot of the capabilities that exist within smart contracts and blockchain tech that can’t really be accomplished in the legacy system.”

RFLXT’s studio model merges assets, payment systems and the systems to transact them with identity. The triangulated approach sits at the bedrock of its vision for a turnkey model that can embed anyone and anything into games.

“As we move deeper into the metaverse, we think the way celebrities and influencers—anyone with a following—will engage with fans will be different and we’re trying to build that ecosystem,” Galen said. “It’s a new talent ecosystem for web3.”

In this way, people will be able to develop a relationship with an AI version of a human, which can talk to a million people at once. But while it's an AI version, it’s still an approved version by the human influencer themself.

Gamers are then able to engage with the AI Digital Double in the same way they’re able to engage with gaming influencers on Twitch and other streaming platforms.

“We hooked them up to an event broadcaster for a game we’re making and it looks just like it would on a Twitch stream," Joshua Miller, general manager at RFLXT said. “You’ve got your monitor, camera, microphone as they’re playing the game. They’re reacting to what’s going on in the game and they’re reacting to you chatting with them, just as you would during gameplay.”

But will gamers understand they’re communicating with the Digital Double of an influencer and not the “real” influencer?

“The way we’re approaching the tech is very transparent, which is actually not the way a lot of people are going to approach it,” David Siemer, board member of RFLXT said to me recently. “We’re making it very clear to our users that they’re talking to an AI, whereas in the next election cycle, you’re not going to know if you’re talking to an AI or that you’re receiving messages from an AI. I think we’re building in the right, ethical way.”

Non-ethical AI is a real problem. As we’re seeing from the fallout of different court cases, AI platforms that source their data from unlicensed, unapproved sources could face serious consequences. It’s the darker side of AI that can definitely fan the flames of fear with respect to the tech.

“We know that as these models get smarter, instead of having one influencer getting paid $200 for every 10 minutes of playing a video game, you could have 1,000 versions of that influencer charging higher rates—and people may not know the difference,” Siemer said. “But on a positive note, I think we’re going to be able to create some pretty powerful gaming environments where people feel like they’re hanging out with someone they really admire, and that person is going to be responsive, thoughtful, creative and clever through the power of AI. I think it’s going to be a fun experience, and as an entertainment company, that’s what we want to provide.”

Part of RFLXT’s player-first mentality exists in its low barrier to entry. Players won’t have to jump through hoops making purchases to access content or learn how to create web3 wallets. Instead, RFLXT is utilizing open authorization—one click and you’re in and playing.

“We’ll create a custodial wallet in the background for you,” Tony Colafrancesco, executive producer and head of games at RFLXT said to me during a recent conversation. “This helps us reach out to a much wider audience, like the typical web2 gamer who doesn’t know anything about blockchain but just loves games. We’re reaching out to them while weaving in web3 elements in a smart way that brings them value.”

One major way the company aims to deliver that value is by putting nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in its games to help with data ownership—specifically by allowing players to keep the digital assets they earn through gameplay.

“One of the things that’s really important is utility,” Colafrancesco said. “It could be as simple as owning an item in your wallet that provides you with a badge on your character’s chest, a map, a skin, or it could be a completely new playable character. It could be anything.”

Les Borsai

The more an item or character advances in gameplay, the more unique and valuable it becomes. Players can then choose to do what they want with the digital asset: Enjoy its utility, sell it on a secondary market or give it to a friend. The key is that players will have the freedom to choose what they want to do with their items.

“Utility across titles is something we think will be really powerful,” Colafrancesco said. “We’re using the Dynamic protocol with Cardano, where these digital collectibles can not only increase in value but in substance over time. If you purchase a playable car in one game, it could give you skins or a logo in another, and it can grow. As you progress and use the item in these different titles, Dynamic metadata can be written back to the car token so that it grows over time.”

So if a player generates a lot of kills with a specific sword in a game—and has advanced deep into gameplay—that sword stands to be more valuable because it’s helped the player level up considerably. The sword's metadata can then verify the stats the player accumulated to make it a special item.

But the utility across different titles extends beyond digital items and into the Digital Doubles themselves. RFLXT’s goal is to plug in different versions of the same characters across different games—the same Double who looks and feels specific to each game, and who still knows who the user is.

Remember Kelly Brannigan, co-founder of Girl Fight and Borsai’s inspiration for RFLXT? Her digital double is actually in the game.

“One of the things we’re doing is we’re taking Kelly and we’re taking her Digital Double and we’re sticking it in multiple games,” Borsai said. “AI infused within the Double will then provide a vastly different gaming experience across different titles.”

Borsai showed me screenshots of Kelly’s Digital Double in both Girlfight and Chronoshot, where she engages in different actions in each game.

But in both games, it’s still Kelly—just different versions of her. Not the identical character of course, but variations of the character based on the background of the game. Same AI playing multiple different roles depending on the game it's in.

So as EA Sports says, “It’s in the game,” but before we know it, we might be saying, “I’m in the game.” For RFLXT, the trajectory is to first prove its model works and then to grow.

“The next steps are bringing the Cardano community and other multi-chain communities into the RFLXT ecosystem,” Borsai said. “We’re going to launch a token, bring in more influencers and grow the user generated content (UGC) element where anyone can be in video games and have an AI digital twin. We’re going to make that happen.”

But—

“I don’t want to be a gaming company,” he said. “It’s not that. It’s an entertainment company.”

lead image: Kelly Brannigan