Liquidnitro Games hires ex-Tencent Games global CTO for AI-enabled game production | exclusive interview

Liquidnitro Games has hired former Tencent Games Global CTO Cedric Collomb as its new CTO, shortly after closing a $19.1 million Series A round that brings total funding to $24.3 million. Collomb, who previously served as CTO of EA Mobile and held leadership roles at AMD, Kabam, LucasArts, and Sony Computer Entertainment, will oversee the company's long-term technology strategy and market positioning, focusing on using AI and agentic workflows to empower creative teams rather than replace them. The Hyderabad-based studio, which has grown to over 140 developers and expects to exceed 200 by fiscal year-end, aims to help top-tier publishers deliver live-service games with compressed timelines and reduced operating costs through its proprietary platform anchored by the AI-enabled operating system Geoplay.

Become a member of GB MAX to gain exclusive access to the industry and to the most influential global B2B leadership community in the business of gaming, entertainment, and tech. Join now https://go.gamesbeat.com/gb-max/ and also get a VIP ticket to GamesBeat Next Nov 2-3, SF .Shortly after its $19.1 million funding round, Liquidnitro Games https://www.liquidnitro.games has hired former Tencent Game Global CTO Cedric Collomb as its new CTO. Collomb brings nearly three decades at the top of games and technology, most recently as CTO of Tencent Games Global and previously CTO of EA Mobile, with earlier leadership roles at AMD, Pearson, Kabam, LucasArts, and Sony Computer Entertainment. The old production math in gaming is broken, the company said. Bigger teams, larger budgets, familiar genres, and faster pipelines no longer guarantee a breakout. Players are more selective, communities are louder, and live games have to earn attention every single day. “I worked with Sandeep Kowdley, CEO of Liquidnitro Games and the team at EA, and they were able to take some projects that EA almost gave up on, and not only grow them. They grew them beyond all the wildest expectations, and they actually repeated this multiple times and so again the team was very impressive,” Collomb said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat. He added, “Sandeep contacted me and showed me some of the technologies and shared a lot of the thoughts that the team have been putting behind their technology and everything they are working on. I was really blown away. I think you have a lot of AI hype right now, and you have a lot of different things. But what I saw in what Sandeep showed me was really real in terms of taking a live service and really transforming the timelines, compressing the timelines, reducing the operating cost, growing the games, replicating and enhancing what the team had been doing at EA, but really taking it to the next level thanks to the power of AI.” Hyderabad, India-based Liquidnitro Games was built for that shift, empowering expert human teams with proprietary technology and agentic AI workflows that give developers the leverage to attempt bolder ideas and deliver player experiences worth returning to. The hiring comes directly off Liquidnitro’s $19.1 million Series A, which brings total funding to $24.3 million. In two years the company has grown past 140 developers and experts and expects to close the fiscal year above 200. Collomb takes ownership of Liquidnitro’s long-term technology strategy and market positioning, with a clear vision: use AI and emerging technologies to amplify what creative teams can do, rather than replacing them. That distinction matters right now. Publishers face rising costs, expanding timelines, fragmenting global markets, and relentless pressure to run live services with precision, while the market floods with AI tools promising cheap, automated game production and business intelligence. Liquidnitro is betting on the opposite thesis. AI should empower development teams to reach further creatively, sharpen product decisions, and improve execution, all without stripping out the emotional depth that makes players care. Liquidnitro exists to be the ultimate games partner for top-tier global publishers on mid-to-large-scale titles, across three core capabilities: zero-to-one production, end-to-end live services, and expansion into high-growth regions including India, the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. The company combines a deep understanding of games, players, and market dynamics with a model built on accountability, committing to measurable outcomes by owning both strategy and execution, unlike typical service providers. The technology behind that promise is a proprietary platform built over the past two years, anchored by Geoplay, its AI-enabled agentic operating system, alongside Nitro Forge, Nitro Brain, and Nitro Blocks. Together they fuse creative craft, live services expertise, and player intelligence into a self-learning system that sharpens decisions from first build through launch, live operations, and market expansion. “Cedrick’s experience, strategic vision, and deep understanding of where our industry is headed will be a tremendous unlock for Liquidnitro,” said Kowdley. “Our ambition has always been to build one of the world’s leading games companies, and the companies that define the future of this industry will be powered by exceptional technology and platforms. Over the last two years we’ve invested heavily in a proprietary technology ecosystem anchored by our AI-based agentic operating platform. Cedrick will play a pivotal role in leading that strategy and making sure our technology helps teams build better games, unlock greater creativity, and deliver player experiences that resonate.” “I’m excited to join such an accomplished team, including dear former colleagues from EA,” said Collomb. “Liquidnitro is a rare company where leadership genuinely understands that technology is a multiplier for game development. The team has identified real, endemic challenges facing the industry and built AI solutions that scale its combined experience and deep expertise. I strongly believe Liquidnitro’s approach will transform the entire game lifecycle from creation, launch to scale and enable a new value equation for the industry.” Liquidnitro’s position is that the next generation of winning games will depend less on raw production scale and more on how fast teams can read player signals, make the right creative and product calls, and keep improving player experiences long after launch. That is decisive as global publishers chase the next billion players across fast-growing markets, where success turns on cultural understanding, live services discipline, and moving quickly without sacrificing quality. With Collomb as CTO, Liquidnitro will double down investments on its platform, with particular focus on Geoplay and deeper integration of agentic AI workflows empowering expert teams. The goal is to make game production, live services, and global expansion more predictable and profitable at scale, while giving teams more latitude to do ambitious creative work. Kowdley said Liquidnitro was founded to serve as the ultimate games partner: one capable of transforming raw ideas and established IPs into breakout global hits. What makes the business model distinctive is the accountability, he said. The team commits to KPI outcomes and combines expert human teams with a proprietary tech ecosystem to deliver them. Traditional game production and live operations are notoriously unpredictable, expensive, and difficult to scale across culturally diverse regions. The legacy approach relies heavily on generic headcount scaling or pure volume outsourcing, which fails to bridge the gap between a publisher’s high-level business goals and ground-level execution. Liquidnitro takes full ownership of the pipeline instead, and de-risks the process with continuous player validation so that outcomes are met predictably. The company expects to finish the year with more than 200 employees. Rivals include broader gaming services players like Keywords Studios, Globant, and Virtuos. However, an exact apples-to-apples comparison does not exist because Liquidnitro is highly specialized. While large development and art outsourcing firms focus on executing pure volume tasks, Liquidnitro acts as a strategic growth partner and it focuses exclusively on high-stakes, cross-discipline missions for top-tier global publishers, and we are measured on business outcomes rather than delivered volume. Liquidnitro will continue to scale and iterate on its proprietary tech platform, with particular focus on Geoplay, its AI enabled agentic operating platform. The goal is to integrate agentic AI workflows more deeply alongside human teams, expand what those teams can attempt creatively, and make live operations and culturalization across emerging global markets predictable and profitable at scale. Kowdley said Liquidnitro’s goal is to partner with the top game publishers and the company is in conversation with some of those firms now. “We are different from others because we take on very specialized mandates,” Kowdley said. “We are engage with games that are sizable and with large games, and we stay focused on the difficult parts of what publishers are trying to solve. We basically translate business intent of large publishers into strategy, execution, and deliver on outcomes.” The team deals with games that are declining and need to restore growth and support a larger audience. The aim is to preserve core KPIs and deliver the growth. “Cedric coming on board is a huge unlock because a significant amount of technology investments we’ve been making for the last couple of years are really pointed towards how do we expand creativity of game development to build player experiences which are far more immersive,” he said. The aim is not just cutting costs but maximizing creativity. And part of the mission is to take older games and restore them to growth, Kowdley said. “Our technology allows us to really have games of different shapes and sizes, with sort of agentic teams working and operating, finding unlocks, and of course our philosophy in using AI technology has always been right from the get-go. How do you really empower expert game dev teams to operate at unprecedented leverage and breadth and depth of understanding of their players,” Kowdley said. He said the team also finds new audiences for games in places like India, the Middle East and Asia where markets are growing faster. Collomb said, “Every publisher wants to extract more value of everything they have. Very often, they’re not very efficient at doing it. Sometimes it’s an opportunity cost, and here there is the combination of the team experience and the technology that together will really unlock better results.” I noted that gamers and game developers have shown resistance to AI. I asked how Liquidnitro deals with that reaction from developers. Kowdley said, “There is really flexibility on where you apply the benefits of AI, and it’s really built with a mindset of not replacing and not trying to do everything. It’s really to augment the humans. So we’re not trying to replace humans. We are really trying to augment, and really the the technology and the platform is really flexible to adapt depending on the publishers’ tolerance to where you apply the AI and how you apply the AI to really either get faster deliveries or higher quality deliverables, or you get to faster to the fun.” Kowdley added, “We don’t broadcast that we’re working with some of the publishers. We’ve been quiet about it and generally that’s our style. We go from zero to one on game production or scale games from one to 100. We have tech which really gives us that unmatched leverage. So what we’ve done, in terms of positioning, is work with the biggest of publishers.” The team has typically worked with games that are $25 million to $50 million in revenue size, managing all of their live services and hitting their business goals with scale and efficiency. Liquidnitro has invested in the last couple of years into agentic teams, game metrics and what players are looking for, Kowdley said. And the team has focused on working with PC and console games for large publishers to bring new intellectual properties to life, starting with prototyping and finding the fun before greenlighting. I asked about whether there was that much new IP being created at big companies, considering the layoffs at Microsoft that have focused on core IPs. “The short-term view of a lot of people is how do you really drive efficiencies and optimize the shape of your business and recompose themes for the future,” Kowdley said. “We’ve always seen technology come and disrupt in various different ways in the past, and it’s always pushed what player experiences end up looking like. Higher fidelity and visuals, and today with AI, we’re talking about life-like virtual experiences. Every playthrough is going to look very different, and your actions define storylines, which can come in various different ways.” He added, “There’s so many things we can do with new technology, and we feel that’s going to happen down the line. But short term, I feel publishers are going to be sitting on the side of let’s optimize and find new ways of partnering with external developers to help as the industry sort of settles down. Even when you look at AI and technology, you’re seeing very very rapid advances changing today. If I greenlight a game and commit $30 million to producing the game, maybe three months down the line, the $30 million starts to look at like $20 million. So what do you do?” Collomb said the goal is to operate with a startup mindset, even at bigger companies. For him, going to a startup is not a big change. “Here, the idea is how can we move fast and how can we really try things that bigger companies would not dare try. And the the technology the team is building is really groundbreaking. And you see, maybe some of the Western publishers might have been afraid to develop that kind of that technology because of the perceptions and the stigma related to AI. I think Tencent, that my previous company, might have been more more open to AI, and I think they are pushing a lot. But I think this is the what really makes me excited here. There’s a team that is really already working on it. I’m joining and I’m adding to that. But it’s really the potential of what the solution will be able to do is really what makes me excited, regardless of the size of the company.” The discussions get harder when it comes around to replacing people, and so the tech solutions focus on productivity boosts in the development process. “Our objective, at the end of the day, we all have been in the games industry for a long, long time. And the reason is because we love the industry so much, and we are in the job of creating amazing, unforgettable player experiences,” Kowdley said. “These are human emotions we are curating and crafting, and they cannot be short circuited just by having problems and having AI make those decisions. That’s why, whether it’s technology and platforms assisting developers, we are always building our technology with a philosophy of maximizing people’s creativity and nudging them to think and bring in their ideas. The philosophy behind all of our technology investments has always built with the lens of how do you really get people to be motivated, how do you get people to build more deeper, richer experiences.”