In Brief:
- The Sandbox (official site) CEO Robby Yung said the company has spent almost three years building Sandbox Studio, an AI toolset aimed at professional developers, with a public launch provisionally planned for October.
- The tools are designed to automate debugging, testing, content updates and porting, not to generate games from prompts.
- It’s a break from the no-code Game Maker, which Yung said acted as a constraint on real game developers.
The Sandbox is rebuilding its creation tools around AI, and it isn’t aiming them at hobbyists. CEO Robby Yung said the new Sandbox Studio is built mainly for developers who already work in engines such as Unity and Unreal.
“The goal here is not to automate game creation. Because that’s how you get AI slop,” Yung said in a podcast interview, episode #213 of the Blockchain Gaming World series.
An LLM can create a demo that looks incredible. But it’s not a game: progression, monetization, multiplayer… the boring parts are what make it a real product.
Watch the full conversation with @viewfromhk CEO of The Sandbox, and @blockchaingmgThe SandboxView on X ↗
The company’s X account put the pitch another way. “An LLM can create a demo that looks incredible. But it’s not a game: progression, monetization, multiplayer… the boring parts are what make it a real product,” The Sandbox said.
Three years in, launch pencilled for October
Yung said The Sandbox has spent almost three years developing Sandbox Studio. It has run a series of controlled game jams, and a public launch is provisionally planned for October.
The toolset targets the repetitive work in production. That means debugging, testing, content updates and, above all, porting a single title to multiple platforms.
The current plan lets creators export projects to the web, Telegram, mobile app stores and Steam. Yung’s argument is that multiple platforms can multiply the revenue a single game earns.
Why Game Maker had to go
The shift moves the company away from its original no-code tools. VoxEdit and Game Maker made building accessible, but their simplicity capped what professional studios could make.
“If you were an actual game developer, then those tools actually acted as a constraint,” Yung said.
It also moves away from the founding idea that creators would build games mainly for The Sandbox’s own virtual world. The interview addressed whether The Sandbox can keep its brand if it drops its voxel art style.
Smaller studios
Yung said he expects the tools to let studios operate with far fewer people. He cited a conversation with Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of Fenris Creations, in suggesting that even serious game studios may soon have no reason to employ more than 30 people.
And at the small end, he said one- and two-person teams will use AI to produce games that once needed much larger organizations.
The episode also covered how Yung sees the past 12 months in blockchain games and how AI adoption changes both development and distribution.
Background
The rebuild follows a management reorganization at The Sandbox in the summer of 2025.
In September 2025, Yung published a vision statement placing the company at the intersection of AI, Web3 and mobile. The company said at the time it had more than 400 major brand partners, over 400,000 creators and more than 8 million users.
That statement said The Sandbox had begun training custom AI models for asset generation, drawing on a library of 1.7 million assets and hundreds of game templates. It also announced a partnership with Rosebud AI.
Yung said then that “the biggest challenge for creators very often occurs post-creation in the form of distribution, engagement, and monetization.” The first investment aimed at that problem was SANDchain, a cross-platform layer built by The SANDChain Foundation with support from The Sandbox.
“We have made significant progress in addressing this via our no-code creation tools (VoxEdit, Game Maker), but AI will revolutionize this space and we plan to lead the charge,” Yung said in that statement.
