Portal picks 20 creators for early access to Gen8

In Brief:

• Portal is selecting 20 creators for early access to Gen8, the engine it says is almost ready to launch.
• Those creators will build games alongside the team and shape Portal’s dev tools.
• Gen8 is the third product off the Portal 2.0 roadmap, following Studio (official site) and Nexus, which shipped in late July.

Portal is recruiting 20 creators for early access to Gen8, its integrated game engine, ahead of the product’s launch.

“We’re almost ready to launch our next product, Portal Gen8, and we need your help, the best community! We’re selecting 20 creators to get early access, create games alongside us, and directly shape the future of our dev tools,” the company said in a post on its X account.

The post sets out who qualifies, beginning with the line “If you have a game.” Portal didn’t state a deadline or a selection date in the opening of the announcement.

What Gen8 does

Portal describes Gen8 as a product where you describe a game and hand off orchestration to plan, build and iterate a playable experience. It sits at the shipping end of the company’s three-part stack.

Studio is the workspace. Creators prompt agents to generate characters, tiles and sprites, preview them before committing and drop them into a project. Studio also carries guided milestones for shipping a real game with agents in the loop, either by pushing builds to an outside engine or building on Gen8.

Nexus is the routing layer underneath. Portal shipped it in late July at nexus.portalgaming.com after teasing it since June under the working name GameRouter. It routes prompts to specialized models for code, sprites and audio behind a single API key and one credit balance covering 2D, 3D, voice, music and NPC tooling.

“Nexus is a unified API that powers your agents, assets, and pipelines across your entire game-dev stack,” Portal said in a June post.

On release, the company called it “one control panel to access trending creation models for your game dev workflows.”

One account works across all three products. Portal also supports keeping existing tools in place, connecting Claude Code, Cursor, Unity, Unreal or Godot so context is shared across agents and engines. A mid-June Studio update dropped the API key requirement for agents running on Portal inference.

Third of four

Portal teased on July 6 that another product would land a few weeks after Nexus, saying it already had the visual layer and the tools layer.

The company unveiled Portal 2.0 on April 18 and branded the moment “Day 1.” Four products were named then: Studio, GameRouter, GameGen for prompt-generated games and GameHub for monetization. GameRouter shipped as Nexus. GameHub hasn’t arrived.

For its first two years Portal ran as an interoperability and liquidity layer for web3 gaming. The 2.0 pivot aimed the company at AI-native tooling and creator-first workflows, pitched at non-developers as well as established studios.

Who’s running it

Benjamin Charbit is CEO. He took the role in December 2025, when Portal merged with BLIFE Protocol, and previously worked as a director at Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

The relaunch, announced Dec. 22, 2025, is backed by Animoca Brands Corporation Ltd, with ecosystem and strategic partner G-20. Animoca agreed to support it with new capital and introductions across its gaming portfolio.

The token side

Portal plans to use revenue from its AI tools to buy back PORTAL tokens on a regular basis. Holders are offered early access, advanced tool usage rights and voting rights.

The creators program attaches that early-access promise to a specific cohort and a specific product, with the 20 picks working directly on the tooling before it opens up.

PORTAL distributed 50 million tokens through Binance Launchpool in February 2024, against a total supply of 1 billion. It hit an all-time high of $3.36 on Feb. 29, 2024, and trades well below that.