The developers at Haven Studios, one of Sony PlayStation’s newest video game teams, aren't just making a game — they’re trying to craft a better way to make games by moving development into the cloud.

Why it matters: Game development — which combines programming, animation, interactive design, art, writing, sound and more — is such a notoriously complex process that creators often joke it’s a miracle any games get made.

• Haven's goal: A server-based approach allowing for more collaboration, faster iteration and simultaneous work by multiple developers on specific parts of games.

What they’re saying: Think of it as a game development take on Google Docs, “but it's not a document, it's a level in your game,” PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny told Axios near Haven HQ in Montreal last week.

• Haven's vision, he explained, would replace the status quo of developers needing to huddle around a monitor to compare notes or check their progress.
• Instead, games would be built on cloud servers, with changes visible to all collaborators in real time. "The level designer is modifying it at her computer and everybody who is play-testing it is seeing those changes," Cerny said.

Between the lines: Haven's tech isn't there yet, but the studio has been working on a cloud-based approach since it was founded last year by veterans from Ubisoft, EA and a team making games for Google's recently shuttered Stadia platform.

• Starting in the midst of a pandemic, the Haven team had no office and no easy means to build a new dream game together.
• "We had kind of a very big necessity to innovate," co-founder Jade Raymond told Axios in Montreal.
• More than 30% of Haven's 115 or so developers are now working on cloud-based development tools, artificial intelligence and machine learning, with an eye toward streamlining development, Raymond said.

Details: Haven’s approach so far involves putting development tools in the cloud, making new builds of its game available remotely and running cloud-based telemetry checks that analyze performance during every play test.

• Haven developers are also exploring how AI and machine learning can help create game graphics. Noting recent advances in AI-generated art that create crude visuals out of simple text prompts, staffers are testing if AI can produce rough versions of character concepts that an artist can refine.

The target of Haven’s efforts? Slowdowns baked into modern game development that can impede creativity.

• Cerny, who just celebrated his 40th year making games, believes cumbersome development processes hurt game quality. "The game ends up not being your best ideas, or it ends up being your ideas but they're not in the best possible form, because it's that really fast iteration that lets you polish it and get it into place.”

What’s next: Haven execs hope to get close to that Google Docs ideal in the coming years as they develop their first game while also fleshing out their development process.

• "There are some innovations that are interesting for us, but we ultimately aren't going to spend all of our time dreaming and staring at the sky if it doesn't deliver a great game," Raymond said.

Meta’s VR gaming plans will remain focused on its growing Quest market, even as it introduces a new Quest Pro VR headset.

Why it matters: Meta has found a tech standard for gaming in 2020 that it thinks works and is sticking with it, despite releasing more powerful headsets before and since.

• To that end, the new Quest Pro headset will run the same game store and list the same games as its current main VR offering, 2020’s Quest 2.
• That headset was weaker than earlier Oculus VR headsets from Meta/Facebook but more popular because it did not need to be plugged into a powerful PC.

What they're saying: “All the customer interest is on Quest,” Chris Pruett, Meta’s director of content for VR, told Axios.

• By extension, he added, that's where it's good for developers to be.
• “For me, the main goal is that our ecosystem is a healthy one, which means you don't need to be the next Minecraft or something to make a profit,” he said.
• “You can grow your business and make a profit or make the next game or make the next game after that with a mid-tier success on our platform.”

Numbers: Meta is promoting Quest 2’s gaming market as a success, hyping $50 million generated by The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners on the Meta Quest headset.

• The company says a VR version of Resident Evil 4 generated more than $2 million in its first 24 hours of release.
• And it notes that $1.5 billion has been spent on games and apps in the Quest store.
• Yes, but Meta does not share adoption numbers for its headset and doesn’t release player stats.

Meta’s investment in gaming is increasing. It is expanding its first-party studios, with the acquisition of Camouflaj, Twisted Pixel and Armature, the last of which is a veteran studio formed by the lead creators of Nintendo’s Metroid Prime games.

• Camouflaj’s most recent game, Iron Man VR, will come to Quest. The game was formerly a PlayStation VR exclusive.
• Other titles ahead include: Among Us VR and a sandbox mode for Population One.
• It's also promising to support Xbox Cloud Gaming through the Quest headset.
• Pruett, who focuses on working with third-party developers, says Meta is funding more than 100 upcoming games and is striving to ensure there are multiple new game releases for the Quest store each week.

🤔 Valve released a hype trailer for Steam Deck that included a glimpse of a Switch emulator installed on the hardware — then quickly edited it out.

✔️️️️ EA's PC gaming marketplace Origin has been retired in favor of the EA App.

💰 Microsoft generated $2.9 billion in revenue from Xbox Game Pass last year, according to Brazilian regulatory filings, as spotted by Tweaktown.

💰 Xbox paid $2.5 million to get Ark Survival Evolved on Game Pass, while Sony paid $3.5 to feature it as a giveaway for PlayStation Plus subscribers earlier this year, according to an SEC filing,

📱 Activision Blizzard will require players of its October mega-release Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to have a working cellphone number that's not tied to a pre-paid plan, according to a company support post.

• The measure, meant to curb cheating in multiplayer games, has already been rolled back for many players of its recently released Overwatch 2.

😲 Indie studio Whitehorn Games is calling for pay transparency across the field. In a report today, it published its CEO’s salary ($75k) and the average workers’ salary ($51k).

New BMW vehicles will be able run video games next year, via a third-party gaming platform called AirConsole.

• Games will run on the curved display adjacent to the drivers’ dashboard, and passengers’ cellphones can be used as controllers.
• Titles include sports, racing and cooking games.

Safety first: The games will not play once the vehicle is in motion, a rep for BMW tells Axios.

Between the lines: People have been playing games in cars at least since the Game Boy let kids thumb-tap their way through Pokémon back in the 1990s.

• But it’s become a built-in feature of cars more recently.
• Tesla cars have run games from a screen near the driver for a few years. After the New York Times noted in December that drivers could play them while driving, Tesla restricted them to playing while stopped.