How Latitude turned AI Dungeon into a platform

AI Dungeon came out of a hackathon in 2019. You typed what you wanted to do and the story came back written on the spot, which in 2019 almost nobody had seen before. It has since passed eight million downloads and holds over 1.5 million monthly active users.

Latitude, the company Nick Walton built around it, has been running AI-native games for seven years. Most of the industry started paying attention about two years ago.

What they actually solved

Generating text is the easy part now. Keeping a world coherent is not.

An AI game has to remember what happened four hours ago, keep characters behaving like themselves, stop the story collapsing into nonsense, and do all of it fast enough that a player does not sit watching a cursor. Latitude has been grinding at those problems since before there was a playbook. They also hire designers and worldbuilders to tune how the model behaves, which treats the writing as craft work and not only as engineering.

Treating the writing as a craft discipline in its own right is a choice, and it shows in the output.

Voyage

On 21 April 2026 Latitude opened Voyage in expanded beta.

Voyage moves the tool into the player's hands. You design a world, set the rules and the characters, and the AI runs it for whoever plays. During the beta players created more than 160,000 unique characters.

The business model is subscriptions, with tiers planned at $15, $30 and $50 for heavier use and more capable models. Latitude is cross-promoting into it from AI Dungeon's audience, which it spent seven years building.

The backing is serious: Google's AI Futures Fund, NFX, Griffin Gaming Partners, Album VC and Midjourney, with former Roblox chief business officer Craig Donato joining as an investor and board member.

Why we are writing this

We should say what we do before we go any further.

CyberScope is an incentives consultancy in Türkiye. We help software companies and game studios claim cash back from a Turkish government programme. So when we read about a company like Latitude, we look at the cost side of the business, because that is the side the programme pays for.

Under Decision No. 10962, Türkiye refunds a percentage of three costs: the commission the app stores take, money spent on marketing abroad, and hosting. For most game studios the store commission is the biggest of the three. For an AI-native company it is compute, and compute falls under hosting.

The United States refunds none of it.

The assumptions

Latitude has not shared any financial information with us, and none of what follows comes from them.

The figures below are ours. They describe a subscription business at roughly Latitude's scale, with the compute bill an AI-native product carries. If the real numbers are half of these, halve the results.

Those three lines cost $7.50M a year as things stand, and compute is the largest of them. At the programme's rates, 50 percent of hosting, 70 percent of advertising into a target country, and 50 percent of store commission, the same spending nets out at $3.35M.

Where the caps change the answer

For this company the choice of programme decides most of the outcome.

The standard programme caps hosting support at 5 million lira a year, about $105,000. For a studio running game servers that ceiling is comfortable. For a company whose main cost is model inference it is gone in the first month. The advertising and store commission caps run out too. Added up, the standard programme returns about $1.57M against $7.50M of spending.

The Branding Programme and its E-TURQUALITY track drop most of those per item caps and replace them with one ceiling of 500 million lira a year, roughly $10.5M for the whole company. On the same assumptions that returns $4.15M, which is about two and a half times the standard result, and the compute line is what makes the difference.

Entry to the Branding Programme needs an average of $1.5M a year in foreign revenue over three years, or $10M over two years for the fast track.

Figures use 47.7 lira to the dollar. Caps are revalued upward every year, so they grow with inflation.

What it would actually take

None of this happens by filing a form.

It needs a Turkish operating company doing real work in Türkiye: staff, a registered address, books, and invoices in the company's name. That is a structural decision about where part of the business sits, and it is a longer conversation than a blog post.

Ownership is not a factor. A company owned entirely by American shareholders claims on exactly the same terms as a Turkish one. The programme exists to grow Türkiye's service exports and is indifferent to who owns the exporter.

We have written about what the Branding Programme pays and how hosting and cloud costs are claimed.

To the team at Latitude

You were building AI games years before the rest of the industry arrived, and Voyage is the clearest statement yet of what you learned doing it. The compute bill that comes with running it is the one line the Turkish programme treats as an export cost worth subsidising.

We would like to run the model on your real numbers instead of our guesses. It takes about 20 minutes, we will show you the working, and you will get a figure you can take to your board. Book a call and we will put it together.