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Journal · Notes from the archive

Notes from the archive.

← All postsMarket · Oct 2026

The missing environment

We read the sites of twenty-eight data and environment vendors. None sells a real game world.

The market for training data has moved from labels to worlds. Almost every vendor we read now leads with environments: a task, a sandbox, a way to check the result and a reward. Some rent experts by the hour, some record how experts work, some build replicas of offices, codebases and trading desks, and a few own a vertical such as biology or markets.

Games barely appear. One vendor has models play a puzzle game through text. One tests planning under a speedrun clock. One asks agents to write a console emulator. An open framework ships a strategy-game plugin. Nobody offers what a game studio actually has: live worlds with real rules, real opponents and millions of people who already played them.

That matters because games stress exactly what agents still get wrong. Long horizons, where a decision at minute two decides the outcome at minute ten. Many agents at once, some cooperating and some not. Real-time pressure. Outcomes that arrive late and noisily. A replica can approximate those things. A production game server is them.

So that is what we sell. Environments that run on the rules players had, graded by the server rather than a model, with human score distributions from people who chose to play. And alongside them, the studio that built those games: the tickets, code and patches, linked to what happened next.

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