The Final Boss Every month an industry leader wraps up MCV/DEVELOP with their unique insight
Natalie Jones Global Brand Marketing Director, Keywords Studios
For anyone who thinks they don’t know Keywords Studios… Well, you might think you don’t know Keywords Studios, but you’ll almost certainly know our work. We partner with some incredible teams in the games industry who need external support. We work on some of the biggest IP across the full game dev lifecycle: co- development, art production, localisation, marketing, QA, engineering, and player support.
If you’ve played a game in the last twenty years… there’s a very good chance Keywords Studios have been part of it.
How did you first get involved with Keywords Studios? I joined almost three years ago, just as Liz Corless, Head of scale and strength of Keywords Studios. My role has broadened to include PR, events and positioning our services transparently: ensuring a clear, consistent overarching brand story. I’m working on shifting perception, moving away from the “outsourcer/provider” label and towards what we actually are: a strategic, creative & tech-enabled partner across the full game lifecycle.
In a space where everyone is being super-defensive about the use of AI, you make it very clear you use AI “like a junior teammate”. Can you elaborate on that? I think the “junior teammate” framing is about being practical. accountable, so it needs direction. You might use it to speed up parts of the workflow for instance, such as with repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Things traditionally delegated to junior staff that aren’t always the best tasks for them to be doing for actually learning the role.
54 | MCV/DEVELOP May/June 2026
That keeps things grounded. It’s not about replacing where humans and AI work together and can evolve as the technology does. The thinking, judgment and accountability still sit with our team of experienced people.
You offer various services, but are you finding that as time passes your workload is weighting towards a specific demand? It’s a shift towards a connected and end-to-end demand. Clients want partners who can move across the lifecycle and not isolated transactional providers. scalability while maintaining quality, whether that’s co- development at scale, globalization, or more tech-enabled integration.
What’s your personal favourite project of late, and why? The most exciting work is usually the least shareable, as it’s usually still under wraps.
Something I can talk about is Keywords Studios incredible R&D strategy. Recently, we had an entire team at Electric Square, one of our co-dev studios, dedicated to an R&D Project called KARA. The project was a remaster of a game using AI-driven pipelines, assessing whether technologies could The team conducted extensive cross-studio research, encountering breakthroughs, challenges, and limitations. We’re then able to share these learnings with our partners and provide insight into the true potential of AI for game development.
What can we look forward to from you in 2026? A continued push to make it unmistakably clear what Keywords Studios is today. A talent and technology led partner. The level of talent, dedication and genuine passion across Keywords Studios is what sets us apart. When you spend time inside the business, you realise very quickly this isn’t a and exciting companies operating in the space today.
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