Case study · Sep 28, 2026
LivePlay's avatar hosts earn 2x the revenue of unhosted games
LivePlay chose LemonSlice to power real-time avatar hosts. Avatars now run for more hours each day than human hosts.
“If we didn't have LemonSlice, we probably would not have launched avatars yet. Nothing else was good enough.”
Geremie Camara · Co-Founder & Chief Experience Officer, LivePlayCompany: LivePlay
Industry: Mobile & web games
Use case: Live-streaming entertainment
2x
revenue*
+50%
retention*
75 hrs
per day of avatar shows
* compared to unhosted games
The Problem
LivePlay is the global leader in live-hosted game show entertainment, featured in Wheel of Fortune and Forbes. They develop online social games and broadcasts them with live human hosts. When there's no host, every game metric drops: revenue, session length, engagement. But finding great game hosts is hard. Of every 100 applicants to LivePlay, about 10 get an audition, 2 can do the job, and 1 is great.
Plus, it's challenging to scale human operations. Great hosts don't necessarily want to perform at 3am. A late-night game room with only two players can be demoralizing. And new show concepts or local-language shows are difficult to spin up and down quickly when you need to hire and fire real humans.
Avatars don't have these problems. They present just as well at 3am as 7pm; they don't care whether there are 2 players watching or 2000; and they can switch from English to French at the click of a button. For these reasons, LivePlay wanted to build AI avatar hosts as a tool for their business. They spent 5 months evaluating 6 different providers, but none were good enough. They had nearly given up on the idea, but then LemonSlice came into the picture.
“We paused our avatar search for a few months because we couldn't find an avatar provider at the quality level we needed. Then we found LemonSlice.”
Geremie Camara · LivePlay
The Solution
LivePlay built AI avatar hosts for its game shows using LemonSlice's avatar technology. Each avatar host reads live game data and player chat, then responds in real time: calling out wins, commiserating on losses, and triggering on-screen effects.
LivePlay chose LemonSlice because its avatars felt natural and charismatic. It was the only provider with hand gestures and whole-body actions, and LivePlay could train the avatars to mimic the body language of its best human hosts.
“You wouldn't greenlight a production until you found your lead actor. When we saw LemonSlice, we knew we had our 'lead actor.'”
Additional tools in the stack include Agora's Conversational AI Engine for orchestration and multiple TTS providers for voice.
LivePlay built the equivalent of a producer's control room, with knobs for everything from the host's tone and pitch, to response frequency, to their appearance and body language. LivePlay can now launch hosts for new customers and games in hours instead of weeks.
Avatar hosts let LivePlay sell games to more B2B customers more quickly, since new concepts and game rooms can be spun up within one day rather than requiring weeks or months of human casting and setting up studio operations.
LivePlay built an “AI producer’s control room”, with knobs for everything from the host’s pitch, to response frequency and body language.
Slide 1 of 3Why LemonSlice?
01
Live, real-time streaming for hours
Many video models look great if they get 5 minutes to render a 10 second clip. LemonSlice avatars look great in real time, with no drift, even hours into a stream. “It looked so good live, which is really, really, really hard.”
02
The avatars are natural and charismatic
LemonSlice has expressive avatars that hold attention. “The LemonSlice model does the hand gestures you would expect incredibly well, but it’s more than hand gestures. It’s the way the earrings on a female host move when she talks. It’s how dynamic hair is. Everything just flows.”
03
LemonSlice improves fast
“I am blown away, literally on a weekly basis, at how fast LemonSlice is moving,” Geremie says. He shares an idea with the LemonSlice team and it comes back the next day. He calls working with LemonSlice “a builder’s paradise.”
“We immediately recognized that LemonSlice avatars were far better than the market because of their low latency and expressivity.”
Geremie Camara · Co-Founder & Chief Experience Officer, LivePlayThe Results
01
2x revenue
Avatar-hosted hours earn about twice the revenue of comparable unhosted hours.
02
50% higher retention than unhosted games
Every single metric is up, from session length and engagement to D7 retention and more.
03
Avatar hours surpassed human hours
Within 6 weeks of launch, LivePlay is streaming 75 hours a day of avatar-hosted shows vs. 45 human-hosted hours. It would have taken months to get that same capacity with human-hosted hours.
04
Shipped in days
It took LivePlay only a few days to go from gaining LemonSlice API access to shipping to real players.
05
Players get attached
When LivePlay tests a new avatar character, and then takes it away, players spend days asking about it in the comments. Players develop connections with avatar hosts like they do with human hosts.
Growing the pie: More humans and more avatars
LivePlay hasn't laid off any human hosts, and, in fact, it plans to hire a lot more.
Avatars fill in gaps that humans can't or don't want to, such as late nights, low-traffic rooms, and new markets (a local-language show in South Africa or Mexico, cast within 1 hour). The prime time slots still stay with human hosts. LivePlay sees avatars as a useful tool that builds the off-hours fan base, grows the business, and makes those primetime human shows stronger.
LivePlay's goal is 500 hours a day of live content within six months, which will mean about 5x more human hours than they have today.
“We have absolutely not replaced any human hours with avatar hours. And we don't intend to. Avatars are a tool that helps ‘grow the pie’ for human hosts and our overall business.”
Geremie Camara · Co-Founder & Chief Experience Officer, LivePlayWhat's next
LivePlay is scaling to 500 hours a day, expanding into international markets, and working with LemonSlice toward a “Turing test moment” for live avatar broadcasts.
“LemonSlice has this amazing character world model that keeps surprising us and not letting us down. I am blown away, literally on a weekly basis, at how fast LemonSlice is moving.”
Geremie Camara · Co-Founder & Chief Experience Officer, LivePlay
