AI is redefining the productivity boundaries of game creation. At the 4th Creator Conference for "Egg Party" in 2026, new data was revealed: over 700 million registered users worldwide, monthly active users consistently exceeding 100 million, more than 50 million native UGC developers, and over 200 million user-generated maps published to date. The conference officially launched the industry’s first "Twin Star" editor system, deeply integrating large models such as DeepSeek V4 Pro and Kimi K2.7 Code into the entire creative workflow to address the three major challenges: learning curve, time investment, and idea realization. From July 2025 to July 2026, the platform distributed over RMB 200 million in creator incentives and rewards; top creators earned annual incomes in the millions, with single viral maps generating over RMB 5 million in revenue. "Egg Party" is evolving from a single content creation tool into a comprehensive development ecosystem spanning the entire creative lifecycle, exploring the ultimate form of UGC platforms in the AI era.Author and source: 36Kr Games
In 2026, a new business concept is attracting growing attention—OPC (One Person Company), also known as a "solo company." It refers to micro-teams of just one to three members who leverage digital tools such as artificial intelligence to deliver project work.
But few have noticed that in the gaming industry, this change has long had a natural foundation—UGC creation communities.
The widespread adoption of AI technology is continuously reshaping the boundaries of content creation productivity. Tasks that once required professional teams can now be accomplished by individual creators using accessible tools. This trend is particularly evident in the gaming UGC space: ordinary users are no longer just content consumers—they can also become developers of game mechanics.
However, past UGC creators mostly remained in an amateur phase of “creating out of passion,” limited by tool capabilities and monetization opportunities, making it difficult for them to grow into true micro-entrepreneurs. It wasn’t until AI’s deep integration that this ceiling began to loosen.
Last weekend, NetEase's "Egg Party" hosted its fourth Creator Conference, where it unveiled its achievements in the UGC ecosystem and officially launched the industry's first UGC editor system to simultaneously support frame synchronization and state synchronization—the "Gemini" editor system—while further enhancing AI capabilities across the entire content creation pipeline.
Compared to a simple tool upgrade, this adjustment is more like a restructuring of UGC infrastructure: by integrating AI capabilities with the editor system, "Egg Party" is exploring how to enable more ordinary creators to achieve game development capabilities approaching those of professional developers.
To some extent, this is also an early exploration by the gaming industry into the ultimate form of future UGC—when AI redefines game production, how will the next generation of AI-native UGC platforms emerge?
2026 Egg Party UGC Ecosystem Strategy Launch
AI is becoming the new infrastructure for UGC creation. Over the past two years, game companies have significantly increased their investment in UGC communities. In 2025, miHoYo launched the "Thousand Star Realm" feature in Genshin Impact, leveraging its massive user base to validate its concept and build a UGC ecosystem. In 2026, Xingdian Network introduced the AI-powered game creation tool "TapTap Maker," led personally by CEO Huang Yimeng. The product’s predecessor, "Spark Editor," once used "Everyone Can Make Games" as its slogan.
An industry consensus is forming: UGC is the key battleground for the next stage of competition.
Those who bet earlier have already crossed the river by feeling their way. NetEase’s “Egg Party” has almost perfectly captured the trends of UGC ecosystems and AI development.
The core team members of this product primarily came from NetEase’s earlier project, the “Beaver Project,” its first game editor. At that time, they accumulated extensive experience with editors and UGC ecosystems. When developing Egg Mania, they drew on their past expertise in editor development and chose to believe in the power of “talent among the people,” making UGC the cornerstone of future game development. The initial party gameplay was primarily a means to attract and grow their user base.
The subsequent success of the product also proves they chose the right path.
Within half a year of its launch, "Egg Party" surpassed the UGC customer acquisition tipping point and began explosive growth. Even now, four years later, it remains one of NetEase's highest DAU products. At the 2026 Global Digital Economy Conference, the official announced the game's latest achievements: over 700 million registered users worldwide, monthly active users consistently exceeding 100 million, more than 50 million native UGC creators, and over 200 million maps published cumulatively.
This scale of UGC is unmatched by almost any product domestically or globally.
But scale is just the foundation. What truly distinguishes Egg Party from traditional UGC platforms is its systematic integration of AI capabilities.
For a long time, UGC creation has faced a core contradiction: users have the desire to create content but lack the ability to turn their ideas into games.
In the past, even though editors significantly lowered the barrier to game development, creators still needed to master multiple aspects, including gameplay design, art asset creation, and logic implementation. Users capable of consistently producing high-quality content remained concentrated among those with some development experience.
Now, "Egg Party" has integrated cutting-edge large models such as DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM-5.2, and Kimi K2.7 Code into its editor, deeply embedding them throughout the entire creation workflow.
Source: Egg Party
These large AI models primarily address issues at three levels.
First is the "learning curve." The technical challenge in game development lies in the fact that most issues require case-by-case analysis. Moreover, there isn't always a universal solution to the same problem, which heavily tests the developer's coding skills and demands constant reference to numerous tutorials and documentation.
The purpose of an AI assistant is to help players resolve specific issues immediately. Even if it can't fully solve the problem, it can still help creators identify exactly where the issue lies.
According to data revealed at the Creator Conference, since its launch at the end of October 2025 through July 2026, the AI Q&A assistant has served 859,000 creators, generated 2.243 million conversations, assisted with 855,000 map edits, and averages tens of thousands of questions and editing actions daily.
Source: Egg Party
Second is the "time cost." Developing games often requires significant demands on programming and assets; individual developers or small teams aiming for higher-quality content frequently struggle to find the bandwidth to complete such a workload.
To address this issue, at the 2024 GDC conference, "Egg Party" proactively reached out to 3D generation algorithm company Yingmou Technology.
In September last year, the two parties officially partnered to integrate the 3D generation algorithm Rodin into "Egg Party," enabling immediate, large-scale application of 3D generation technology in a mobile environment.
Based on this AIGC 3D asset set, creators can obtain usable game assets through text descriptions without needing professional modeling skills. The official team has revealed that features highly requested by creators—such as 3-view model generation, automatic sub-model separation, and intelligent mesh optimization—are currently under development.
The third challenge is the greatest difficulty in game development: "difficulty in realizing ideas." To achieve this, AI must understand the creator’s intent and fully learn all the code.
Piggy Party already features a visual programming system called "PiggyCode," which uses simple textual logic to display code, ensuring creators can start making gameplay with zero barriers to entry.
Source: Egg Party
On this foundation, they later introduced Lua scripts. Compared to other programming languages, Lua scripts are lighter, simpler, and easier to manage; compared to "EggCode," they support a higher upper limit for content editing. Combined with AI, developers with more advanced aspirations can seamlessly transition from "EggCode" to Lua scripts, ultimately enabling more complex and engaging game designs.
According to statistics, the development assistant has generated a total of 377,000 lines of code during its beta testing period.
The stacking of three layers of capabilities has transformed AI’s role within the Dandan ecosystem. It is no longer just an auxiliary feature outside the editor, but a foundational infrastructure covering the entire creative workflow. When AI takes over the most time-consuming and expertise-dependent foundational steps, the proportion of creativity from ordinary users surges dramatically.
In the ideal scenario, as Baozi, head of the UGC business for "Egg Party," said at the 2026 Global Digital Economy Conference, “Users can create assets just by speaking a sentence, and even those who don’t know how to code can create games that can be launched and played online.”
AI is changing not only tool efficiency but also how creators participate in game production.
Releasing the boundaries of creators in the AI era: Interestingly, as AI gradually lowers the barrier to creation, the team behind Egg Party began to ponder another question:
As more players gain development capabilities, can existing UGC tools continue to meet their growing creative demands?
At this year's Creator Conference, Daxiangzi, the lead technical officer of "Egg Party," revealed that the team's own AI usage increased more than tenfold in the first half of 2026. When digital employees can handle certain tasks, the team naturally gains the capacity to explore deeper issues.
For example, when AI enables more players to become creators and enhances the creative capabilities of existing users, whose needs should the platform prioritize more?
Producer Kwan of "Egg Party" mentioned that through ongoing communication with creators and players, the team has sensed an increasingly strong signal: what people want to create is surpassing the boundaries of existing tools. Concepts such as more open worlds, enhanced social interactions, deeper gameplay, and long-term operations face real bottlenecks within the current editor’s capabilities. However, expanding the editor’s functionality might make it less user-friendly for lighter users.
After much consideration, the team behind Egg Party decided on the answer: "I want it all."
At this Creator Conference, they officially unveiled the industry's first "Twin Star" editor system: the original frame-synchronized editor has been renamed the "Egg仔 Origin Editor," and a brand-new state-synchronized editor, the "Egg仔 World Editor," has been launched.
Source: Egg Party
According to the official explanation, the two editors address different problems. Previously, some creators might have had to use a rice cooker to bake a cake; now, the rice cooker is still there, but they’ve specifically provided everyone with an oven.
Among them, the Origin Editor is essentially the classic editor, designed for low entry barriers. It uses a frame-synchronization approach, allowing creators to build maps simply by dragging and dropping visual "Danma" modules without handling synchronization logic. It supports seamless interoperability between mobile and PC platforms, with the mobile version lowering the psychological and technical barriers to first-time creation, while the PC version preserves professional-grade productivity tools for advanced creators.
The Origin Editor supports six categories—combat, racing, role-playing, simulation, casual, and puzzle—and has generated over 200 million maps.
However, the Origin Editor has a limitation: due to its frame-synchronization mechanism requiring all players to start simultaneously, it struggles to support drop-in/drop-out gameplay.
This means creators cannot develop game types that require players to freely enter and exit and save their progress individually—such as open-world, large-world, or MMORPG games—since it wouldn’t make sense for players to be kicked out after waiting through a countdown like stopping at a traffic light.
Source: Egg Party
The World Editor aims to fill this gap. Using state synchronization technology, it supports chunked loading and ultra-large maps, allowing players to join and leave seamlessly. Creators can use it to explore more complex game formats such as open worlds, RPGs, and long-term operational games.
In other words, if the Origin Editor is crudely understood as a MOD development tool and manager, then the World Editor is firmly moving toward a game engine, making the realization of a true "One Person Game" in the future far from impossible.
Two editors form a cohesive growth path: new creators start with the Origin Editor to gain experience, and as their skills improve, they can seamlessly transition to the World Editor for advanced development. The platform thus evolves from a single content creation tool into a comprehensive development system covering the entire creative lifecycle.
This precisely hits the core challenge of UGC platforms in the AI era. Previously, the core logic of UGC was a simple cycle of “players create content, users consume content”; as AI lowers technical barriers, creators’ demands for gameplay depth, content scale, and commercial potential rise simultaneously—platforms must therefore upgrade their technological foundation accordingly, or they will ultimately become a bottleneck for creativity.
In addition to the World Editor, "Egg Party" has also begun gradually releasing other accumulated tools. Previously, players could only use the editor’s built-in asset library, which limited their creative styles. After opening up custom model uploads, creators can now import their own 3D models and are no longer confined to any existing "templates."
The introduction of the effects editor gives creators greater control over visual expression. The PC editor, Eggitor, also supports detailed editing features such as terrain and effects.
Source: Egg Party
The introduction of these systematic development tools by "Egg Party" may also signify that competition in the UGC ecosystem has officially entered a new phase. Now, UGC competition is no longer just about raw content volume and reach, nor is it focused on creating more flashy content to attract users; instead, it emphasizes the cultivation and reinforcement of comprehensive capabilities such as creation tools, technological infrastructure, and entrepreneur incubation.
In other words, "Egg Party" is evolving into a streamlined "gaming integration platform."
The ultimate validation of the long-term value of the UGC ecosystem: At this point, many may wonder—why did "Egg Party" become the first to lead in AI-powered game creation? Was it simply because they got started earlier?
Not necessarily.
The real confidence behind enabling AI creation and dual editors in "Egg Party" comes from four years of building a complete UGC commercialization ecosystem.
"Ball Pit Party" had long moved beyond its early UGC phase driven purely by passion, even enabling creators to treat it as a full-time career. Kwan refers to the period from July 2025 to July 2026 as the "Year of Commercialization": during this year, the total incentives and revenue shares distributed to creators exceeded 200 million yuan.
Source: Egg Party
Designed with extensive creative freedom, creators can configure a variety of business models—including direct sales, BP manuals, lotteries, and advertisements—through map design, and even establish monthly subscriptions for “members” and “fan club” status. Each of the platform’s past viral maps, such as “Shining Stella,” “Tower Climbing Simulator,” “Survive in the Forest for 99 Days,” and “Eat Pills to Grow Stronger!,” has broken previous UGC monetization records.
Source: Egg Party
If creators prefer not to implement an in-app purchase system, there are two alternative monetization methods: in-game advertising and park sponsorships (player tips). According to statistics, the park accumulated over 5 billion ad impressions last year alone.
These three models essentially cover all types of game monetization methods available on the market—such as in-app purchases for mobile games, ad-based revenue for casual games, and tips for indie games—making them more like a microcosm of the gaming industry.
On this basis, "Egg Party" has introduced a new revenue-sharing policy with higher commission rates. The revenue share for in-app purchases remains unchanged at 70% after deducting channel costs and player refunds, while the channel commission rates for other revenue streams (ads, tips) have been correspondingly reduced to further benefit creators.
Of course, the most direct indicator is how much creators have earned—according to official statistics, top creators can earn up to tens of millions of yuan annually, while mid- and lower-tier creators earn over 100,000 yuan per year, with a single popular map generating stable revenues exceeding 5 million yuan.
The 4th Creator Conference for Egg Party
Taking a creator from a university in Wuhan as an example, he was an undergraduate student who initially created maps solely to build a practice space for improving his gaming skills. He later discovered that many players enjoyed his map. Since then, he has gradually begun designing various maps and gameplay modes.
His series has accumulated over 15 million plays, with annual revenue now reaching hundreds of thousands.
This is not an isolated case among university students; some have already earned their first fortune through "Egg Party," and after graduation, they founded studios to pursue UGC development. For example, a creator from a university in Yichang established a studio and now generates annual revenue exceeding one million yuan; a creator from a university in Chongqing has also founded a studio, achieving annual revenue of over 1.5 million yuan.
At "Egg Party," one-person companies that once surprised the industry seem to be everywhere.
Reviewing the development path of "Egg Party," one can clearly see the core narrative centered around the UGC ecosystem.
In this ecosystem, creators design content, receive feedback, and earn rewards, enabling them to develop even more engaging maps; the platform attracts and retains users, who then become creators, and in turn, these creators continuously expand the product’s boundaries and content. Based on its UGC ecosystem, "Egg Party" has established a self-sustaining positive cycle for nurturing "one-person companies," completing a closed loop.
When AI makes creation no longer the exclusive domain of a few, we can no longer view "Egg Party" merely as a product—but, as Baozi, Head of UGC Operations for Egg Party, says, "Egg Party isn't managing UGC; it's co-building an independent content entrepreneurship market with creators."
The future is here