How AI Is Changing the Way We Play Games Online in 2026

For decades, the headline job for artificial intelligence in games was beating the human across the board. Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton took that job to its logical end in two games. Their computers had worked on checkers almost continuously since 1989 when, in 2007, the team behind the program Chinook proved that the game ends in a draw if neither side makes a mistake. In 2015 the university’s Cepheus essentially solved heads-up limit Texas hold’em, and in matches played late in 2016, DeepStack beat professional players at the no-limit version.

Those programs were opponents. The AI running through online play in 2026 has other work: it helps decide which games a store puts in front of you, gives characters voices and legs, generates frames the game itself never rendered and watches matches for cheaters. Each of those jobs moves some of the choosing that players, designers and referees used to do over to a trained model. Online casino games keep one decision with the operator, which settles the slots a bonus spin can be played on before a player ever sees the offer.

The store has already guessed

Steam shows the scale of the problem. A count built on Steam’s own data put the store at about 114,000 titles by July 2025, more than 20,000 of them added in the previous year alone, which is far more than anyone could browse. One of Valve’s answers began as a 2019 Steam Labs experiment that looked at how much a player had played each game in their library and used machine learning to suggest others. Valve introduced the finished Interactive Recommender in 2020 as an addition to the ways Steam already recommended games, not a replacement for them.

The model behind it, Valve explained, was trained on the playtime histories of millions of Steam users and was not directly affected by tags or reviews. It learns what a game is from the people who play it. If players with habits similar to yours play a game you have never tried, the recommender treats that as a sign you will enjoy it too.

For the player, every hour played becomes an input. The shortlist arrives pre-sorted by strangers’ playtime, and the controls sit at the edges: the Labs version let users lean toward popular or niche picks and narrow the results by release date and tags. Two people with different libraries can open the same page and get different lists, which is the point.

Characters that talk, walk and decide

Fortnite’s Darth Vader made an early and very public test case. On May 16, 2025, Epic added an AI Vader who talked back to players, built with the Jones family’s permission.

The update went live at 7 a.m. Eastern. By 8:30 a.m. a clip of Vader repeating a streamer’s swear words back at her was circulating, and Epic pushed a hotfix the same day. Epic later told Business Insider its filters had missed “a specific variation of an expletive”, and that a player who kept trying to make Vader break its rules would lose him from the team for the rest of the session.

Another studio put machine learning into how its characters move. ARC Raiders, which won Best Multiplayer at The Game Awards 2025, uses reinforcement learning to teach its legged robots to walk and find their way around its maps.

Players had come to suspect the machines were learning from them. In February 2026, design director Virgil Watkins told PC Gamer that the learning stops at movement and that behaviour and attacks are designed by hand: “That’s just us in the way we author them”.

PUBG Ally went further and let the model decide. Krafton’s AI teammate for PUBG: Battlegrounds adjusted its play to the orders it was given and to what was happening around it, without waiting for a fresh prompt at each step, and all of it ran on the player’s own PC rather than on a remote server. The table sets Vader and PUBG Ally beside Smart Zoi, an AI option in Krafton’s life simulator inZOI:

Bonus spins come with the game already chosen

Online casino games have an offer that turns the recommender’s logic around: the spins bonus. A store’s model starts from what you have played, while a spins offer starts from games the operator has already chosen. Slot maker Pragmatic Play, for one, offers operators a promotions tool that lets them set the number of spins, the games, the bet level and the audience for a campaign.

That makes the game the first detail to look for in any spins offer, ahead of the headline count. Some offers let the spins run on any slot, others tie every one to a single title or a short list, and the pairing differs from one casino to the next. Offers also come and go, so any list of which slot goes with which casino dates quickly.

BonusFinder Canada’s page on casino extra 25 free spins keeps one, though what it shows depends on whether a reader visits from Ontario. For readers outside Ontario, many of its listings name the slot the spins are tied to, most carry a wagering figure in their details panel, and the list mixes 25-spin deals with smaller and much larger bundles.

By the site’s own account, Ontario’s rules stop it promoting casino bonuses there, and visitors from that province are shown licensed casinos alone, picked for qualities such as how quickly they pay out and how many games they carry, with no offers attached.

Frames the game never rendered

When Nvidia released DLSS 4 for its GeForce RTX 50 Series cards on January 30, 2025, its Multi Frame Generation could add up to three generated frames for every frame the game rendered. At the end of March 2026, DLSS 4.5 raised that ceiling to five generated frames for every rendered one, a 6X mode Nvidia credits partly to its second-generation transformer model. A Dynamic mode released alongside it shifts between multipliers on its own to push the frame rate toward the monitor’s refresh rate.

That changes what a frame counter means. At 6X, a reading of 240 frames per second means the game rendered 40 of them and the model generated the other 200. Motion looks smoother, but the number on the overlay no longer shows how often the game itself drew a new picture.

Sony’s PS5 Pro leans on the same idea. Sony calls its PSSR upscaler “an AI library that analyzes game images pixel by pixel as it upscales them” and says it had lifted the effective resolution of more than 50 PS5 Pro titles by the time an upgraded version arrived with Resident Evil Requiem early in 2026. Owners can now switch the newer version on for existing supported games in the console’s system settings.

The referee trained on millions of hours of play

Call of Duty’s online matches have a new kind of referee. Ahead of the Black Ops 7 beta in 2025, Activision’s RICOCHET anti-cheat team said it had spent the year since Black Ops 6 went online training a model on millions of hours of gameplay, built to “separate natural aim from the precision patterns of an aimbot”. Machine-learning models that analyze gameplay for aimbots had been part of RICOCHET since Black Ops 6 launched in 2024.

Activision has said people stay in the loop for at least part of that work. Its machine learning system that analyzes game replays identifies suspicious gameplay “for human-validated enforcement”, so the software flags a match and a person confirms. Five months after Black Ops 6 was released, the team had issued more than 228,000 bans and said it removed 23 per cent of cheaters before they played their first match.

A September 18, 2026 update said the team’s behavioural systems “analyze gameplay over time for patterns associated with automated assistance” and counted more than 70,000 new hardware bans in the previous month alone. Those systems work alongside technical detections that look for unauthorized software interacting with the game.

Canada’s rules for machines that learn your habits

Recommenders and referees both run on records of how people play, and Quebec already limits how such records can be used to size someone up. Its private-sector privacy law, updated by Law 25 in stages that ran from 2022 to 2024, defines profiling as collecting and using personal information to assess traits such as a person’s preferences, interests or behaviour. The province’s privacy regulator, the Commission d’accès à l’information, says a person must be told beforehand about technology that can profile them, and that its profiling functions cannot be switched on by default.

Gambling regulators aim at the marketing end. Ontario’s AGCO lets operators offer bonuses but bars public advertising of them, and its guidance puts “targeted advertising and algorithm-based ads” inside that bar. An operator can still show its offers to people who visit its own gaming site or app, and in messages the player signed up for.

Alberta took the same line in advertising standards its regulator, AGLC, issued in June 2026, weeks before the province’s regulated iGaming sites opened for business on July 13. Operators there must also watch for high-risk behaviour and act on it, and give players spending and time limits.

None of this changes who online casino play is for: adults, meaning 19 and over in Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan and 18 and over in Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec. In Quebec, Ontario and Alberta, help is a phone call away at any hour. Quebec’s Jeu : aide et référence line is free and confidential, on 1-800-461-0140, or 514-527-0140 in the Montreal area. In Ontario, the line to call is ConnexOntario, on 1-866-531-2600. In Alberta, calls about gambling as well as other addictions go to 1-866-332-2322, and the service that answers is Alberta’s 24/7 Addiction Helpline.