Too lazy to Google a guide on that boss you are stuck on? Want to find all of the legendary items for your character? Razer Project Ava was announced this week at CES 2025, and it’s a co-pilot for gaming that helps you ‘git gud’ without having to pause your game.
The backseat gamer you pay for tips
Project Ava was demonstrated at CES 2025 as a “helpful” AI companion that takes thousands of pictures of your screen to analyze your gameplay and, in real time, provides hints and tips to help you improve.
In the marketing video, Ava is shown analyzing gameplay across various genres and advising players—pointing out enemies in a MOBA or telling you exactly when to dodge an attack in Black Myth Wukong. “I will always have an answer to your toughest gaming challenges,” boasts Ava.
Can she help me get better at Call of Duty? Probably not—she’s not a miracle worker. Besides, I’m not sure I could stomach someone constantly telling me how to play my game better. If I wanted that kind of feedback, I’d become a streamer.
Project Ava acts like an AI coach for Esports
Where Project Ava really seems to shine, is in competitive gameplay, coaching the team to victory. As it can remember enemy positions better than your human brain, it can tell you exactly how and when to counter their attacks, and this was displayed in a live demo to many outlets at CES 2025 such as The Verge, with a League of Legends match.
While the demo wasn’t perfect with some delays in response times from the AI, The Verge reported that there is much more work to be done to help it run via a cloud service, with a bigger announcement planned for GDC in March.
Convenience but at what cost?
As a writer on the gaming team, I’m conflicted about Project Ava. There’s no doubt it’s incredibly useful, opening the door to unprecedented levels of accessibility. But at what cost to those who create the source guides? Project Ava may analyze gameplay, but it also relies on guides written by real people to point users in the right direction. And yet, it hasn’t indicated whether these guide writers will be credited or compensated for their work.
There is also the risk of AI guide content becoming like a snake eating its own tail. If AI tools like this replace the need for gamers to search for guides, the demand for written guides will dwindle (and we know too well how many sites live and die by their position in the Google algorithm). When that demand disappears, so will the creators and the websites producing them.
Without that foundational content, AI won’t have anything original to analyze or draw from, leaving it to recycle and distort fragments of an ever-diminishing pool of information. Even now, AI makes mistakes. If I ask ChatGPT a question about Diablo 4, it often responds with a mishmash of information about previous games in the series. It takes a human being—someone who knows the franchise inside and out—to differentiate what’s relevant, correct and corroborate the information. Without actual gamers writing accurate and detailed guides, AI tools are prone to spitting out half-truths and outright misinformation.
Sign up for Project Ava beta test
Project Ava isn’t simply a concept for Razer, they are going all in with a public beta test which you can sign up for directly on Razer’s website as either a gamer or a developer looking to integrate the tool.
