Poland ships the franchises. AI search decides which studios get cited.

Polish gamedev is a barbell market. Two AAA tenants — CD Projekt RED at 851 staff (Warsaw + Kraków + Wrocław, with 447 devs on Witcher 4 and 135 on Cyberpunk 2 / Project Orion per the H1 2025 disclosure) and Techland at ~550 in Wrocław after Tencent took the majority stake — sit at the top with in-house everything and parent-publisher distribution.

A mid-cap layer of ten WSE-listed AA studios sits in the middle: 11 bit studios (~299), People Can Fly (~500 after the December 2024 cut of 120 staff), Bloober Team (~200 in Kraków, listed on WSE main market since January 2024), CI Games (~140 after two 2024 RIF rounds), Flying Wild Hog (~300 across Warsaw, Kraków, and Rzeszów), plus Forever Entertainment, Vivid Games, Movie Games, Image Power. This is where the marketing buying centre actually lives.

PlayWay is structurally different — a federated holding-style publisher with 38 consolidated subsidiaries and 25 affiliate companies as of December 2024 (Dungeon Investing). Most subsidiaries run fewer than 20 staff and zero in-house marketing.

The 2024 release slate included Car Mechanic Simulator 21, Contraband Police, and UBOAT; Builders of Egypt and Holstin are upcoming. Approached through the PlayWay holding layer, it is the largest single addressable cluster of small game studios in Europe.

The long tail is ~800 indie shops where the PARP median studio runs fewer than 16 staff. Most cluster around Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, and Tri-City (Gdańsk + Sopot + Gdynia); the Game Industry Conference Poznań circuit and the WSE-listed publisher channel are the only formal connective tissue. Discoverability for an indie title released here is a Steam wishlist problem, a press-coverage problem, and now an AI-search problem.

Foundation — studio site + comms layer. Dual-audience by default: publisher / platform pitch (Steam, Epic, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, Tencent) plus recruiting funnel for the 50-500 dev hires per year an AA studio puts through.

The current AA studio sites (techland.net, 11bitstudios.com, ci.games, peoplecanfly.com) are Webflow- and WordPress-era, with no Game schema, no entity markup, no `llms.txt`. Direct upgrade. WSE-listed studios need an investor-relations sub-tree wired to ESPI, English-default with Polish fallback, careers tied to the ATS, and press-kit infrastructure that survives launch-week traffic.

AI Search — game-title and studio queries. Polish AA and indie titles are systematically absent from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews answers for category queries like 'best survival city builder', 'best zombie open-world game', 'studios behind Frostpunk 2', or 'Polish indie studios to watch'.

Current answers default to Wikipedia, Steam reviews, and a handful of English outlets (PC Gamer, Game Developer, Eurogamer). Mid-tier studios (Vivid Games, Forever Entertainment, Movie Games, Image Power) are functionally absent. A well-structured `/games/[slug]` or `/studios/[slug]` page with Game schema, named-author signals, and citation-rich body captures engine surface the studio's own site does not.

Voice Agent — community + tier-1 player support. Helpshift-class capability framed as a Polish-built EU-data-residency alternative. Use cases: refund triage, account recovery, Steam-key support, bug-report triage, Discord first-touch. Bilingual default (EN, PL, DE, FR, ES) sized for 10k-1M MAU live-service AA studios. Constraints designed in: GDPR Article 8 minor-consent handling, DSA notice-and-action mechanics, audit logs for every moderation decision.

Workflow Ops — localisation + moderation queue. Polish studios localise into 12-20 languages per AAA release; the current Crowdin + memoQ + in-house QA stack is not AI-native. A workflow wedge sits between linguists and the engine pipeline for first-draft, glossary enforcement, and QA flagging.

The same operational core feeds DSA-mandated moderation with audit logs, post-launch comms automation, and the build-pipeline notification surface. EU-resident n8n plus custom agents; no Zapier flows that violate ePrivacy.

Knowledge Bot — wikis, FAQs, and dev internal. Player-facing trained on the official wiki, patch notes, and lore (Witcher-lore depth as the canonical reference example). Internal-facing trained on Confluence, engine docs, style guides — where a 500-person studio saves real hours. Helpshift's published range is 30-50% ticket deflection on live-service titles; the same range applies once the corpus is properly indexed.

Growth Stack — Steam wishlist + Epic launch + influencer. Specialised agencies (Evolve, Hooked, Future Friends) already own the Steam + Epic launch playbook. Areza enters as the AI-search-optimised content wrapper: wishlist conversion content, press-kit production, influencer outreach with EU GDPR-safe lists, IndexNow on patch-note pages, AppsFlyer or Adjust on mobile.

Spot checks against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for 'best Polish indie game studios 2025', 'studios behind Frostpunk 2', 'alternatives to Cities Skylines from European devs', and 'open-world games by Polish developers' return shallow, citation-light answers that lean on Wikipedia plus a handful of English outlets.

Mid-tier studios — Vivid Games, Forever Entertainment, Movie Games, Image Power — are functionally absent. PlayWay subsidiaries are referenced only at the parent-publisher level, never as individual studio entities.

Areza's wedge is per-studio Foundation plus AI Search bundles that frame each studio as a citable entity: named founder, games shipped, engine used, year founded, headcount, listed ticker, key franchises, recent revenue, and engine + tool stack. The same content compounds as Foundation schema, AI Search retainer artefacts, recruiting-funnel surface, and IR-adjacent fact pages.

Bird & Bird's 2025 EU legal guide notes Steam disclosed ~7,800 titles with declared generative AI by mid-2025 (~20% of new releases) — Polish studios sit at or above that baseline, but the public-facing citation layer documenting any of it does not exist outside Wikipedia.