Quantum-Powered Games: From Today to 2030
by James Wootton, CSO at MOTH and Daniel Bultrini, Researcher at MOTH
Gamescom 2025 will host a milestone for both quantum computing and the games industry: a massively multiplayer game with levels generated on-demand by a QPU. For the first time, anyone will be able to go and play a game running live on a quantum computer. A game we call Space Moths.
This milestone occurs in the near-term era of quantum computing, when don’t yet have the perfect platonic ideal of quantum computer should be. We don’t have the hardware that will provide quantum speedups that leave conventional computers in the dust. But we do have devices that can be used, especially those of our hardware partners at VTT and IBM Quantum. So we are using them, and showing that they are useful.
This is not the long-term vision of MOTH. We are not just here to have fun with the emerging hardware of today. We want to provide actual useful quantum advantages once quantum computers reach their full potential. According to the roadmaps of quantum hardware developers such as IBM Quantum and Quantinuum, we can expect to see this emerge in 2030 and beyond.
Until then we will take a two-pronged approach. On the one hand we will do everything we can with current and near-term hardware. Serve it to as many people as we can. Make it as useful as we can for them. Give creatives and the creative industry new tools to create innovative new content. Build the infrastructure required to serve quantum computing to them, reliably and at scale. Prove that the unique way that quantum computers process information can translate into unique aesthetics.
On the other hand, we are planning for 2030. We are developing new algorithms and adapting old ones to address computational bottlenecks for games, music and computer graphics. We will also be part of the emergence of fault-tolerant quantum computing, doing the research needed to bring in the next era of quantum computing as early as possible.
Space Moths is clearly part of the first part of this strategy. Our first steps into the second part will be presented the week after Gamescom, at the IEEE Conference on Games. There MOTH Researcher Daniel Bultrini will present our new paper “Procedural Generation in the Epoch of Fault Tolerant Quantum Computing”. Here we outline how quantum algorithms could power procedural content generation (PCG), a concept used by many games.
In PCG, the aim is to generate content from the small scale of objects and enemies that appear within the game, to the entire world of the game and its history. The content can be concrete assets or even narrative structures. It is often said that such generation is random, but ideally it is done deterministically from a given seed. If the seed is chosen randomly, then the generation is random, but content can also be revisited by providing the seed.
The task of PCG is then to generate content that is as diverse as possible when varying the seed, allowing meaningful differences in player experience. At the same time, the content needs to fit in with the needs of the game, satisfying constraints required for the game to function. The conflict between the need for diversity and the need for conformity is what provides the main challenge in designing generative systems, driving the need for new computational methods or clever workarounds.
In this paper we review typical methods used for PCG, and summarise the proven quantum speedups that could be used to enhance them. The aim is to provide a basis for future specific explorations of how quantum algorithms could be integrated into current and future PCG workflows. We also consider a specific ‘Gedankenspiel’, a thought experiment game based on a recent quantum algorithm for evaluating the Jones polynomial. This takes the quite abstract knot-theoretic problem for which we know a good quantum solution, and turns it into the core of a knot-based game. This short review therefore represents the first steps toward concrete and provable quantum advantages for computer games.