At Metashift Labs we build AI that keeps a player’s heroes acting while the player is away. The hero follows the player’s goals, makes the moment-to-moment decisions, and reports back. Dominus Automa is the first game built on it.
This article is the company view: why we chose to build a full game rather than sell a tool, what the game has shown so far, and what comes next. If you are here to play, Dominus Automa, the automated multiplayer RPG, has its own site with everything a player needs.
Why build a game and not a tool?
An AI that plays for you is easy to demo and hard to prove. A short clip of an agent completing a task says little about whether people want it, whether it holds up for weeks, and whether it can run at a cost a game can carry. The only test that answers those questions is real players in a live world. So we built the world.
The August 2026 Steam playtest was that test. Over the month, more than 12,500 players spent about 127,000 hours in the game. At peak, 500+ heroes were online at once, about 2.5 times as many as the human players online at that moment. 43% of players used offline play, and roughly 60% of fights happened without the player present. People did not just try the feature; they left their heroes to it.
We break down those numbers, including the unattended-play figures for 7–23 August, in what the playtest data says about heroes playing alone.
The idea behind the game is simple:
“Players aren’t losing interest in games. They’re losing the time to play them.”
Rafał Bieniek, CEO, Metashift Labs, Strefa Inwestorów Demo Day, 15 October 2026
A tool would have let us talk about that problem. A game lets us measure whether we solved it.
How does Dominus Automa play?
Dominus Automa is an automated multiplayer RPG — an idle MMORPG with a hero that acts for you. You plan your hero’s journey and set the goals, rules and priorities. The hero carries them out around the clock on the game server, in a shared world with other players’ heroes, whether your PC is on or not.
The world is built on familiar RPG ground. Three factions compete for control of open-world hubs, with PvE, PvP and world events. Life skills — gathering, crafting and cooking — feed the hero’s progression. The grind is automated; the planning is yours.
What makes it an AI hero game rather than a classic idle game is how the hero talks to you. Each hero has an AI personality and moods, and speaks in natural language. It reports how it is doing, such as experience or pelts gathered per hour, and suggests changes to its plan, leaving the decision to you. You give it orders through in-game chat, by text or by voice.
The next step is reaching the hero outside the game. Talking to your hero through Telegram is in closed testing with more than 100 players and is planned for the November 2026 playtest. We are also testing a nightly in-game newspaper that AI writes from the server’s logs, so the world’s events become something you can read over breakfast.
For a broader look at this kind of system, see agentic AI in games, where we explain how agents that act for the player differ from chat-based AI.
What are the three design pillars?
We build Dominus Automa around three ideas. Internally we call them the holy trinity.
Automation
The hero does the repetitive work. You decide what matters and the hero executes it. This is where the agentic AI lives: turning a player’s intent into a long run of in-game decisions.
Offline play on the server
The game is server-authoritative, so the hero keeps acting when you log off. Nothing runs on your machine while you sleep. This is also why the playtest numbers above mean something: unattended play happened in the same world, under the same rules, as everyone else’s.
Talking to your hero through a messenger
A hero you can only reach inside the game client is still a hero you have to sit down for. A messenger channel lets the hero report and ask from wherever you are. In-game chat and voice are part of the game today; Telegram is in closed testing.
One more principle runs through all three. AI drives the hero and helps us build the game, but the art players see is made by artists.
“We keep AI in the process, not in the final product.”
Rafał Bieniek, CEO, Metashift Labs, Strefa Inwestorów Demo Day
Who is Dominus Automa for?
We design for adults who grew up on MMOs and RPGs and now have jobs and families, roughly players in their thirties and older. That is a large group. The ESA’s 2026 Essential Facts puts the average US player at 37 years old.
Time is the problem for this group. In a 2024 YouGov survey, 47% of gamers who enjoy gaming less than before said work and family responsibilities were a big reason. An MMORPG asks for hours a week; an automated MMORPG asks for decisions. The hero spends the hours.
It is also a group we know from the inside: nine in ten of our team are fathers.
How will Dominus Automa make money?
The business model as stated so far has four parts:
- Subscription. A monthly subscription covers what an always-on hero costs to run: server time and AI model use.
- Player trading. A player-to-player trading market, monetized.
- Cosmetics and quality-of-life items.
- Seasonal servers. Servers that run in three-month seasons, each with a battle pass.
No prices have been announced.
The subscription is the part that follows directly from the technology. A hero that plays 24/7 on a server has a real running cost, and the subscription is how it is paid for.
What comes next for Dominus Automa?
The next public milestone is a playtest in November 2026. It is planned to add hero paths set by the player, more maps, teams, and Telegram messaging. After that, a trailer and pre-sales are planned; neither has a date yet, and there is no launch date.
Dominus Automa is built for PC (Windows) and playtested on Steam. A mobile version is in development, with progress shared between PC and mobile as the goal.
Play it, or follow along
Dominus Automa exists to show that a hero can carry a player’s intent through a living world while the player gets on with their day. The playtest gave us the first real evidence, and every playtest from here adds more.
If you want to see it for yourself, wishlist Dominus Automa on Steam to hear about the next playtest, and join the Dominus Automa Discord community to talk with the team and other players. For the game itself — features, news and how to sign up — head to the official Dominus Automa site.