Hello all, thank you for showing interest in outdraw.AI. Today we have a big announcement we’d like to share: we’re officially changing our game’s name!

From today, “outdraw.AI” will be known as "Deviation Game”.

For most this will be a fresh change, however for some it’ll be a familiar return… I guess we have some explaining to do.

Although we only officially announced the game last month, in truth we’ve been working on this project since 2022, originally as an art exhibition in Tokyo. The game’s initial concept was inspired by flipping Alan Turing’s 1950 “Imitation Game” on its head; instead of an AI fooling humans, it is the humans who fool an AI (or try to), and thus the “Deviation Game” was born.

After the game’s original installation, we decided to continue its development to release a home version for all to play. But it was at this point that we came to know there was a new, massive game studio in the works, which was called, you guessed it, “Deviation Games”. In fear of our game getting overshadowed with the soon-to-be blockbuster studio, we made the decision to change the name to outdraw.AI.

Now as fate had it, a few months after the change, something unexpected happened: the company “Deviation Games” had sadly shut down, meaning suddenly our beloved, original title seemed plausible once again. While we had grown attached to outdraw.AI at this point, we still felt that how it came across didn’t fully capture the intention behind the game as effectively as Deviation Game had. After much deliberation, we’ve now realised that it really is our final chance to make the change, and so today we’re following our gut and re(un)naming our game back to its roots.

Plus the “.AI” part made us sound like a tech startup, and that just isn’t us. The project started with just the three of us (Tomo, Dan and Saki), and today the core team is joined along with our good friends Kye and Jasper who are helping us immensely with development. We’re also self-publishing the game under the company “other rules inc.”, but again this is just us! We don’t have millions in investment, we’re just a bunch of artists making things that resonate with us. We’re all incredibly proud of what we’re building together, and with Deviation Game, we can finally package our work under a title we’re even prouder to share.

So we hope you’ll continue looking forward to playing Deviation Game, and stay tuned for a launch date announcement in the near future!

Tomo, Dan and Saki