Lionbridge Games, one of the world’s leading providers of game localization, audio, testing, and player experience services, has announced that its AI-driven localization platform, Lionbridge Samurai™, has won “Best Overall Use of AI in Gaming” award at the 9th annual AI Breakthrough Awards program, conducted by AI Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies, and products in the global Artificial Intelligence market. The accolade recognizes Samurai as the first production-ready, game-specific, AI-driven localization solution that removes the trade-off between innovation and reliability.
Game localization sits at the intersection of creative storytelling, technical complexity, and high-stakes player expectations. Most general-purpose AI translation tools have struggled to handle this combination. Generic large language models (LLMs) frequently miss nuances in character voice, cultural references, and platform constraints, thus producing errors that require costly manual remediation before titles can ship.
Samurai was built specifically for this context. It places linguistic and cultural expertise at the center of a game-specific AI workflow, allowing studios to capture the speed and efficiency advantages of AI without compromising quality control that loyal player communities demand. From the customer perspective, Samurai operates as a familiar Translation, Editing, and Proofreading (TEP) engagement, with the AI gains applied behind the scenes through expert configuration tailored to each specific intellectual property.
“Game developers are under enormous pressure to ship globally without sacrificing the experiences their players expect,” said Tugdual Delisle, Managing Director, Lionbridge Games. “Samurai was built to take that pressure off by supercharging human expertise with AI speed to deliver the uncompromising quality control that great games demand. This recognition affirms what our customers are already telling us: a purpose-built solution for games makes all the difference.”
Underpinning the workflow is a structured Linguistic Quality Evaluation framework aligned with Multidimensional Quality Metrics principles. This approach captures AI and human quality in the same environment and feeds a closed-loop system to monitor delivery against TEP-equivalent thresholds and refine configurations for live-service content updates. Since its launch, Samurai has delivered 26 million target words across 42 game titles, with 55 language pairs in production for 29 active customers.
“Lionbridge Samurai impressed us with the care and craftsmanship behind its design, and with the depth of expertise the team has brought to a difficult problem,” said Steve Johansson, Managing Director, AI Breakthrough. “We are proud to recognize Lionbridge Games as our 2026 Best Overall Use of AI in Gaming winner.”
The achievement marks the third consecutive year Lionbridge has been honored by the AI Breakthrough Awards program for its industry-defining AI leadership. Lionbridge previously won “AI Model Validation Solution of the Year” for Aurora AI Studio™ in 2025, and “Best Machine Translation Solution” for Smart MT™ in 2024.
About Lionbridge Games
Lionbridge Games delivers the gaming experience your players demand. Its network of global gamers, combined with our award-winning AI-powered globalization solution, brings every aspect of your game to life across any language, culture, and platform. From concept to launch and beyond, it helps developers and publishers break through cultural barriers to engage players everywhere through localization, audio, testing, player experience, and multimedia services. With offices around the world, its follow-the-sun approach ensures that wherever your project is, a Lionbridge Games team is ready to pick it up in-market, in-culture, and around the clock.
