How Status created a million-user AI social simulation in a month

• Status, developed by six-person team WishRoll, reached 500,000 DAUs (and one million registered users) within just one month of public launch
• The AI-powered social sim blends elements of The Sims with social media, enabling users to role-play as influencers in a toxicity-free environment
• By partnering with Inworld AI, the team optimised their AI implementation costs by 90%, enabling them to scale the game globally

During GDC this month, we met the creators of Status, a breakthrough AI-powered social simulation game that’s rapidly gaining traction. 

Developed by new outfit WishRoll, Status was part of Inworld AI’s presence at the San Francisco conference. It’s a game that’s remarkable for its short development time, its Zeitgeist-courting use of AI, and its rapid growth, particularly among the teenaged demographic. The game – a blending of The Sims and Twitter – has attracted a million registered users and scored 500,000 DAU within just one month of public launch. 

It’s proving so popular that as we sit down with CEO and co-founder, Fai Nur, she’s had to pause new sign-ups because it’s too busy. She fires it up for us and explains the appeal: “Status is essentially an AI-simulated social media game where the users can become anyone they want.” 

The interface is a familiar X- or Threads-style feed, behind which lurks an LLM chatbot, but you set the parameters of its artificial world and your interactions with it are gamified. “It’s a simulated social media universe,” Nur clarifies. “The first thing you do is pick who your first ‘follower’ is. Our users create different characters. They are teenagers, so it’s usually things related to Harry Potter! They present as the idealised version of themselves.”

The social side

WishRoll is a team of six people who met, appropriately, on social media during the pandemic and then went through Y Combinator together. They’ve spent three years working together, and Status – their first game – took shape last August. 

Nur herself previously worked at Facebook and got into the startup space to build apps. “It’s always been about building things for my teenage self!” she says. “I was super into fandom, fan fiction and other things teenage girls obsess over. And I want to build things for that audience.”

The game interface “looks like Twitter,” where you are the centre of your own story, a social media influencer, interacting with the ersatz world and being observed by it. “You have a mix of NPCs, people who are just talking about you. There are fake news accounts that post about you.”

As you post and interact with the AI-controlled users of the fake site, you gain followers and also “humour points” and “aura points”, which is how you level up in the game. The interaction feels somewhat like a text adventure, with goals to reach and characters to encounter. There is an energy bar which limits how much you can post and what actions you can take. “We took inspiration from casual gaming, where you have a number of moves you can make in a day. You can probably play the game for about an hour, which is a good time to get really in depth,” explains Nur. 

The game’s monetisation comes from users paying to extend this time – to buy energy, effectively. But you can also switch the game off and wait until tomorrow for your energy to refill, refer a friend, and do other actions that earn moves. In fact, on average, users spend 1 hour and 36 minutes in the game per day. 

Ready to scale

In October, the beta test invitations went out via Discord and TikTok, and the team’s first challenge was running the AI for the number of participants who wanted to join.

TikTok buzz allegedly drove over 100,000 downloads during the trial period. “We needed to figure out a way to optimise the cost so we could launch it publicly,” says Nur. “We were using [Claude] 3.5 sonnet, which is an amazing model but very expensive to use at scale. That’s when my co-founder found out about Inworld.”

Founded in 2021, Inworld AI runs an AI framework for games, focusing on interactive AI agents. It helps studios manage their tech stacks with tools optimised for data management, low latency, and scale. At GDC, the Inworld AI booth was home to its own Streamlabs: Intelligent Streaming Assistant, Little Umbrella: The Last Show (a web-based party game) and Nanobit: Winked (a mobile chat game), as well as WishRoll’s Status. Inworld AI has published a case study about the growth of Status and its cost-cutting initiatives.

“They’ve been a great partner to us,” continues Nur. “We’re consumer founders who just want to build cool features; we’re not ML ops experts! So Inworld helped us evaluate our options, A/B test different models very quickly and get direct feedback from users. With them, we were ultimately able to 10x drop our costs. I won’t say which model we’re using right now – we are in the process of fine-tuning. We can change; we’re able to plug and play with other models.”

The team, all TikTok natives familiar with organic distribution, launched the game into the community, and it took off like, well, like a viral tweet.

“We went from 6,000 people on the app in the beta to 500,000 daily actives in one month!” Nur says. The app now has over a million registered users, primarily 13- to 18-year-old girls. “That makes a lot of sense when you think about RPG games, simulation games like The Sims, or role-playing experiences like Brookhaven on Roblox,” confirms Nur. “And not just games. I like self-insert fan fiction too! And like that, our game really constructs the whole world around you. And that’s the beauty of the LLM: it’s the infinite playability of the product.”

Troll-free routes

Real social media is plagued by toxicity. Was that a drive to create a space like this? “At first, we thought it’s just an engaging game world!” confesses Fai Nur. “But talking to a lot of users, we hear that they prefer this to real social media. It’s not toxic. You’re in charge of your story.”

And feedback has been very positive (the game has a 4.7 rating on Google Play at the time of writing). Nur adds: “We have a Discord community of almost 200,000 users now. It’s a fun community and our user base is worldwide – our biggest markets are the US, Brazil, Mexico and Europe. Our users realise they can localise it themselves! They put in their description, ‘Everyone in here speaks Spanish.’ That’s another beauty of what we’re able to do with consumer AI.” 

So, after a successful launch and a positive GDC, what’s next for WishRoll? Nur describes a number of features that are in development for Status: “Next on our roadmap is to make it more and more immersive. It looks like a regular social feed right now with just text. We want it to be multimodal – not necessarily AI-generated images, but you being able to post photos and videos and having [the game] react to what you’re posting. We’ve just launched ‘messaging’, which is not just the regular AI chatbot messaging; it’s realistic. You have read receipts, and they can leave and come back and leave again!”

With its rapid growth and engaged community, Status appears to have tapped into something fundamental about how this generation of gamers wants to interact with mobile games. “I think we’re in a weird space in between,” reflects Fai Nur. “I don’t know if it’s a new genre. I like to think of us a lot like Roblox, in the way that you’re coming to hang out as well as play.” 

As AI becomes more sophisticated and costs continue to drop, Status might be the harbinger of a fresh category of entertainment – one that blurs the boundaries between games, social media, and interactive storytelling.