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- cross-posted to:
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Yesterday, Google announced Project Genie, a new generative AI tool that can apparently create entire games from just prompts. It leverages the Genie 3 and Gemini models to generate a 60-second interactive world rather than a fully playable one. Despite this, many investors were scared out of their wits, imagining this as the future of game development, resulting in a massive stock sell-off that has sent the share prices of various video game companies plummeting.
The firms affected by this include Rockstar owner Take-Two Interactive, developer/distributors like CD Projekt Red and Nintendo, along with even Roblox — that one actually makes sense. Most of the games you find on the platform, including the infamous “Steal a Brainrot,” are not too far from AI slop, so it’s poetic that the product of a neural network is what hurt its stock.
Unity’s share price fell the most at 20%, since it’s a popular game engine. Generally speaking, that’s how most games operate: they use a software framework, such as Unity or Unreal Engine, which provides basic functionality like physics, rendering, input, and sound. Studios then build their vision on top of these, and some developers even have their own custom in-house solutions, such as Rockstar’s RAGE or Guerrilla’s Decima.
This will never be widely accepted in the gaming space because it’s not a game. The model only generates an interactive world, not a game world. It’s effectively a glorified AI prompted showroom. It’s useless as a development tool because nothing it generates is usable in the traditional development process which means the model would have to create the whole game but the model is incapable of understanding what a game is.
It’s good enough for shovelware alredy.
Examples? This article describes “a 60-second interactive world”. How can this even compete with trash tier roblox games?
Yeah this is more investors being stupid. Hell this would be impact VFX and Architects but the logic they are using. The whole thing is a cool demo but little real world application like like with most genAI.
So… it’s as good as Starfield then but without load screens?
Even better, it’s Starfield but your character is moving in 4D space and things pop in and out of existence depending on your position in the 4D space. And of course no loading screens.
That’s all it does so far.
But I doubt AI games will succeed, people are always going to want the human touch when it comes to art.
Isn’t that the AI hype in a nutshell? “It’s all it does right now but if you add insert hopes and dreams it’s going to revolutionize X”.
I mean, human touch will play a role but I think the tech overall just nowhere near where it should be to make games. It would actually need to understand what it is doing because there needs to be some intentionality there. Something as simple as a counter going up when you kill an enemy, but I think even that goes beyond what current models are even remotely capable. They would be capable of imitating a counter for some timeframe but to actually keep track of it over a long gaming session? I have my doubts.
The article was little light on the details, but if the whole game is run on ai thats what is going to happen. But if AI is creating real code and the game it creates has real files that are saved on the computer, things like point counters are not anymore tied by the limits of AI’s memory.
But i just dont see how AI in its current state could make large cohesive projects.
Also there is no such thing as artificial intellect. AI is just nice marketing word for something that tries to mimic what real AI would be.
It’s not generating any code. You don’t even get a game out of the model, you only get a video of what you played. It’s like an AI video generator except you have control over the camera and character.
So its a glorified a procedural generator that does not save anything it makes?
What the fuck. Its like saying game devs are being replaced because people see dreams when they sleep.
There will be a demand but I wouldn’t bet on that demand being the most popular.
Given that what it “does so far” already required the theft of the sum total of human creativity available online and the sacrifice of the survivability of humanity due to climate change, kinda seems like there isn’t much else to wring out of this.
As a dedicated fan of walking simulators I can already see the amount of shovelware we need to dig through to find the good stuff multiplying by orders of magnitude.
It’s been a year since I played INFRA and I’ve thought about it without fail at least once a week and it damn well isn’t because they haphazardly made boring environments.
Well that’s something I didn’t think about before. How would you even release an AI game? It’s just a prompt and the rest is a black box.
The companies that market machine learning tools to investors and the masses have not been set up by people who believe art has value. Everything is content, and content exists to be aggregated alongside advertisements or displayed for a fee.
I genuinely hate that actual artists can’t use a lot of pretty neat novel digital levers to make stuff. Because it’s synonymous with garbage. The ability to leap across the uncanny valley has lost all novelty and is downright banal now.
But the answer to your question is the same as every desperate attempt at getting a “good” use case for slop generators. It’s for cranking out low effort trash.
Its a step in that direction though
There were also steps in the NFT games direction. Steps in some direction doesn’t mean those steps will lead to somewhere.
Very different things.
Because one is completely useless and the other is great at making the illusion of not being completely useless?