Gaming market melts down after Google reveals new AI game design tool — Project Genie crashes stocks for Roblox, Nintendo, CD Projekt Red, and more
www.tomshardware.com
Project Genie can AI-generate "games" capped at 720p and 24 FPS.

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.

  • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    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.

    • Goodeye8@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      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.

      • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        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.