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.
If you ever feel like you’re stupid, ignorant, absolutely microbe-brained, and that no one on this planet could possibly be more braincell starved than you:
remember that at least you don’t invest in the stock market for a livingIf this is widely adopted, I have enough emulators and classic PC games to never buy another game in my life and still be entertained the whole time. Good luck, corpo dipshits.
I tried an in-browser demo of something like this that Microsoft recently took down, and it was an image diffuser running an agent that could contextualize mouse+keyboard or gamepad gameplay inputs to behind-the-hood text prompts.
It looked like I was playing a Quake 2 clone, and almost played exactly like it, but weirdly turn-based when I didn’t do anything because it was just an AI generating images. It remembered the corpses of the bad guys I shot and it also kinda remembered the environment it made, including ramps that go up another floor and opened doorways that led to other areas.
Its cool, but not really a good game, very jank and likely resource intensive, which made sense why they took it down.
So what i am hearing is buy in the dip?
We play games because they’re stories and challenges put forth by other humans that look interesting.
Even if a slop machine put together a cohesive game involving metaphor and emotions, it’s still not human and it still won’t be played and enjoyed. It would ring hollow, just like AI sound files that try to approximate human music.
Roughly an average 10% drop in major gaming stocks, because a plagiarism machine can produce one minute of 720p, 24fps ‘gameplay’ at an absolutely astounding compute cost.
These people are all fucking idiots.
Therr is no universe where this even makes sense under a ‘a games are streamed’ paradigm.
This is like 100x to 100,000x the cost in hardware and energy, to produce a minute.
Do these fucking idiots think a game can just be wholly reinstantiated every single minute?
It actually would have made more sense to fine tune an LLM to interface with an API layer for Unity or something, to just… you know, produce an actual game?
Call that the uh, the processed training data/output condensed into a distilled an efficient piece of software, the ‘local’ model, if these clowns understand nothing but jargon.
I truly cannot comprehend the mind numbing level of stupidity on display here.
If that much investor money can be swayed by this utterly pitiful demonstration, then all these game stocks deserve to go to near 0, because clearly the people in charge (the investors) understand literally nothing about video games.
This is utterly asinine.
What happens if/when all of the plagiarised games start suing Google for IP infringement?
How is everyone involved at every step of this so utterly mentally impaired?
It’s Google, so it will last two years MAX.
Your turn will come, gen AI. It’ll be a total shitshow because of the monster you’ve created, but it needs to happen anyway at this point.
Good. Time to buy.
They are literally Rader in split fiction. They think they own creativity. I hate these scum.
The pigs oink and squeal for more slop, and the market trembles.
And Gabe keeps laughing
Who cares what makes it if it’s fun?
I agree, and lowering the cost of entry to the game development market means more games and better games for all of us.
More games? Yes.
Better games? Very unlikely.
There are already 99 slop games for every good game.
If everyone in the world suddenly created a video game and 99.999% of them are garbage, but 0.001% of them were good, that’s still 8,000,000 good games.
Vastly increasing the number of video games released undoubtedly leads to more good games. The problem at that point is more finding them rather than questioning whether or not they exist.
