According to Reuters, shares of several major gaming companies, including Take-Two Interactive, Roblox, and Unity, experienced significant declines on Friday. This drop occurred just one day after Google unveiled its Project Genie tool, which enables users to generate interactive experiences through AI prompts. Take-Two's stock closed at $220.30 (down 7.93% from the previous day), Roblox's at $65.76 (down 13.17%), and Unity's at $29.10 (down 24.22%).
Other AI tools have faced strong opposition from artists and creators, who accuse them of appropriating their work to train underlying AI models, along with concerns over AI's resource consumption and its impact on creative output. Diego Rivas from Google DeepMind informed The Verge that Genie 3—the AI world model powering Project Genie—was "primarily trained on publicly available data from the web." A white paper by Google DeepMind researchers on the initial Genie model stated it was trained from "a dataset of over 200,000 hours of publicly available internet gaming videos."
Many game developers remain skeptical of generative AI and its tendency to produce derivative content that mimics existing works. The worlds I created using Project Genie prompts, reminiscent of "Super Mario" and "The Legend of Zelda," bore some resemblance to Nintendo's original games but lacked their engaging gameplay and enjoyment. For an industry already grappling with successive waves of layoffs, even the current iteration of Project Genie represents a potential threat to roles in testing and concept development.
The version of Project Genie demonstrated by Google this week can only generate 60-second interactive experiences. These creations lack scores, objectives, and even sound. They may exhibit odd glitches and inconsistencies, such as race tracks unexpectedly turning into grassy fields. After an experience ends, users can only download a video or generate a new one; they cannot directly import content from Project Genie into traditional game development tools like Unreal Engine or Unity.
However, the push from investors and executives for AI-powered game creation tools is already becoming evident. xAI CEO Elon Musk has promised "real-time, high-quality large-scale programs and video games tailored to individuals by next year." Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney stated on Friday, "We will see leaps in engine-centric AI and world model-centric AI until they converge for maximum impact." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg extensively highlighted during the company's earnings call this week how AI will make games "more immersive and interactive." His comments came just weeks after the closure of VR game studios and projects.
