this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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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.

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[–] Apeman42@lemmy.world 234 points 1 week ago (10 children)

If 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.

[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 124 points 1 week ago (21 children)

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.

[–] WereCat@lemmy.world 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

So… it’s as good as Starfield then but without load screens?

[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 31 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] agentTeiko@piefed.social 13 points 1 week ago

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 like the Meta-verse, but somehow even worse.

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[–] Fecundpossum@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

This. My back log of physical DS and 3ds games is extensive and grows a little every time I remember I have the eBay app on my phone. Sorry wallet.

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[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

Literally millions (billions?) of amazing games made before 2018 are waiting to be played! I wonder if future gamers will shun the 2020 era of gaming like the disco era

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[–] Paradachshund@lemmy.today 110 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Welcome to the stock market: where the money's made up and the rules don't matter!

[–] bytesonbike@discuss.online 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Always has been.

Remember when Elon had to buy Twitter?

Prior to that, he was manipulating the market through Twitter causing a lot of uncertainty.

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Always has been.

Not always. It has been for longer than we've been alive, but stock originated as a way to fund merchant voyages - you paid a share of the costs and got a share of the proceeds (in merchandise or in the sale value of that merchandise) when the ship came in.

Literally the origin of the phrase "your ship has come in".

Then people started speculating over the future value of and trading those shares while the ship was still at sea, then the concept got generalized beyond merchant voyages, etc and here we are where it's more like the art market where things are worth whatever someone will pay and that value isn't necessarily tied to anything concrete.

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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 92 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

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?

[–] omarfw@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How is everyone involved at every step of this so utterly mentally impaired

Most of the shareholder oligarchs who own our economy are lead poisoned boomers and this is all just their way of competing with each other for the top spots on the forbes richest people list.

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[–] mad_djinn@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the more mentally impaired you are the more susceptible you are to chasing gains

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[–] Kronusdark@lemmy.world 87 points 1 week ago (3 children)

It’s Google, so it will last two years MAX.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 64 points 1 week ago (1 children)

killedbygoogle.com's already polishing the new tombstone

[–] tourist@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago

The people running that site must be extremely overworked

I have no idea why people and companies still trust Google. When I did work on GCP we had mandatory maintenance every 2 months because some core service was changing. Hell I just got a notice last week that they're shutting down another API.

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[–] Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 63 points 1 week ago

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 living

[–] HetareKing@piefed.social 56 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I see a couple of major practical reasons why game (engine) devs are under no threat from this even if it gets better in the future:

  1. Scale. Like all things AI, this is not going to scale well. This doesn't generate code, 3D models and textures, both making games and playing them requires running the model. So if you want a game to have a persistent environment where the world behind you doesn't get regenerated into something different after taking 8 steps, the context window is going to get real large real fast. And unlike programmed games, you can't make choices about what's worth remembering and what isn't, what can be kept on persistent storage and is only loaded when it becomes relevant etc., because it's all one big, opaque blob of context, generated by a black box; you either have it remember everything or it becomes amnesiac in a way that makes it useless. Memory availability also isn't increasing at a rate where this becomes a non-issue any time soon.

  2. Control. Manipulating the world though a text prompt gives a lot of control, but it's also very course. It's easy enough to tell it that you want a character that can run and jump, but how fast does it run? Does it accelerate and decelerate or start and stop instantly? Does it jump in a fixed arc or based on the running speed and duration of the jump button being pressed? How far and how high? You're going to run in the limits both of what you can convey and what the language model will understand pretty quickly. And even when you can get it to do exactly what you want, it would have been faster and more practical to manipulate values directly or use a gizmo place things. But there's no way to extract and manipulate those values, because again: big, opaque blob of context.

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[–] BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 49 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Genie is pretty cool as it stands from a technical standpoint, but... 1 minute of some really, really bottom tier walking simulator gameplay is not going to destroy the gaming market.

Investors are so easily manipulated.

[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I think a lot of people forget that Google (and AI research like this) pumps out a lot of work like this that shows amazing new advances. However, that doesn't mean any of this is near ready.

Here is a 2018 paper about using world models (a concept where a model is developing an understanding of a "world") that used it to create an interactive Doom AI model - https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122 just to show that this stuff has been in the works for a long time.

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 44 points 1 week ago (6 children)

So what i am hearing is buy in the dip?

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[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So people are idiots. Got it.

I dunno man working on a video game as a side hobby they’re the worst things I’d use for gen ai. There’s too many things from pathing to physics and collision that require human input to make work.

Anytime I’ve tried it’s given some absolute shit results.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

People spend 2 hours making an llm spit out some shit thats mediocre instead of spending that time learning. And they consider it a win.

I do admit all this shit has made me want give up on music or ever learning programming becauze every other person will just prompt it and be better than me in the short term. sigh. depressing times.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

As a full time software engineer you’ll get a lot more out of learning how things work, even in the short term, if you properly learn the craft.

Otherwise when something deals you won’t have the tools to debug it. When the work LLMs are great but if things go haywire you wanna be able to stop and triage yourself.

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[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago

Classic GenAI marketing BS :

  • show a superficial demo (literally it's JUST the surface of the things you claim you can "generate")
  • imply that we are on the "brink" of radical change so we "just" have to wait then the "rest" will be generated
  • move on to the next grandiose claim to make sure nobody goes beyond the surface

It's so obvious it's painful. Sure it's not random, sure there is "progress" but it's NEVER tackling the hard problem. What makes a game fun or exciting isn't the generated world, only a non gamer would claim that.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 31 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] gegil@sopuli.xyz 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Investors never played a real video game. They dont undestand the difference between video (ai generated) and a video game.

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[–] LostWanderer@fedia.io 24 points 1 week ago

ROFL Investors are like distracted toddlers that are so easy to sway. This is so stupid, I can't wait for the bubble to pop and we can return to some semblance of normalcy.

[–] kronarbob@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)
  • Step 1 : buy some shares that fell down
  • Step 2 : Wait for the IA fuckery to collapse
  • Step 3 :
  • Step 4 : profit
[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Step 3: market remains irrational, loops back to step 3

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[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

Why does Google keep trying to make AI, when they're soooo bad at it, and pretty much everything else they do?

[–] Damage@feddit.it 16 points 1 week ago

And Gabe keeps laughing

[–] Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

The pigs oink and squeal for more slop, and the market trembles.

[–] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

This stock sell off is not accidental or even just from fear. They are driving it themselves. I have zero doubt in my mind that they are selling off their own investments in those companies that they made through intermediaries to drive it down more. Short selling the stock to help.

These people do not allow the stock market to react to things, they control it whole cloth.

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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[–] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] tanisnikana@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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Hmmm. let's build something we know and take some time, and know how to modify and build off it, or! we could spitball into the shit machine and it can shit us out a shit we don't know how any of the shit in it works and then spend twelve times as long untangling its web. SHIT MACHINE AHOY!

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago

They are literally Rader in split fiction. They think they own creativity. I hate these scum.

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