Yesterday, Google announced Project Genie, a brand new generative AI software that may apparently create total video games from simply prompts. It leverages the Genie 3 and Gemini fashions to generate a 60-second interactive world moderately than a completely playable one. Despite this, many traders have been scared out of their wits, imagining this as the way forward for recreation growth, leading to an enormous inventory sell-off that has despatched the share costs of varied online game corporations plummeting.
The companies affected by this embrace Rockstar proprietor Take-Two Interactive, developer/distributors like CD Projekt Red and Nintendo, together with even Roblox — that one truly is sensible. Most of the video games you discover on the platform, together with the notorious “Steal a Brainrot,” will not be too removed from AI slop, so it is poetic that the product of a neural community is what damage its inventory.
Project Genie evades all that and handles these constructing blocks itself, however do not forget that it would not truly construct video games, per se. When you ask it to make a clone of Super Mario 64, it is going to dupe it moderately impressively, however all you get is primary motion with a free digital camera that may look across the map. There are not any targets, and the AI usually forgets what it has already generated when filling in gaps.
Roads in these questionably-generated video games would usually have patches of grass in between, as if the mannequin thought it was speculated to generate one thing else for a bit earlier than swiftly recovering. This hallucinating habits signifies the prototype nature of the tech, and Google has said Project Genie is an experimental tool for now, meant to help with things like previz for large games.
That ties into the issue with game development these days: how bloated some productions can get with insane budgets and lead times, yet still somehow end up delivering an underwhelming product. Tools like Project Genie could genuinely help here, saving developers time they’d otherwise spend in the early stages of the game, before level design is locked in.
But in that way, AI is the solution to an artificial problem that should’ve been solved without it; for all that matters, devs could still find a way to balloon productions out of control even with Project Genie and a hundred other generative AI models at the helm. Of course, instead of having that concern, investors are clearly more hopeful for an AI-assisted future, given the resulting stock market shenanigans.
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