514
submitted 3 days ago by ekZepp@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top new old
[-] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 100 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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?

[-] fodor@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago

Basically you don't understand. Investors sell when they think the companies will fuck shit up. That could be because they think the product is obsolete, or it could be that they think manglement is going to do dumb shit. Take your pick. Remember, it's gambling about the future, not about what's right or reasonable.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[-] Paradachshund@lemmy.today 117 points 3 days ago

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

[-] bytesonbike@discuss.online 34 points 3 days ago

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 18 points 3 days ago

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.

Yeah no I wouldn't bet on the concrete market right now. Carbon taxes will likely continue to put a damper on those.

Better bet on the fictitious market, I head there's some great sci-fi and general fantasy about to be released.

(Sorry, I just had to make that joke right now to vent)

[-] HetareKing@piefed.social 60 points 3 days ago

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] Kronusdark@lemmy.world 91 points 3 days ago

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

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 64 points 3 days ago

killedbygoogle.com's already polishing the new tombstone

[-] tourist@lemmy.world 24 points 3 days ago

The people running that site must be extremely overworked

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 11 points 3 days ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days 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.

[-] Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 66 points 3 days 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

[-] BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 49 points 3 days ago

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 3 days 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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] LostWanderer@fedia.io 27 points 3 days 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.

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 45 points 3 days ago

So what i am hearing is buy in the dip?

load more comments (6 replies)
[-] Quazatron@lemmy.world 14 points 3 days ago
[-] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago

is it? stock prices are still quite high

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] brsrklf@jlai.lu 31 points 3 days 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 3 days ago

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago

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

[-] kronarbob@lemmy.world 24 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
  • 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 3 days ago

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

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Damage@feddit.it 16 points 3 days ago

And Gabe keeps laughing

[-] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days 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.

[-] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 days ago

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

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

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!

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
514 points (98.5% liked)

Games

45903 readers
2031 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Rules

1. Submissions have to be related to games

Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.

This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.

2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.

We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.

3. No excessive self-promotion

Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.

This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.

4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.

We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.

5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.

No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.

6. No linking to piracy

Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

Authorized Regular Threads

Related communities

PM a mod to add your own

Video games

Generic

Help and suggestions

By platform

By type

By games

Language specific

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS