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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[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 8 points 1 hour 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.

[–] HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 8 points 4 hours 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.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 82 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (5 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?

[–] mad_djinn@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

...j-just... just gimme s-s-some gains bro, I need more GAINS!

I NEEED LINE GO UP!

I NEED IT BAD, MAN!

... you g-got any gains bro? P-please!

[–] fodor@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Try to apply that logic to any of Elon's stocks.

Like, I generally agree with you, but... no one can possibly do any kind of analysis on TSLA, and Elon, and conclude anything other than:

Everything about this is completely insane and makes no sense.

Oh hi I'm Elon Musk, my car company only exists because of tax credits for EVs, and I just spent a squagillion dollars to elect a guy who will cancel those.

Oh, also, we build C3POs now, not cars.

Even though they're decades behind already existing humanoid robots, being built by another car company (Hyundai), who acquired an actually ground breaking an revolutionary robotics firm (Boston Dynamics).

Also, please given Elon a squagillion dollars, to incentivize him to keep performing his super duper CEO magic.

... fucking what? He's an actual madman, not a suave and calculating Bond villain, he's a fucking lunatic!

... Does any of this not qualify as 'management is going to do dumb shit?'

(also i am not sure if 'manglement' was an intentional joke or unintentional misspelling, but that will now be the word I am using in place of 'mismanagement', hahah!)

[–] omarfw@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours 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.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago

... Yeah... yeah.

Yeah that pretty much is the actual answer.

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[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 13 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

is it? stock prices are still quite high

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Don't follow me for advice, I know nothing about this stuff other than "line is down - buy, line is high - sell"

[–] LostWanderer@fedia.io 26 points 15 hours 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.

[–] HetareKing@piefed.social 53 points 17 hours 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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[–] Paradachshund@lemmy.today 107 points 19 hours 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 17 hours 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 11 hours 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.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 7 points 12 hours ago

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

[–] Apeman42@lemmy.world 224 points 22 hours ago (15 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.

[–] atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 hours ago

indie developers will still be making games

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 7 points 12 hours 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

[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 119 points 21 hours ago (22 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.

So it's like the Meta-verse, but somehow even worse.

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[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 19 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 13 points 12 hours ago

All the executives invested heavily in AI because they're easily wowed by things that look impressive but have no substance so they thought it was the next Big Thing. They want it to pay off so they can cash out and get rich(er).

[–] Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 16 points 16 hours ago

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

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 34 points 18 hours 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 12 hours 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 11 hours ago (1 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.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah for sure. It feels like an uphill battle more than its ever been though.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 6 points 11 hours ago

I feel that.

Even in my current job they’re pushing us to use chatbots and LLMs even when it doesn’t make sense. There’s a lot of people hoping for the mythical productivity boosts that snake oil salesmen are shoveling. Going to the point where they see a future where “you check in prompts to source control because LLMs will be so good at translating those”. Which is batshit but you gotta let c level people learn this the hard way and fire everyone else for their mistakes.

[–] Kronusdark@lemmy.world 84 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 60 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

killedbygoogle.com's already polishing the new tombstone

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[–] BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 48 points 20 hours 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.

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[–] Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 63 points 22 hours 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

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