Project Genie can AI-generate "games" capped at 720p and 24 FPS.
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.
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.
Nah, I am 100% that Maga buffoons would play an ai generated concentration camp simulator and pay $20 for it too.
Also do remember that some people also spent thousands on NFTs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i wish i knew how to use this stupidity, but i dont know what stock would be useful to get. I dont want to buy anything from america, ubisoft is bad investment always anyway and only finnish game company i can think/find doesnt even seem affected.
I wonder how bugs are patched or any updates are made to the games. There is no source code either, right? Even if it produces full games, they seem to be worthless and a copy paste at best. Whatever happens in the future, there will always be classic programmers and designers with a vision and talent, who will create wonderful games. And that is even a good selling point.
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.
It’s an initial proof-of-concept. It’ll be developed into more complex games eventually, that’s not really an issue for it
The main issue is that it’s just a facade. It completely lacks the foundation required for a game. It’s a world without hard rules, which is a terrible experience for any user. The game isn’t determining cause and effect from actions. It’s just guessing at what would come next
What’s the point of decorating an in-game house if the next time you go there, the AI forgot what was supposed to be there?
What’s the point of completing quests if the AI forgets what you’ve completed?
What’s the point of getting new gear if AI hallucinates what gear you have?
There is no progress in an AI generated game because everything is made up as it goes. Google would need to fundamentally change their approach to allow for that
That being said, this and similar technologies could be used to add really cool mechanics in a game that previously weren’t feasible. The ability to add a temporary dream-like or watercolor aesthetic easily would be great for small developers to tell stories
It’s an initial proof-of-concept. It’ll be developed into more complex games eventually, that’s not really an issue for it
Except it is an issue, just one being masked by the mountains of cash these companies are burning to provide AI. To increase the depth and complexity and actually store state would require orders of magnitude more energy, compute, memory and storage. The AI bubble is causing very single one of those to become more expensive. At some point the market will call bullshit on these companies (“show us profit, or at least exponential revenue growth, or line go down”), at which point these companies will attempt to download the costs onto their users. When people see the bill and realize what these services actually cost, the whole thing is gonna collapse like a flan in a cupboard.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I am convinced they just push stuff to become THE dominant ai company. It doesn’t matter if it’s useful, they just need the publicity and also ChatGPT to crash and burn.
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?
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.
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!)
… I didn’t downvote you, but uh, no, I really don’t think they can.
I think you are confusing an semi-automable asset pipeline that adheres to various kinds of standards for… a whole lot more than that.
I’d really like to see any evidence that what you seem to be describing actually exists.
Because if it does, and is or has been in widespread use for any amount of time prior to now… well very broadly, it would seem to be hurting more than helping things.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
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.
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.
Nah, I am 100% that Maga buffoons would play an ai generated concentration camp simulator and pay $20 for it too.
Also do remember that some people also spent thousands on NFTs.
Yeah, you’re right, even when people have hit rock bottom, they’ll just get a more powerful subterranean speed-tunneller.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah for sure. It feels like an uphill battle more than its ever been though.
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.
i wish i knew how to use this stupidity, but i dont know what stock would be useful to get. I dont want to buy anything from america, ubisoft is bad investment always anyway and only finnish game company i can think/find doesnt even seem affected.
I wonder how bugs are patched or any updates are made to the games. There is no source code either, right? Even if it produces full games, they seem to be worthless and a copy paste at best. Whatever happens in the future, there will always be classic programmers and designers with a vision and talent, who will create wonderful games. And that is even a good selling point.
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.
It’s an initial proof-of-concept. It’ll be developed into more complex games eventually, that’s not really an issue for it
The main issue is that it’s just a facade. It completely lacks the foundation required for a game. It’s a world without hard rules, which is a terrible experience for any user. The game isn’t determining cause and effect from actions. It’s just guessing at what would come next
What’s the point of decorating an in-game house if the next time you go there, the AI forgot what was supposed to be there?
What’s the point of completing quests if the AI forgets what you’ve completed?
What’s the point of getting new gear if AI hallucinates what gear you have?
There is no progress in an AI generated game because everything is made up as it goes. Google would need to fundamentally change their approach to allow for that
That being said, this and similar technologies could be used to add really cool mechanics in a game that previously weren’t feasible. The ability to add a temporary dream-like or watercolor aesthetic easily would be great for small developers to tell stories
Except it is an issue, just one being masked by the mountains of cash these companies are burning to provide AI. To increase the depth and complexity and actually store state would require orders of magnitude more energy, compute, memory and storage. The AI bubble is causing very single one of those to become more expensive. At some point the market will call bullshit on these companies (“show us profit, or at least exponential revenue growth, or line go down”), at which point these companies will attempt to download the costs onto their users. When people see the bill and realize what these services actually cost, the whole thing is gonna collapse like a flan in a cupboard.
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.
Welcome to the stock market: where the money’s made up and the rules don’t matter!
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.
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)
Why does Google keep trying to make AI, when they’re soooo bad at it, and pretty much everything else they do?
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).
Yep, gaming stocks are on sale today because of stupid investors. Happily bought a few
Step 3: market remains irrational, loops back to step 3
So… No profit for me ? I’m sad, but not surprised
So what i am hearing is buy in the dip?
no these are a bunch of dips making it happen
If you like holding an empty bag, this is a great strategy.
Ever hear of carrying capital losses forward to offset capital gains?
… That kinda sorta works for companies, not so much for people looking to make some kind of probably leveraged bet.
It works for individuals too. When I sold some shares a couple parcels were at a loss so I was able to offset the gains on other shares.
You do have a limit on how long you can carry the losses forward and they only offset capital gains not regular income tax.
I mean it sounds like we are in agreement then, that this works better for companies than it does for individual/retail investors.
They are literally Rader in split fiction. They think they own creativity. I hate these scum.
And Gabe keeps laughing
It’s Google, so it will last two years MAX.
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.
I am convinced they just push stuff to become THE dominant ai company. It doesn’t matter if it’s useful, they just need the publicity and also ChatGPT to crash and burn.
killedbygoogle.com’s already polishing the new tombstone
The people running that site must be extremely overworked
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?
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.
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!)
The expert systems that the console manufacturers supply to developers can already do this sort of thing.
… I didn’t downvote you, but uh, no, I really don’t think they can.
I think you are confusing an semi-automable asset pipeline that adheres to various kinds of standards for… a whole lot more than that.
I’d really like to see any evidence that what you seem to be describing actually exists.
Because if it does, and is or has been in widespread use for any amount of time prior to now… well very broadly, it would seem to be hurting more than helping things.
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.
… Yeah… yeah.
Yeah that pretty much is the actual answer.
the more mentally impaired you are the more susceptible you are to chasing gains
…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!
The pigs oink and squeal for more slop, and the market trembles.
Good. Time to buy.
is it? stock prices are still quite high
Don’t follow me for advice, I know nothing about this stuff other than “line is down - buy, line is high - sell”