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.

  • Apeman42@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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
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      4 months ago

      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.

        • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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          4 months 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.

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        That’s all it does so far.

        But I doubt AI games will succeed, people are always going to want the human touch when it comes to art.

        • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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          4 months ago

          That’s all it does so far.

          Isn’t that the AI hype in a nutshell? “It’s all it does right now but if you add insert hopes and dreams it’s going to revolutionize X”.

          I mean, human touch will play a role but I think the tech overall just nowhere near where it should be to make games. It would actually need to understand what it is doing because there needs to be some intentionality there. Something as simple as a counter going up when you kill an enemy, but I think even that goes beyond what current models are even remotely capable. They would be capable of imitating a counter for some timeframe but to actually keep track of it over a long gaming session? I have my doubts.

          • MrFinnbean@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            They would be capable of imitating a counter for some timeframe but to actually keep track of it over a long gaming session?

            The article was little light on the details, but if the whole game is run on ai thats what is going to happen. But if AI is creating real code and the game it creates has real files that are saved on the computer, things like point counters are not anymore tied by the limits of AI’s memory.

            But i just dont see how AI in its current state could make large cohesive projects.

            Also there is no such thing as artificial intellect. AI is just nice marketing word for something that tries to mimic what real AI would be.

            • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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              4 months ago

              It’s not generating any code. You don’t even get a game out of the model, you only get a video of what you played. It’s like an AI video generator except you have control over the camera and character.

              • MrFinnbean@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                So its a glorified a procedural generator that does not save anything it makes?

                What the fuck. Its like saying game devs are being replaced because people see dreams when they sleep.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 months 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?

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months 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!

    • omarfw@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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
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        4 months ago

        … 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.

    • fodor@lemmy.zip
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      4 months 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.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months 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!)

  • BaroqueInMind@piefed.social
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    4 months 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.

  • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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    4 months 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.

    • ByteOnBikes@discuss.online
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      4 months 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
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        4 months 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.

  • HasturInYellow@lemmy.world
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    4 months 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.

  • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

  • kronarbob@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago
    • Step 1 : buy some shares that fell down
    • Step 2 : Wait for the IA fuckery to collapse
    • Step 3 :
    • Step 4 : profit
  • Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 months 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