No, Google’s Project Genie Is Not A Game Maker

You may have heard Google is rolling out a test version of a new gen-AI tool, Project Genie, to its highest-paying customers this week. What does it do? Well, if you describe an environment in a prompt, as well as the character you’d like to be and whether you want a first or third-person viewpoint, it will generate what it believes to be the world you described, then let you run around in it for 60 seconds.

Why 60 seconds? That’s as much as it can currently handle. It’s not building the entire world, it’s rendering it in real time as you explore it. It’s also currently stuck at 720p and 24 frames a second. It’s not a game; it just builds environments and that’s it. The problem is (1) the screenshots and footage make it LOOK like a game and (2) that’s enough for your average moron to assume entire sophisticated life-enriching Miyamoto-level video games can be made from prompts now. It can’t make games, but try telling that to Wall Street.

IGN reports that Take-Two Interactive, the company behind what everyone’s convinced will be the game of the century, GTA 6, had its stock drop 8% today. Other game publishers had their stock dip as well, though in the case of Ubisoft it was hard to tell since they’re as low as you can get (insert Nelson Muntz HA ha here). It’s the byproduct of investors being dumb enough to not do any research beyond a quick screenshot glimpse. Clearly GTA 6 will flop because in six months everybody will prefer to auto-generate crude approximations with a bad framerate for $124.99 a month. If you guys don’t want Take-Two stock, can I have it?

A reporter for The Verge got to try out Project Genie and his verdict was what we relaid to you. He was able to get it to mimic Breath of the Wild pretty accurately, at least in visual terms, but the similarities go out the window once you watch Link move slow as molasses and float when he jumps like he’s on the moon. He also managed to generate a weird mushroom-filled off-brand take on Mario 64 (Mario looks the closest to right, but with angry eyes) and a Metroid Prime environment with Samus’ gun-arm frozen in mid-spark. According to Google he wasn’t supposed to be able to do any of this, because Nintendo would sue them. It stopped him from rendering Kingdom Hearts, but we have to wonder if that was more Square’s influence or Disney’s.

Even if you’re of the opinion that auto-generated games will be “the future” someday…think about it. It’s like saying no one wants another 2D Mario platformer because Mario Maker exists. Infinite crowdsourced content is already a thing, it tends to be bland, and AI-generated content tends to be even more bland. There is still no substitute for hard work.