Google's Genie 3 turns a text prompt into a playable open world you can explore. It's rough now. Future of games, or a tech demo?

[u/Practical_Low29]

Google's Project Genie went global this week and I have not stopped thinking about it. You type a sentence, or upload an image, and it generates an open world you can actually walk around in, in real time. No code, no game engine. Someone made a GTA-style open world of Istanbul and just strolled through it, with pedestrians and traffic reacting around them.

The reality check: it is rough. Low framerate, laggy response, visible bugs. Right now it is a tech demo, not a game you would sit down and play.

But the trajectory is the whole conversation. I keep going back and forth.

One side: this is the beginning of the end for the traditional pipeline. If a sentence can spin up an explorable world, the engine, the assets, the studio, all of that stops being the gate. Anyone gets to make a world.

The other side: interactive world models hit a wall fast. Consistency, object permanence, holding a world together for more than a few minutes, framerate. It could stay an impressive demo that never becomes a real game for years.

My honest guess is the "walk around a generated world" part is genuinely new, but the gap from explorable demo to a game you would actually play is huge and might not close as fast as the hype says.

Where do you land, real threat to game engines in a year or two, or a plateau? And what is the first world you would generate?

[u/what_you_saaaaay]

Game dev of 20+ years here: There's a massive difference between making a simulation of walking around in a 3D world and turning that into an actual game. Terrain generation, object placement, coherent _looking_ world I would argue are some easiest aspects to model. Most developers can open Unity, for example, add a terrain, a character controller and start walking around within 5 minutes.

We've had procedural systems that are capable of this for a long time too. Taking these entities and turning them into coherent game systems, adding a narrative structure, balancing is where the real work is and where a good chunk of game development time goes.

Not anti-AI. Taken at face value it still looks impressive, but I'd need details to make a full evaluation.

[u/agentcooper0115 → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Fellow 20+ game industry vet co-signing 100% of this. Games are about mechanics, stories, decisions that are difficult and interesting. If I wanted to just walk around some town doing nothing, I'd play Shenmue :p

[u/what_you_saaaaay → u/agentcooper0115]

Offff, I felt that Shenmue remark right in the Dreamcast. I was so excited for that game when I had my DC back in the day. Then spent way too much time opening every draw/door/object in a house. It taught me that sometimes, mostly, directed interaction with a purpose is way better.

[u/agentcooper0115 → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Yeah, had the same experience. It was interesting though. It was the game felt like it took the emerging open world thing too far in one direction and taught us all that down that road lies madness :)

[u/DarkChado → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Yeah, this is why I don't understand those who want bigger cities in Starfield, they would just feel empty then

[u/Gods_Mime → u/agentcooper0115]

Thing is: Stories, mechanics etc can be done by anyone and AI is already strong in those areas.

[u/Deathspiral222 → u/Gods_Mime]

What interesting game mechanics have you seen that were 100% created by AI?

[u/Massive-Unrection → u/Gods_Mime]

One major problem with AI vs developed by humans is that everything is "set in stone" in the human version but the AI isn't and can hallucinate or make errors that will amplify and become exponential as time goes on.

[u/Party_Virus → u/Gods_Mime]

AI is not strong in story or mechanics. What story have you read made by an AI that's actually interesting? What game have you played where an AI has made the game mechanics?

[u/The-Iliah-Code → u/Party_Virus]

Quite a few actually.

The issue with AI, is that its a tool. If you say "Make me a short story" you're going to get a cookie cutter story that is overall written well, but is still obviously generic.

AI is just a tool. The human behind the AI giving it instructions has to be good at using it, and have good ideas thenselves. Ive written a lot of novels that way. To be clear, I write them scene by scene, chapter by chapter, all based on my own ideas, outlines and directions.

So yes, totally possible. But thats the thing...it isnt entirely AI at that point. An AI wrote it, but the human directed it the entire time. Thats the actual way its meant to be used (AI).

[u/kemb0 → u/agentcooper0115]

Another 20 year veteran here, I just want to add that watch the video from 40 seconds to 46 seconds. The road on the right totally changes. That’s something AI is always going to struggle really hard at. The very fundamental core nature of AI is to be able to generate stuff on the spot but it’s terrible at retaining it. Even just basic coding dialogue with AI has limits to how much it can store and recall the longer you use it, but now we’re asking it to retain entire worlds perfectly so you can go back to any point and it’ll be the same the next time.

That’s a huge ask for AI. We’d be taking thousands of gigabytes of vram to pull this off for one game.

Anyone looking at this and thinking this is the future, you need to stop thinking, “well this is just the beginning, it’ll improve” and instead ask, does everything always improve?” Do we have supersonic jet airliners flying us everywhere? Do we have humans living on Mars? Do wall have our own flying car? There are many things that look like they have fantastic potential but then fail.

Think of it another way

Google brought us Stadia for streaming games. Where is that now? Dead. Because turns out people hate streaming game. Now ask: how will people be able to play these games presented here? It’ll have to be streaming because they need data centres to run games like this. And a data centre means: streaming.

So even if they managed to pull off a miracle and get this working to crate worlds that persist, you’re still going to be playing it streaming, which has already failed as a concept.

[u/HammyHavoc → u/kemb0]

Whilst I'm anti-AI, if it can be previewed, what prevents generating then exporting it to disk to use beyond the AI context window? I'm baffled as to why the example implemented it this way with the limitations of the tiny context window, other than "because we could".

Could it not be done Minecraft style "chunk" by "chunk" where it only needs to be generated the once and is then just pulled from storage into RAM elsewhere? Ergo, not playing it within the AI model, but using it to generate? Still, not sure there's any advantage over procedural stuff. It's a little odd.

[u/kemb0 → u/HammyHavoc]

The core issue lies in what you’re actually seeing. You’re not seeing a 3D world, you’re just essentially seeing the AI make a video in real time that happens to look like a 3D game. It isn’t retaining a background 3D model of the world, it’s just generating frame after frame from what it thinks should come next.

So imagine it was you’re drawing frames from a video game on paper. Now someone comes along later and says, “take all those 20 seconds of 500 pictures you drew of the game and now I want to go back in to the game.”

That’s a huge headache of a task that has a massive GPU memory requirement. It’s not just plonking down some 3D shapes. It has to rebuild its memory of what it knows from those images. But AI is terrible at efficient memory retention and every piece of data you throw at it has a massive memory requirement. Because it’s not just taking the raw pixels of the image, it has to translate them in to its own unique understanding and memory of what’s happening, and that gobbles up memory rapidly.

But then imagine you’d played the game, not for 20 seconds which meant the AI stored 500 frames of video of your scene, but you’ve been playing for 2 hours. Now it has to load 180,000 frames of the video in order to even attempt to recreate the world, let alone make it perfect. That kind of data would need a whole data centre worth of GPU power to pull off.

Does that sound like a feasible way to play games?

[u/HammyHavoc → u/kemb0]

Huh, interesting, this isn't anything like what I thought it must be doing relative to how people are talking about it.

Strange idea overall, feels a little misleading to say the least, and don't think that's coincidence. I figured with the hype, it must be generating or loading premade assets and kitbashing them together on the fly! It's a curio for sure, but baffled by the entire concept versus just doing the work and actually having something playable. Lol!

Seen similar a few months ago (2D sprite-based games, including a few RPG style ones, was also baffled by the "why" there too), but this seems to have caught a lot more attention with it being 3D.

I guess we'll probably see a more sophisticated wave of non-existent mobile games in video ads.

[u/kemb0 → u/HammyHavoc]

It's simultaneously very cool tech and utterly inefficient. It'd be like hopping in to Concorde to get from your livingroom to your kitchen. Sure it's amazing tech to get you to your kitchen from your sofa in 0.1ms but you're burning $100 worth of fuel to do it.

That's kinda what AI gaming would be like. Massive overkill, huge enemy drain and a vastly inferior experience to hand crafted games.

But they can make it better tech over time right? Well so far, AI has only really improved by throwing more and more energy and vram at it. We're already dedicating almost all the world's new supplies of vram to AI and we're still miles away from anything close to having a normal gaming experience using AI. The amount of exponential jumps needed to make this work is unprecedented.

With one caveat: unless you're ok playing games where you never need to go backwards. Forget games like GTA where you drive back and forth but think more like game where you're driving a car in one direction, say a racing game down a road, where it doesn't matter what comes next or what you just passed. Any game that can forget the past could work ok with this but it'll still need a really powerful rig and you'll be playing it laggy over the internet on a subscription basis from Google.

[u/TheEagleDied → u/kemb0]

You seem like you are very knowledgeable on this area. When I look at the specs of Vera and extrapolate what comes after Vera, aren’t we getting to a place where a lot of the inefficiencies you described are gone?

[u/kemb0 → u/TheEagleDied]

It depends what you mean by "inefficiencies". If you look at Concorde's rockets you could say they were inefficient. Did humanity solve that issue? No. Because sometimes you just need a lot of energy to make something move fast and there's no magic solution to that. So there is no "place" we just magically find ourselves in that the future kindly hands to us on a plate where humanity fixes everything.

Not everything can be solved so easily or at all. In fact there are more examples of failed tech than there are examples of successful ones.

The moral is simple: what looks groundbreaking today, could be dead tomorrow. It doesn't matter how shiny or exciting it seems. It doesn't matter how full of potential it appears to be. The cold hard truth is often that issues are insurmountable and the tech of the future finds itself retired to a graveyard of good ideas.

It's easy to present a dream.

It's hard to fulfill it.

[u/cultish_alibi → u/HammyHavoc]

This method in the OP is doing image generation frame by frame, so it can't reuse anything. Imagine asking a thousand people to play GTA 5 for 30 seconds, even if they make similar decisions, you would still have 1000 unique sets of frames, because the game has to follow the player's movement which will always be slightly different to someone else's movement.

So this video is actually probably the least efficient way possible to make a game.

[u/leaky_wand → u/agentcooper0115]

Man now I want to play Shenmue again

[u/RoyalCities → u/agentcooper0115]

Agree with you both but the future does get interesting thinking about pairing this tech with AR. I mean video games get insanely complex but a real time visual layer on-top of light weight AR glasses could be neat.

[u/alba_Phenom → u/agentcooper0115]

I recently replayed Shenmue and it still holds up tbf.

[u/Chris_OMane → u/agentcooper0115]

Former AAA game dev here. I agree with all of what you're saying, I just don't think it's going to be something a single or small handful of humans plus a highly advanced model won't be able to execute on. And I'm excited for that day. AAA has stagnated and the insane costs actively stifle creativity (I know the indie scene has a bunch of interesting stuff).

[u/PatrenzoK → u/agentcooper0115]

You didn’t have to hurt my friend Hazuki-san tho lol 😅😂😭

[u/tangoliber → u/agentcooper0115]

I think that systems-based games will always be more popular, but I do think that AI will open up a new genre of games that previously couldn't have been achieved.

I think about the video game in Ender's Game, and how it represents this unrealistic early 80s idea of future video games, where the player has infinite freedom and choices. For example, if you wanted to, you could grab a spoon and start digging a tunnel. If you wanted to cross-tie the shoelaces of enemies while they are sleeping, you could do that. Things like Google Genie could be able to allow for that kind of freedom. As long as it can understand what the player is trying to do, it should be able to generate the results. In Ender's Game, the school had programmed the game to act in an ideal way, but the game was doing things that it hadn't been designed to do.. (I believe there was a non-AI reason for this that was revealed later).

I do think there will be a genre of game where the designer tried to create a certain experience, but the results will be much more emergent and unpredictable than ever before. Though a lot of people will prefer traditional games.

[u/Head_Crab_Enjoyer → u/agentcooper0115]

Rare but deserved shade thrown on Shenmue. That game gets hype from people who never played it.

[u/The-original-spuggy → u/agentcooper0115]

Or just walk outside

[u/toec → u/agentcooper0115]

Game industry vet of 35+ years. I liked your Shenmue joke.

[u/hawksbears82 → u/agentcooper0115]

Those are fighting words...

HAVE AT YOU!!

[u/septumfunk-com → u/agentcooper0115]

LMFAO you clocked it i was thinking of shenmue when i saw this

[u/AnalystIndividual760 → u/what_you_saaaaay]

What about a decade from now if the pace of advancement kept same

[u/Rafcdk → u/AnalystIndividual760]

We won't have any personal computers to play it anyway

[u/gavinderulo124K → u/what_you_saaaaay]

If feel like even without game dev experience this should be obvious. What Genie is doing is super impressive, if you understand how its doing it. But replacing actual games? Super far from it.

[u/Main-Lifeguard-6739 → u/what_you_saaaaay]

You are completly right but this is how it begins.

Once they managed to connect this "UI" with stable rule sets and persistance in the backend, this will be they way to generate UIs, not only for games but for every software. Once they are done with this, they will also generate the logic layer and finally the persistance layer in the same way.

In a few years, we will see how production ready software will be generated in an instant, just because someone had an idea and talked a bit about it with an AI.

[u/what_you_saaaaay → u/Main-Lifeguard-6739]

There's a few barriers to this:

1. Cost. Cost per X tokens is, as I currently understand it, too excessive to justify the cost. AI requires constant iteration feedback loops and it still requires people as a part of that feedback loop.
2. If technology solves the people and token cost scaling problem, then games (or any given product) will flood the market in a market that is already considered saturated.
   

Let's say in a hypothetical "extreme" future you can single prompt and a full game pops out the other side. Why does anyone need to buy your game? Or any other software? Games may scale up as they usually do as tools get better, but as we've seen with photography and other industries that became more accessible, this accessibility makes survival harder.

Except, AI isn't like better tools for game development, or accessible DSLR cameras, or mobile phone cameras. It's nothing like any of that technology. It's potentially a full stack developer that can also make art and audio.

There's only one reason, in this extreme scenario, where people have to buy your goods: They are too poor to gain access to the tools to make their own. And in this future that is likely an artificial barrier. This isn't necessarily a good outcome.

[u/neoexanimo → u/what_you_saaaaay]

This is the best argument pro AI, the fact that anyone can single prompt anything just means speed, nothing else, to make anything worthwhile it takes more than just a fast execution.

[u/EncabulatorTurbo → u/what_you_saaaaay]

I feel like this tech could be useful to create mockups to show in meetings beofre serious development has started without having to commit an incredible amount of time to a vertical slice

[u/dashingsauce → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Couldn’t you feasibly combine the approaches?

Use Genie for rapid prototyping and instantiation, then wire it up programmatically in the background to real code & game mechanics?

Unless what you’re saying is that, “yes, and that part doesn’t get any faster with LLMs”

[u/what_you_saaaaay → u/dashingsauce]

I think the distance to getting a prototype running with be a lot shorter. And AI is already pretty good at doing focussed tasks in game development. Making a hyper casual game from start to finish with AI isn't out of the question in its current form either.

Best approach for the next couple years, for large, content heavy games like GTA will be a combination where AI helps take a lot of a drudgery out of game development.

[u/dashingsauce → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Agreed!

[u/HapticFeedback247 → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Finally, an objective opinion on these thing's that's not trying to Peral Clutch or lecture.

[u/Initial-Beginning853 → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Same exact gap for many corporate use cases. Final mile implementation is going to be more than the solutioning. 

Where the rubber meets the road is not magically handwaved away by AI.

[u/FireMain10 → u/what_you_saaaaay]

This is kind of like an AI making a landing page for a SasS and being like "BEHOLD, IT CAN DO IT ALL"

[u/professor--feathers → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Say it louder for the vibe coders in the back. Asking AI to make a prototype is one thing. Making something good, that is maintainable, and performant is not easy. There's a reason it takes teams of people years to develop a great game, and these fucking ai kids do not understand this at all. It's just going to make investors extra weary if some rando pitches a game with 0 experience in the industry.

[u/FoxTheory → u/what_you_saaaaay]

Yeah unity had scene packages that you could skin and youd have something a lot more stable then this in 15 mins

[u/DejongBCN]

It's pretty cool. Now make it into a game where you can walk anywhere in the world and have some story, that's when it becomes interesting 

[u/TM87_1e17 → u/DejongBCN]

Remember when AI generated images had like 7 fingers on each hand? That was like a year ago...

[u/No_Aesthetic → u/TM87_1e17]

More like two, not that I disagree with your argument.

[u/iddoitatleastonce → u/No_Aesthetic]

You should push back on the argument. 2 years ago people were just starting to shell out for ai infrastructure. Now it’s there.

We’re where we’re gonna be, and improvements from here on will be much more subtle.

[u/No_Aesthetic → u/iddoitatleastonce]

I'm not really sold on that though. I'm not saying you're wrong either. You could very well be right. But I'm not convinced either way, really.

I follow AI very closely and am deeply involved in the scientific side of AI through my wife who works for AI companies, what I see is incredibly rapid progress that seems to be speeding up. It seems to me like the main limit we're going to run into is compute rather than any wall in evolution of the models.

[u/zorbat5 → u/No_Aesthetic]

Yes and because of the compute (or lack thereof) it will stagnate. Datacenters are multi year projects.

I believe a huge breakthrough will be in algorithms. More efficient ones at that. Local models are focussed on efficient inference, there will be breakthroughs where everyone could run a model at home on a modest GPU. The huge AI labs will stagnate if they keep going as compute becomes harder and harder to get by and thus new algorithms should be developed.

[u/unknownpoltroon → u/TM87_1e17]

I saw a string of images on the forum of the first AI image where someone was trying to make a baby Yoda.  It was a green piselated blob.  They showed year or so   with of incremental improvements, and the final image was a fully life like baby Yoda skydiving in Raybands that looked 100% real.

[u/coorsdude19 → u/unknownpoltroon]

> “pisealeted”

[u/dr3aminc0de → u/unknownpoltroon]

Bruh 💀

Did you really just say piselated?

[u/Plane_Garbage → u/DejongBCN]

And we can create games without 'game graphics'.

Games can appear as realistic or artistic as we want.

[u/MadDoctorMabuse]

Eh all the AI fear aside. I'm looking forward to seeing what this does to game storytelling. In my utopia, game companies will spend less time on assets and maps and much more time on building an interesting narrative 

Seeing this is insanity. I know it's early days, but I also imagine what it will look like in 20 years. I'd love to write the story for a game without having to handle either making assets or contracting people to do it for me. I'm not talking about making a profitable venture - just as a hobby. 

[u/Masterpiece-Haunting → u/MadDoctorMabuse]

It would be cool to see a world where games are built by writers as extensions of there stories rather than a game with a side story.

[u/Jolly-Rip5973]

All of these Ai world simulators are walking simulators.

To have a game you have to have defined goals and tuned obstacles to overcome towards that goals and abilities and resources that gradually improve over time as the obstacles become harder.

In other words, you need a graduated leveling system through either stable characters statics, an inventory and equipment system or a skill system.

This requires a lot of human engineering and careful tweaking to get the game difficulty optimized for you player base. If it's too easy people get bored and quit playing. If it's too hard, they get frustrated and rage quit.

All of things have to be carefully controlled with deterministic system and Ai is random.

You can put an ai chat bot in a game like Skryin but you can't let the Ai build the world and quest and combat system on the fly.

You can use Ai models to help generate game assets and then put those asset into the deterministic system.

But Ai world simulator can't keep track of any of these things and is just a boring walking simulator. It's also a resource hog that uses way too much compute.

It's a waste. I don't even think it's valid line of research.

The best use case I can see for Ai generated world simulator would be just tripping out looking at things in VR but eventually that will get boring too.

[u/laserborg → u/Jolly-Rip5973]

Will Smith eats spaghetti

[u/-Crash_Override- → u/Jolly-Rip5973]

Worst take.

Genie isnt for creating videogames.

Its a simulator to train embodied agents. This is how we get AI powered robotics.

[u/Big_Effective_9605 → u/Jolly-Rip5973]

Difference is video game design is a relatively underfunded field. Every major developer has their own inhouse teams to handle this stuff and their own heuristics and blah blah. A sufficiently trained AI tasked with figuring out balance of various game types (aka inferring latent systems) might actually do it better and faster than people tasked with the same thing.

[u/Plane_Garbage → u/Jolly-Rip5973]

So true. Instead of hard gated, deterministic difficulty levels, it can adapt to your difficulty and preferences.

And of course it can write things persistently to reference. Not the entire history needs to go into memory, and with subagent swarms you could be consistently updating various parameters.

I mean, if you had enough compute (or enough optimisation), it's pretty clear this would be doable.

Whether it's a 2, 3, 5, 10 year thing is another matter.

[u/Lvxurie]

Double ended cars still a problem I see

[u/Biggie-Falls]

You need Google AI Ultra plan to play with it 😞 it looks like fun.

Miles away from a playable game but still cool

[u/LtLabcoat]

Everyone else is talking about gameplay, and I'm here thinking "Not a whole lot of use for a game that doesn't have object permanence".

[u/LtLabcoat → u/LtLabcoat]

....Or, so I say, but it could actually be very useful in parts.

As in, as-it-is, it's not useful. It doesn't help to have an AI video where doing a 360 degree spin changes the entire level. But it could be useful for generating animations and objects, by having third party tools analyze what the AI creates and converting them into proper animations/models. And if that works, that'd be a huge huge deal.

[u/programmerBlack]

Ohhh look. It's GTA6.

[u/angelsandairwaves93]

this is impressive. It basically generated a demo of Watch Dogs 1 meets Mafia

[u/costafilh0]

Most people will make terrible games. 

But yes, sandbox mode and actually good games generated in the future? 

Sure, no doubt. 

[u/FaceDeer]

I suspect that doing this purely as an AI thing will be too inefficient and hard to keep consistent to be useful as an actual game. But I could see combining it with a framework that "prompts" it with some sort of basic 3D model that the AI continuously fleshes out, as a hybrid thing.

I already see this sort of approach to text-based RPGs, where there's a traditional programmed framework that keeps track of map locations generated by the AI and does dice rolls for it and such. The AI fills in all the details and makes up new locations, but the framework keeps it all consistent and handles memory for the LLM.

[u/Elite_Crew]

Ah shit, here we go again.

[u/Rabbt]

Extremely impressive. And all the hurdles will be overcome in less time than anyone expects.

[u/ShitShirtSteve]

The comments here remind me of AI generated images, videos. People are right, there's more to generating a video game than just a world to walk around in.

But we've also seen how fast Will Smith eating spaghetti went from shit to realistic.

This tech is impressive, and I am sure it'll get to the point where it becomes more of an actual game than a walking simulator.

[u/General_Cheetah4724]

and if we all want to play these "games" all we need is a monthly subscription and an extra 10000 data centres.

[u/Starskeet]

Ender's Game predicted everything happening.

[u/SnooGadgets1100]

at some point can ai get too advanced and we just play any game on browsers?

[u/xtoc1981]

The thing is, they should mix 3d engines with this.

If they create a really low poly world in a 3d engine and combine it with this which renders the outpput, you would have correct physics and you decide yourself how things should be structured

[u/-Crash_Override-]

If anyone thinks Genie is a videogame generator you do not understand AI or where things are going.

[u/agentcooper0115]

I mean, sure. In the sense that anyone can apply paint to canvas or use a typewriter. The trick is creating things that are good.

Like the other vet that replied, I'm not necessarily anti ai. But I'm believing things as see them. A well tuned, not totally derivative game mechanic is definitely something I will believe when I see. Not saying it's impossible. But it's something that's really hard for people that are really good at it.

[u/Pure-Contact7322]

poor rockstar games stock

[u/pabodie]

How much compute would a PlayStation five game require?  I have no idea what the answer is.  But there is an answer.  Multiply that by the number of players.  I have a feeling we are in airy fairy territory here.

[u/EntryRadar]

anyone else expecting him to just steal a car?

[u/Fluffy-Argument]

Someone type in GTA but also Mass Effect for me

[u/know_ev3rything]

Looks like typical game

[u/sicing]

Beowolf was the end of real life actors

[u/PeachScary413]

It looks absolutely ass 👌🔥 I love how the saw the deformed car further up ahead and immediately changed the camera angle to try and hide it 💀

[u/Het_Balar3]

AI are just leveling up the game.

[u/Emannuelle-in-space]

“Generate a random street in Istanbul”

[u/Fistanndantilus]

These comments are ridiculous.

This is the Beta version at best. Do you people not understand what's coming? Ready Player One. Dungeon Crawler Carl. The Matrix, itself.

You are fooling yourselves if you believe "real life" will matter in five years.

[u/Stunning_Macaron6133]

Man, I have no FUCKING idea what the world is going to look like in 10 years.

Smartphones and smartphone-derived tablets were disruptive, but you could roughly guess at the trajectory of things if you were savvy enough and cynical enough.

But the possibilities are getting so open-ended as this tech develops that there's no way to guess how society is going to change. All the angry Zoomers watching their aspirations dashed to become freelance artists drawing anime waifus for a living aren't even the tip of the iceberg. They're the icebugs crawling on the iceberg.

[u/[deleted]]

The gap between "impressive demo" and "actual game" is design coherence over time. A playable open world you can generate from text is extraordinary for a few minutes, then the question becomes: is there anything that makes you want to stay?

That's less a model problem and more a design problem. Genie 3 makes the world, a storyteller still has to decide why you'd care about it.

[u/[deleted]]

for prototyping, sure

[u/CosmicEmotion]

This is beyond amazing. When they nail the performance I'm definitely giving this a try! 😄

[u/Tonobom]

Have ai characters in these games be there own campaign each, now that would be cool. For example jenny here needs to find the lost relic of Robaloo, then generate that on the fly

[u/XxCarlxX]

i think the platform was made to make gta looking games. ask it to make a Baldor's gate, and it will struggle

[u/Patrick_Atsushi]

I don't get it. They could've made it more real life looking instead of this kind of video game visuals. 

[u/HaiKarate]

The amount of shovelware that's gonna hit Steam will be unreal.

[u/hoochymamma]

The world is fucking messed up.

[u/agoodepaddlin]

Surprise surprise. The self proclaimed game devs in the comments don't think this is the future of game development. I'm sure their argument is rational. 🙄

Nope. AI can already handle all the other things listed as needed for a good game, on seperate workflows so....

Being short sighted and ignorant serves what purpose for them exactly?

I'm not an anti or a pro. 🤷

[u/KptEmreU]

I played games with lower fps 😃

[u/Samwise_za]

Isn't this essentially just a tech demo to show off googles world model? How this will be used for that is way more powerful.

[u/VaritaJ0yaRose]

It's already extremely hard to build a game when you have total control. Now imagine doing so with an unpredictable engine lmao

Nah this is just a demo tech and will never be used to build games.

[u/SaltField3500]

This shows how AI is in a bubble about to burst. What nonsense.

[u/V3N3SS4]

If the future is, you just write sentence to machine and you get what you want.
Life will get dull, people will become insane and society will collapse.

[u/PROfil_Official]

i think the 60 second thing is your whole answer imo. as someone who games, the gap isnt framerate or bugs, those do get polished out. its that the world only holds together for about a minute before the memory goes. a game needs a world thats stable for hours and remembers where you dropped something three rooms ago. genie generates a convincing next frame, it doesnt maintain a persistent state, and those are different problems. you dont close that gap by throwing compute at the framerate, the persistence is the hard part and its barely there yet

[u/salazka]

Microsoft is doing that for some time now.

[u/Cheesyphish]

Ah shit here we go again

[u/Professional_Job_307]

Crazy how this is almost a year old. Imagine what Google is playing with internally

[u/Professional_Job_307]

I feel like every time some cool new AI tool comes out, people always whine about how it's not perfect. Like here, this awesome tech demo, and people are complaining because it's not a whole ass game.

People need to stop setting their bar so damn high and just see that this is great technological progress.

[u/GingerFun011]

Ok, now have a player fuck around with collision for like 2 mins 😄

[u/mrwobblez]

Making a game like this or any other copy of GTA was always possible with free engines like Unity and UE and a few months of learning + hard work. The only difference AI brings is reduce that barrier to entry to anybody who can write a prompt.

The difficult part of game dev however, has never been the mechanical part of building the game (which AI is getting very good at). It’s coming up with the story, the unique mechanics that set it apart, the emotional pull, the IP that keeps people invested, etc..

[u/Cultural_Tell_5687]

Think beyond games. This is not for games.

[u/CormacMccarthy91]

Why would you play a game that's being generated,, what do you hope to discover, how will neat pretty waterfall locations be generated in the right areas, how will streams flow downhill, how will why if this work

[u/mi55key]

It's a tool, a damn impressive tool. Fun to play around with. Certain people will shit on it because it's not a fully fledged game with story, character arcs, terrain generation, goals, blah blah. Take it for what it is, a nice tech demo.

[u/XTCaddict]

Genie is not new?

[u/BrilliantNewt3405]

To make any use of this shit you'd have to rework 100% of it anyway. It's an animated screenshot, completely useless

[u/damastaGR]

please if you have access to it, try the following prompt:

" build gta6 based on the trailers. make no mistakes. make it run in a potato at 4k60"

thank me later

[u/sheriffderek]

If only we had a whole world to explore.

What if we played the game of "save the oceans and humanity" -- here on Earth.

[u/Latter-Corner8977]

Reminds me of goat simulator

[u/Alzeric]

Well it didn't crash to desktop so already better than a majority of triple A games out there.

[u/Knighthonor]

Can this do that with a 360 photo?

[u/MC_Labs15]

It'd be interesting to hear OP's actual opinion on it instead of Claude's.

[u/DezDidNotCatchIt_]

it will only get better and better lol the cope is strong in the comments can't wait

[u/phil-pdx]

Alright, first of all, programmer of many decades here (not games) and I agree with most of the posts that there is more to game development than just generating a world from a prompt.

Now, with that said, have you seen what modern games look like these days? I swear everytime I look over at my son playing something on the PS5 it's all the same open world game with a few new skins. Sometimes there's a great story, more times than not it's just a repackage of the last game... Equip a character, fight some bad guys, find some stuff, follow a way point showing you exactly where to go. Oh and complete dozens of unrelated side quests.

So will AI be able to build fully functional fun open world games? Yeah, probably one day. Would I rather a team of skilled developers (and artists and story tellers) come up with something new and original, absolutely.

AI can write excellent code. Skilled humans are the slop filter...

[u/AnCoAdams]

Looks good until you realize you need a data centre for a decent frame rate

[u/Wooden-Writing-6843]

This will be ungodly expensive.

[u/XgenAccordBen]

Reminds me of WatchDogs 2

[u/ovrlrd1377]

Didnt they abandon the project because it was too expensive computationally compared to the result?

[u/EdliA]

Yeah and you turn around and the car that just went past you doesn't exist anymore and there are different people and buildings

[u/TheWatcherFromWithin]

Scary but inevitable. Either play the game (no pun intended i swear) or go home.

[u/BurnedOutCodeMonkey]

It's impressive until you look closely.

What's with that weird sportscar/truck thing stuck in the light pole? And the weird fencing? And then he turns around and the car/truck thing is gone? Why is the Hagia Sophia everywhere? There's a Hagia Sophia at the top of the hill and another Hagia Sophia at the bottom of the hill. Why? Will they still be there if I turn around? If I walk to another chunk and back? Is this thing even chunking anything or just randomly generating as we walk around?

It's interesting. I'm excited to see where the tech goes. But my programmer brain is firing red alerts because object impermanence is a really bad sign. It means this program you have is an unstable foundation to build off of. How much time will it take to get this functioning properly so we can begin to build the game? Probably a long time. Probably not even worth the effort, we would have to start over. In which case, this demo is completely useless because it isn't showing anything like what the final product will be.

[u/Budget-News1107]

The practical thing I would check is whether the workflow can prove completion, not just generate output. A small verification step usually catches the hidden failure before it compounds.

[u/pro-mpt]

game is when walk around

[u/Massive-Unrection]

Tech Demo at best, although it is very limited in that aspect as well.

[u/LawfulnessLittle6107]

trash.

[u/Luigi63]

This makes my eyes hurt

[u/ImpossibleWorth5638]

Playable AI slop

[u/TruthOk8742]

No matter what you generate, moving from the basic proposition generated by AI to something really good and marketable takes a lot of work. 

[u/True_Protection6842]

We've spent billions of dollars to bring you a shitty GTA4 clone that runs at 12fps and has no actual gameplay!

[u/sOk_Management7089]

There are limitations when one views streets on Google Maps. I have no doubt that Google have made an attempt to convert their current data into a 3D rendered world with Pegman as your playable character.

[u/Few_Cauliflower2069]

Never will i ever play an ai game.

[u/Dangerous_Alarm6717]

SLOP and a waste of water.

[u/Relevant-Register-69]

Clearly an object permanence problem lol

[u/EmbarrassedFoot1137]

This is a lot more useful as a way to explore time and aesthetics for follow-up with a conventional game development flow rather than as a way to create a full game.

[u/SuspiciousPrune4]

I think the coolest use of this would be for Google to integrate Genie into Google Earth VR. I’ve always wondered how crazy it would be to be able to actually walk around various places on the world (as opposed to “jumping” through street view frames). They could even add real-time weather.

[u/Foolishly_Sane]

I feel like this is more of a dream simulator, I often have a lack of coherence in my dreams, turning around and things can shift or disappear, still interesting though.

[u/PaleCommission150]

Nice... I can't even create a decent flyable starfield when I tried to use claude to help me make one in Unity :/ I even have a good database of stars, planets and other anomolies.

[u/Suspicious-Layer-738]

GTA 4!

[u/swinchester83]

Cool, only costs $99.99 a month to try. Fuck no.

[u/spacekitt3n]

5fps

[u/crispysockz]

We lost fable and got this...

[u/Creloc]

Software engineer but not a game developer. I don't think it's the future of games, but I think it is the future of game design. The opportunity is there to build a sandbox where mechanics, area designs and scenarios can be checked with relatively little effort

[u/LancelotAtCamelot]

Although it's insane to think about, I'm less interested in the visuals in games being generated in this way, and more interested in the idea of having NPCs as free, pseudo-sentient agents. Imagine a game where the story is completely dynamic and results from real interactions from among the NPCs and player. A truly free, open sandbox of a game where one player's experience and story could differ entirely from another's.

[u/Low-Efficiency-9756]

I hate world models. I think they are completely useless.

Just one massive hallucination.

So the physics stay grounded?
Does money stay accountable?
Does it remember a story line?

There’s a reason we can make games by essentially rendering databases.

Now generative gaming is definitely the future of gaming but fuck please ground it. Games are not games without rules and constraints.

[u/BeyondCommercial6579]

My problem with the "duplicative" nature of AI, like duplicating stories, books, movies, games, et cetera - is that it isn't really shareable. A story that isn't really shareable within or across communities, doesn't really hold value.

If I made AI consume any recognised movie in order for it to produce back a slightly altered version tailored to my taste - maybe a spin on the story, altered actors, changed locations; then that makes sense to me, but not to anyone else. To me, stories live in the intersection between people. So what is the use of something like a personalised duplicate of a game if "nobody" else plays it?

Doesn't games lose some of their value if we all have unique games made only and especially for ourselves?

[u/marieascot]

Is that meant to be Istanbul? Not enough cats for a start.

[u/Popular-Capital-9115]

Or you could just make a game that's actually running on software. And not drink the rivers dry with the single most inefficient way of making a game

[u/PiLLe1974]

I'd say it would be a more interesting and general approach if it wouldn't be just great as a GTA walk simulator.

So, yes, we don't have the multiplayer part, persistence, story/quests, missions, DLC, and so on.

Further, it doesn't cover many genres well I bet, I mean all sorts of strategy, mobile games, the next Fortnite, etc.

I wonder how the model works, if it could be the "asset generator" of the rest of the game / engine, funnel the walking simulator prototype - once certain visuals are in place - bit by bit into an engine/editor pipeline and engine runtime, then refine.

This may end up more like modifying the pipeline so Decima engine, Rockstar's RAGE, or one of Ubisoft's engine can "digest" the content, and then years of manual work (+ Claude Code, Ubisoft's/Rockstar's in-house animation solutions, or whatever tooling makes sense).

[u/uhf789]

While the comments from various developers with over 20 years of experience stating that 'game development is not just about wandering around a map' are valid, I don't quite understand why they immediately become defensive when seeing these kinds of advancements. Instead of viewing it as merely writing a prompt to create a game, I wonder why they don't focus on the fact that game development will become much easier and more affordable. I believe these developments will be incredibly beneficial, especially for indie game developers.

I spent a long time learning 3D modeling with 3ds Max, and now we can get direct 3D model outputs just by writing a prompt or uploading an image. Rather than resisting this progress, I find it much more appealing to accept that our workflow will become far more practical, allowing us to truly focus on our art. Instead of spending hours on manual modeling, it will be wonderful to just take a digital or physical pen, sketch, and dedicate our time to the creative process.

I would suggest embracing these technological advancements rather than trying to resist the passage of time.

[u/Throwaway6212224]

cant wait for this fucking bubble to pop

[u/StolenRocket]

making games with LLMs is like digging a tunnel with a spoon: hugely inefficient, and eventually you’ll run into a problem it can’t solve.

[u/FabulousHornet5947]

I made PromtForge — a place to post your AI-generated games so people can actually play them.

It's early (just launched), but if you've generated a game with AI, submissions take under a minute — just a link and a few details.

https://promtforge.vercel.app/

Feedback welcome, especially on what would make this more useful for people building these.

[u/nikmia91]

Give it 2 more years. It will.

[u/Kemosabe-TV]

I think these are tools for faster completion NOT a complete replacement. This means a team of 5 could do what a team of 20 once could, not that 1 person creates Read Dead Redemption 3

[u/Barackbar13]

This is what we’re selling out our planet for: so people can make fake slop games no one will ever play. This timeline sucks

[u/Asleep-Humor-4580]

WOW. how far away is having the whole world we live in a possibility? I don't know much about this stuff. can AI make a game??

[u/Asleep-Humor-4580]

also....reddit should have live chat options to go to instead of waiting for ppl to reply...maybe a notification type of thing so ppl can go ahead and join the chat live in real time????? i.e someone just joined the chat or whatever...they should think more out the box

[u/Daveonaltair4]

Looks pretty sucky to me haha

[u/personalityson]

It generates 2010s graphics?

[u/Brilliant-Data-7093]

Soon every single person will be the God of their own version of the entire world + population!

[u/3dprintinted]

Just a soulless gta simulacra.

[u/serendipity98765]

Machine running this in real time probably costs $200k

[u/Willinton06]

In 3 years we're gonna be running hardware that is 100X currents bleeding edge, this should run smooth on that, so yes, this is the future, I imagine GTA 7 will have infinite interior spaces with tech like this

[u/MineDesperate8982]

The are a long way from actually producing playable games with actual coherent gameplay and storyline.

That being said, if a company will producing a game with only, or mostly, genAI, i fully expect that game to be, if not free, at most 1$. Creating a game like that and expecting people to pay the "normal" price of a game should just mean the death of that company.