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.

  • utopiah@lemmy.world
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    5 days 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
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    6 days 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.

    • Abundance114@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I agree, and lowering the cost of entry to the game development market means more games and better games for all of us.

      • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days ago

        More games? Yes.

        Better games? Very unlikely.

        There are already 99 slop games for every good game.

        • Abundance114@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          If everyone in the world suddenly created a video game and 99.999% of them are garbage, but 0.001% of them were good, that’s still 8,000,000 good games.

          Vastly increasing the number of video games released undoubtedly leads to more good games. The problem at that point is more finding them rather than questioning whether or not they exist.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 days 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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        5 days 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
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      6 days 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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        5 days 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
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      6 days 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.

    • ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      The expert systems that the console manufacturers supply to developers can already do this sort of thing.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days 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.

  • LostWanderer@fedia.io
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    6 days 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.

    • underisk@lemmy.ml
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      6 days 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).

  • Hetare King@piefed.social
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Hmmm. let’s build something we know and take some time, and know how to modify and build off it, or! we could spitball into the shit machine and it can shit us out a shit we don’t know how any of the shit in it works and then spend twelve times as long untangling its web. SHIT MACHINE AHOY!

  • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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    6 days 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.

  • criss_cross@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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
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      6 days ago

      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
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        6 days ago

        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.

          • criss_cross@lemmy.world
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            6 days 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.

    • ByteOnBikes@discuss.online
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      6 days 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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        6 days 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.

        • Quantenteilchen@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 days ago

          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)