Google released a brand new AI testing tool last Thursday called The Genie Project. Friday, video game stocks go down as a result. Gaming giants like Unity Software, Roblox, Take-Two, and AppLovin have all felt the effects of Project Genie, at least on Wall Street.
Project Genie, currently only available to subscribers to Google’s $249-a-month AI Ultra plan, is a new world-class artificial intelligence model from the company’s DeepMind research lab. Project Genie allows users to create interactive virtual worlds. Using nothing but text and image input, Project Genie users can create not only environments, but characters that interact realistically with virtual space.
Looking at the others examples of Project Genie at actionit’s easy to see why investors who are already bullish on AI can feel it the same about the power of this tool the implications for game developers.
At Reddit and X, users are trading examples of their favorite Project Genie worlds:
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Riley Goodside, a staff engineer at Google DeepMind, share the video shows a 3D box of cigarettes coming to life as Goodside moves it to the ground floor of an underground station. According to Goodside, he gave the Genie 3 model the “34th Street-Penn Station” environmental instructions and the character’s “discarded cigarette pack”, along with the first frame of the scene produced with Nano Banana Pro.
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Goodside explained that users have a lot of control over what is generated with the image used in the first frame, but less control over where the user moves their character around the world.
Some of those limitations become more apparent in the some examples, like what Project Genie produced for a character trying to look in a mirror.
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Project Genie also seems to treat secondary characters as inanimate objects others the rest examples shared on social media X.
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And like other productive AI tools, it seems there will be a clear cut copyright issues and other generated content.
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Some industry heads, like Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg, don’t seem too concerned about global models replacing game engines, per Bromberg. committing a crime that they will develop output from experienced game developers.
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Still, it’s still early days for Project Genie, and it’s already capable of producing detailed “worlds.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringes Ziff Davis’s copyright in training and using its AI programs.
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