Two months have passed since Project Genie was unveiled, yet Google’s AI tool is still sending shockwaves through the gaming industry. Even without delivering anything truly meaningful so far, the promise alone was enough to rattle the market and put several major companies under pressure.

Two months have gone by since Google introduced Project Genie, a tool included in its AI Ultra subscription plan in the United States that, according to the company, would allow users to create and explore interactive worlds from text or images. In plain terms, that meant Google was suggesting that artificial intelligence could also be used to create video games.

The stock market reaction was immediate. Within a few hours, Take-Two fell 10%, Roblox dropped by more than 12%, and Unity suffered the hardest blow with a 21% decline, driven by fears of accelerated disruption. Alphabet, for its part, closed that day at 293.49 euros per share, but two months later the picture looks very different: it is now hovering around 243.30 euros, down nearly 17%.

Before sliding to its current level, Alphabet had actually climbed to a 52-week high of 303.45 euros per share, boosted by the announcement of Sora and the broader investor frenzy around AI. Since the reveal of Project Genie, however, several gaming companies have argued that Google’s tool is built more on empty promises than on anything substantial, and that skepticism has ended up cooling much of the initial excitement.

What happened to Take-Two, Roblox, and Unity?

The first major corporate reaction came from Take-Two. Its executives stressed that Project Genie is still in a very early stage and, in fact, does not even compete in the same league as a traditional engine. To reinforce that point with hard numbers, the company raised its annual forecast to 5.8 billion euros, while its off-market share price rose by more than 5%.

Roblox, meanwhile, chose a different path and accelerated its own messaging by launching a generative AI tool capable of creating functional models inside the game. Unity, another company badly shaken by the market reaction, tried to calm the panic through the words of its CEO, Matthew Bomberg. According to him, world models complement game engines rather than replace them, because they cannot generate meaningful action on their own without negatively affecting the result.

Two months after the announcement, Project Genie still has not produced anything especially noteworthy, and the three companies mentioned above continue to feel the effects. Take-Two is now hovering around 168.75 euros, Roblox around 46.67 euros, and Unity around 14.85 euros, all well below their January closing prices. The most telling part of the whole story, however, is that despite these setbacks, AI remains a central force in the industry, still present in demonstrations, talks, and virtually every major discussion around the future of gaming.

Source: 3DJuegos