ETtech Explainer | Here’s how Google Genie AI will revolutionise gaming

Google DeepMind, artificial intelligence (AI) research arm of Google, has released Genie, an image-to-video AI model that can generate fully interactive, playable games from real world images or even human-made sketches.

The model is trained on 200,000 hours of unsupervised public internet gaming videos and can generate video games from a single prompt or image.

What is Genie?

Genie stands for Generative Interactive Environments, an 11-billion-parameter AI model trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled internet videos.

It can create action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, images, photos and handmade sketches.

Experts believe it is only a matter of time that AI will be able to create AAA-rated games.

How is it different?
Although the model is not publicly available, AI researchers said that despite not being trained on action or text annotations, Genie’s foundation model can determine who the main character is and enable a user to control that character in the generated world.

It enables users to act in the generated environments on a frame-by-frame basis despite training without any action labels or requirements. This is the closest AI models have got to artificial general intelligence (AGI) – or ability to learn, think and act like humans, some experts said.

How is it relevant to game developers?
“As a game developer, I'm fascinated by the potential of Google Genie,” said Kashyap Reddy, cofounder and CEO of Indian game startup Hitwicket. “Genie’s ability to generate games from concepts is quite interesting which would empower aspiring developers and potentially lead to a surge of creative game ideas.”

Roby John, CEO and cofounder of SuperGaming, the developer of Indus Battle Royale game, said, “It'll be interesting to see if Genie would change the game development landscape given that it's just launched. That said, it could find a place in our workflow to help us rapidly prototype some of our ideas that would make our upcoming game Indus Battle Royale a richer, immersive experience.”

What are the challenges it faces?
Genie has some challenges and faces tough competition from incumbent tools such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Genie is currently limited to creating games only at the rate of 1 FPS (frame per second), which means the video will change an image per second, giving a slow playback.

“In the Indian market, Genie's potential adoption is a double-edged sword. While it could offer cost-effective prototyping for smaller studios, it faces challenges like technical infrastructure limitations and competition from established titles,” Hitwicket’s Reddy said. “Overall, Genie represents an exciting development, but its long-term impact on gaming studios remains to be seen,” he added.