Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts.

Google's Genie AI is nothing new (we've been reporting on its existence [1]since 2024 ), but its appearance in [2]Project Genie , now available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US, is.

Like many of Google's other experimental efforts, Project Genie is rolling out through [3]Google Labs , where users can generate and explore short interactive environments from text or image prompts. Built on DeepMind's Genie 3 world-model research, the prototype lets users move through AI-generated scenes in real time and regenerate variations using revised prompts, rather than serving as a full game engine or production tool.

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[5]Youtube Video

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Demos shown on Google's Project Genie [8]website show various examples, like a cat exploring a living room from the back of a Roomba, a car exploring the surface of a rocky moon, and a person in a wingsuit flying down the side of a mountain. All of the worlds can be navigated in real time, and while they're generated as characters move through them, the worlds are consistent, so backtracking won't result in new areas being generated on top of old ones. Any changes an agent makes to the world will remain, at least for as long as the hardware rendering the world retains space in its memory.

"Genie 3 environments are … 'auto-regressive' – created frame by frame based on the world description and user actions," Google explains on Genie's website. "The environments remain largely consistent for several minutes, with memory recalling changes from specific interactions for up to a minute."

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After those few minutes, however, things get a bit tricky.

"The model can support a few minutes of continuous interaction, rather than extended hours," Google said, noting elsewhere that generation is currently limited to 60 seconds, though it's not clear what happens after time is up. A Google spokesperson told The Register that Genie can create renderings for longer than 60 seconds, but the company "found 60 seconds provides a high quality and consistent world, and it gives people enough time to explore and experience the environment."

Google told us that world consistency will last through a whole session. It's not clear if Google will extend session time later. Regardless, that's not Genie's only current limitation.

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Agents interacting with the generated worlds can only perform a limited range of actions for now, and multiple models in the same world have trouble interacting. Genie also has trouble rendering legible text, can't really simulate real-world locations accurately (it's not like Google has a [11]massive collection of 3D maps of notable locations, after all), and it says that agents sometimes lag and don't respond properly to controls.

In addition, "A few of the Genie 3 model capabilities we announced in August, such as promptable events that change the world as you explore it, are not yet included in this prototype," Google added.

Still, the company said it expects Genie to offer a path toward automated general intelligence, which it says needs to be able to interact with evolving worlds in order to properly reason.

"A world model simulates the dynamics of an environment, predicting how they evolve and how actions affect them," the company said of Genie. "While Google DeepMind has a history of agents for specific environments like Chess or Go, building AGI requires systems that navigate the diversity of the real world."

Game devs, beware: The Genie is out of the bottle

Before it helps Google develop AGI, the company also sees uses for Genie in the gaming industry, something that ought to concern the already-struggling developers in that space.

While Genie "is not a game engine and can’t create a full game experience," a Google spokesperson told The Register , "we are excited to see the potential to augment the creative process, enhancing ideation, and speeding up prototyping."

According to a [12]report from Informa's Game Developers Conference published this week, 33 percent of surveyed US game developers, and 28 percent globally, reported being subject to at least one layoff in the past two years. Half of these game devs also said that their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the past 12 months.

[13]'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

[14]Microsoft boffins promise entire game worlds made from AI slop

[15]New Google AI model maps world in 10-meter squares for machines to read

[16]Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

In other words, the gaming space is suffering, and many are worried AI will only add to that.

Of the game industry professionals surveyed by GDC, 52 percent said they think AI is having a negative impact on the games industry. That's a sharp increase from last year, when 30 percent of respondents said the same. The year before that, just 18 percent expressed negative feelings about generative AI in the games industry.

Professionals in visual and technical art, game design and narrative, and programming roles held the most unfavorable views of AI.

In the words of one machine learning ops employee in the gaming space, however, an AI like Genie is coming for the gaming industry.

"We are intentionally working on a platform that will put all game devs out of work and allow kids to prompt and direct their own content," the GDC study quotes the respondent as saying.

It might have its rough edges and limitations now, but given the speed of AI product improvement, Genie could soon make that prediction come true. ®

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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/google_deepmind_weather_model/

[2] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-deepmind/project-genie/

[3] https://labs.google/projectgenie

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aXvmmuQwGnFUsOJROngisQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE

[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aXvmmuQwGnFUsOJROngisQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aXvmmuQwGnFUsOJROngisQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[8] https://deepmind.google/models/genie/

[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aXvmmuQwGnFUsOJROngisQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aXvmmuQwGnFUsOJROngisQAAAAA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2014/04/23/google_adds_a_sense_of_history_to_street_view_with_archive_footage/

[12] https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-2026-state-of-the-game-industry-reveals-impact-of-layoffs-generative-ai-and-more/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/26/ai_is_like_adventure_games/

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/19/microsoft_genai_game_dev_model/

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/31/google_ai_maps_world/

[16] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/19/ai_force_feeding/

[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/