Future of gaming?

So today I was looking around the future of gaming, Genie 3, which made the news. For those who don't know, this is what people were already able to achieve with it:

Which is actually impressive and can be overwhelming. You can generate a complete world from just a prompt and an image of the game you want to base it on, and it is consistent to some degree. This is crazy what you can achieve there. These results are mind-blowing, but the fact that you can recreate Fortnite, Last of Us, and Zelda gameplay in a matter of seconds (I expect that generation will take some time, but a few seconds of user input) is kind of scary. Similar to this video, where some results have a reference image.


There is Drake from Uncharted playing in the picture around 0:50. We can assume that someone put him in the prompt, or maybe not. This problem is also mentioned here:


It is kind of scary to think about it. So I started thinking about how much it costs Google to make this 60-second gameplay. So I asked its AI model, because why not: 
"Implicit Compute Cost: Industry experts estimate that running such real-time world models is extremely expensive, with some suggesting that at scale, generative games could cost as much as $150 per hour to run."

Then I asked how much it would cost to generate a game like Skyrim. Just as a reference, it mentions that the cost of its production was 85M$-100M$.

If we look at the active daily playerbase in early 2026:
  • Concurrent Players: Roughly 30,000 players are active at any given moment on Steam alone.
  • Hourly Running Cost: To keep Genie 3 running for 30,000 simultaneous players would cost $4.5 Million per hour.
  • Annual Operation: Maintaining this active playerbase for one year would cost approximately $39.4 Billion.

Then it also added: 

Efficiency Gap: Running the game via Genie 3 for just 20,000 players for one month would exceed the entire 4-year development budget of the original game.

Now, looking at the player stats of Skyrim, some show that there were more than 250,000 players at the start. Based on the given Hourly Running Cost, this gives us a simple equation: 

(250,000 /30,000) * 4.5M

Which would add up to roughly $37.5 milions / Hour. The thing about AI models it don't care what game you create, it uses the same model, so the cost of running photorealistic games and some retro games is probably constant.

Some may say, sure, but the cost will go down for sure. And this is true, but even if they cut it by a hundred, this will still be $375K, so playing the whole 40h experience for 250K players would be 1.5M. And this is only a single game, while if there were would be a there would be milions of players playing at the same and every million players would give 6M.

There is also a problem that if the whole content is generated, how to build a consistent experience that can be replicated for different players? This would also have replayability, single use may have repeated the same game, and if it is fully generated, it may be impossible. Then there is the problem of the story being interesting, interesting dialogue, recognizable characters, good level design, etc....

There is also legal stuff about showing other people's work in the generated content. Nintendo will not be happy with seeing their characters in the games. So what we see is impressive, but the more I think about the calmer I am about games being created by humans. 

What is your opinion about it?

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