Take-Two CEO says it’s ‘laughable’ to say AI like Google Project Genie can create hit games at the press of a button

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says he finds it “laughable” to suggest that AI tools like Google’s Project Genie can create hit video games.

In January, Google announced that it had started rolling out a prototype version of Project Genie, an AI tool that lets users generate their own playable worlds by typing in prompts.

Following the rollout of the tool, a number of video game companies on the Nasdaq stock exchange saw notable drops in their share price, including Unity, CD Projekt, Nintendo, Roblox and Zelnick’s company Take-Two.

Now, in an interview with The Game Business, Zelnick says the idea that Project Genie or similar tools can be used to challenge Take-Two and create games on the same level as Grand Theft Auto is out of the question.

When asked whether tools like Project Genie could level the playing field for people looking to create games like GTA, Zelnick replied: “Not even the littlest bit.”

“There’s already plenty of technology out there that allow people to create video games,” he explained, “and as a result, thousands of video games are created every year. And yet the hits all cluster among the large entertainment companies, almost entirely, and now and then, an indie, which is generally speaking well-funded and pretty robust in and of itself.

“The notion that somehow new tools would allow an individual to push a button and generate a hit and bring it to many millions of consumers around the world, it’s a laughable notion. It’s just never been the case with entertainment.

“Right now [in music] there are programs that allow you to put out a prompt and get a professionally recorded song spit back out at you. It sounds like a song, but I defy you to listen to it more than once. It’s great to send as a greeting card to your partner on their birthday, but that’s about it.”

Elsewhere in the discussion, Zelnick expressed surprise at the numerous share price drops following the announcement of Project Genie, saying AI tools should be considered a benefit for developers (and therefore increase the value of the companies using them), rather than a rival which could lead to a drop in company value.

“I was kind-of stunned by the market’s reaction, because its reaction was somehow seeing it as a threat to what we do, when it’s quite obvious that creation tools are beneficial for our industry,” he said.

“I think the bear case for big entertainment companies is somehow that AI tools will mean everyone can create hits, but that doesn’t stand to reason. These tools may help you create assets, but that won’t help you create hits.

“There are loads of assets out there now. It doesn’t matter if you push a button to create an asset, or it takes you six weeks, at the end of the day, you have an asset. And thousands of mobile games are launched every year, and there are only a handful of hits.

“Equally, you can create assets that might look like a big release, that might look like NBA 2K or EA Sports FC. But creating a hit of that magnitude is a completely different animal and does require human engagement and creativity.”

Last year Zelnick said the impact of AI on the development of games like Grand Theft Auto remains limited, because such models inherently lack creativity.

“Whether people in Silicon Valley like to hear this or not, AI is big datasets, with lots of compute, attached to a large language model,” he said in October. “So what are datasets by definition? They’re backward-looking.”