Generative AI (GenAI) has been one of the most controversial topics in the video game industry in recent years, and will likely continue to hold that spot for the foreseeable future. Whether you think GenAI has a place in game development or not, what’s clear from game engine makers like Unity is that users who want to use it in the process of making their games will have that option.
Spotted by GameDeveloper, in Unity’s recent earnings call for its fourth quarter financial report, not only does Unity claim that “AI-driven authoring” is a “major area of focus” for the company, but it sees the potential of the technology being its ability to “enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only.”
The statement comes from Unity’s chief executive officer, Matt Bromberg, who has been at the head of the company since taking over for the interim chief executive officer James M. Whitehurst, who took over from John Riccitiello after the company’s abysmal runtime fee fiasco in 2023.
“AI-driven authoring is our second major area of focus for 2026,” says Bromberg. “At the Game Developer Conference in March, we’ll be unveiling a beta of the new upgraded Unity AI, which will enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform – so it’s simple to move from prototype to finished product.”
Bromberg continues, “This assistant will be powered by our unique understanding of the project context and our runtime, while leveraging the best frontier models that exist. We believe together this combination will provide more efficient, more effective results to game developers than general-purpose models alone.”
Bromberg would add that he believes the technology will go further in efforts to “democratize” game development, and “remove as much friction from the creative process as possible, becoming the universal bridge between the first spark of creativity and a successful, scalable, and enduring digital experience.”
Unity isn’t the only company claiming it has GenAI technology that can make games through prompts. Google’s Project Genie (despite being a self-admitted experiment) was enough to send the share prices of major game companies plummeting. While that may have more to do with investors not understanding how video games are made and what technology like Project Genie lacks, the idea of games being prompted into existence is already out there.
For it to now come from the company behind one of the most popular game-making engines carries far more weight than it did coming from Google, and it’ll be interesting, to say the least, to see how markets react when the new beta branch is revealed at GDC 2026.
Still, regardless of the stock market’s reaction, it’s unlikely consumers will react positively to a game that a developer admits was made entirely through prompts. Even executives pushing for GenAI technology can admit that no one wants “GenAI slop.” It’s difficult to believe that the ability to prompt games into being would lead to anything but more AI-slop on gaming platforms.
There’s also the fact that, while some executives in the industry might see GenAI as the next-best thing that’ll forever change the industry, the biggest video games in the industry are differentiated from the rest of the pack because they are handcrafted experiences. And that’s without getting into recent reports that show just how much disdain developers who are being forced to use GenAI have for the technology.
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