Meta is going to let you build games with AI right on your phone

Meta has a new plan to get people to make games for its Horizon social platform. The company today announced two new development tools that will let you create games with AI prompts: Horizon Create, a mobile app, and Horizon Studio, a browser app that offers more granular controls. The apps will be available in early access, and interested users can sign up for a waitlist.

Horizon has struggled as a platform, but Meta has a plan to give these new Horizon games significantly more reach: It’s going to let published games made with Horizon Create and Horizon Studio get recommended on Facebook and Instagram, where they also will be playable.

“Someone scrolling through Instagram can tap a clip of your game and be in a multiplayer session within seconds, without needing to download an app or being redirected,” Meta says. “Your game lives natively in the feeds where people already discover content and connect with friends.” Games that are “engaging, stable, culturally relevant, and keep players coming back” will get more reach, according to the company.

The company’s announcement comes as Roblox, a similar platform to Horizon that is vastly more popular, is also making a significant push into AI-powered development, including a feature in its mobile app that similarly allows users to generate games with a prompt.

Meta’s news about Horizon, which launched as a VR app, follows a recent pivot to primarily focus on mobile. With Meta stuffing AI into basically everything it can, it’s perhaps no surprise that AI is becoming a big part of Horizon as well.

Giving people the tools to quickly make those could give people more options for things to play. I’m pretty skeptical that a bunch of AI-generated games will be as engaging as a handcrafted experience, but the games made in Create and Studio sound as if they’ll at least have the elements of video games (unlike Google’s Project Genie, which can create brief but empty AI-generated interactive experiences). “Both enable creators to turn any idea into a complete 2D or 3D mobile game, complete with progression systems, balanced difficulty, art direction, multiplayer, and more, then refine every element to their standards,” Meta says in a blog post.

Meta also likely has a very long way to go to reach the scale of Roblox, which has 123 million daily active users. Horizon, by contrast, hasn’t ever really taken off; The Verge reported in early 2022 that it hit 300,000 monthly users.