Horizon (official site) has always struggled more with finding players than with finding things for them to do. In early 2022 it reportedly hit 300,000 monthly users, while Roblox today counts 123 million daily active users. Meta’s newest attempt to close that gap: have AI generate the games, then surface them to people on Facebook and Instagram.
On Monday, Meta revealed two development tools that convert AI prompts into games for Horizon, its social platform. Horizon Create is an app for mobile devices, while Horizon Studio is browser-based and offers more granular control. Both are arriving in early access, and a waitlist is already open for sign-ups.
Distribution is the real story, not the tools
Turning a prompt into a game is the eye-catching part, but the more significant shift is where those games will be seen. According to Meta, published games built with Horizon Create and Horizon Studio are eligible for recommendation on Facebook and Instagram, and users will be able to play them directly in those apps.
“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 said. “Your game lives natively in the feeds where people already discover content and connect with friends.”
That boost isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Meta said extra reach will go to games that are “engaging, stable, culturally relevant, and keep players coming back.” In other words, an algorithm sits between a creator’s work and those feeds, and it’s Meta that defines what culturally relevant means.
On paper, at least, these are supposed to be proper games
There’s good reason to doubt that a wave of AI-made games will hold players the way handcrafted titles can. Even so, Meta is aiming higher than a playable tech demo. By comparison, Google’s Project Genie produces short interactive experiences that feel hollow, whereas Meta’s pitch includes the underlying structure that gives a game replay value.
“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 said in a blog post.
That’s an ambitious set of promises. Human designers find balanced difficulty tough to nail, so it’s fair to hold off on believing a prompt can manage it until a few of these games have actually been played. For now, the blog post is all there is to go on until early access widens.
Roblox beat Meta to it
The timing is hardly accidental. Roblox, which operates a comparable platform and is far more popular than Horizon, is pushing hard into AI-assisted development as well, including a feature in its mobile app that likewise builds games from a prompt.
That means Meta isn’t pioneering anything on the tooling front. What it has that Roblox lacks is Instagram and Facebook — billions of scrolling users Roblox can’t reach without first getting them to install an app.
Horizon’s identity keeps shifting
Horizon began as a VR app. Meta recently repositioned it to center primarily on mobile, and AI is now becoming a major piece of it too — consistent with a company that has been adding AI to almost every product it runs.
More tools for quickly building games could give Horizon users more to play. Whether any of that content is good enough to keep them around is another matter entirely, and closing the distance between 300,000 monthly users and Roblox’s 123 million daily users is a tall order. Anyone curious can join the waitlist and try Horizon Create on their phone — just expect early access software, because that’s exactly what Meta is releasing.