According to Bloomberg Business, shares of Unity Software Inc. plunged as much as 28% on Friday, March 15, marking its worst single-day drop since 2022. The selloff came as Google began rolling out Project Genie, an AI tool that allows users to create interactive worlds for $250 per month. Other major game stocks fell sharply too, with Take-Two Interactive down 9.3%, CD Projekt SA off 8.0%, and Roblox Corp. dropping 15%. Analyst Dylan Becker of William Blair called the reaction a “shoot first and ask questions later” response to AI uncertainty. The fear is that tools like Genie could disrupt the game engine market, where Unity’s pro subscription costs about $210 per month and is used by roughly 70% of top mobile games.
Why the panic is overblown for now
Here’s the thing: the immediate panic seems pretty disconnected from the actual product. Project Genie is a fascinating research prototype from Google DeepMind—you can read about it here—but it’s a world-building toy, not a commercial game engine. It generates 2D side-scrolling environments from a single image or sketch prompt. That’s cool, but it’s a universe away from the complex, multi-platform, physics-driven, monetization-ready ecosystems that Unity and Unreal Engine provide. Unity isn’t asleep at the wheel either; they’ve been baking AI tools like Muse and Sentis into their platform for a while. As Becker noted, the fears “overlook” Unity’s own AI capabilities and are probably “overblown” in the near term.
The real long-term anxiety
So why did the market freak out? It’s not about what Genie is today. It’s about the trajectory. The core anxiety is that AI is systematically lowering the barrier to creation. If a $250/month web app from Google can make a simple, playable world today, what does a $500/month tool from a major cloud provider do in two years? Could it start eating into the low-end, indie, or prototyping use cases that are Unity’s bread and butter? That’s the “longer-term risk” Bloomberg Intelligence’s Nathan Naidu warned about. The market is punishing any company that looks like it might have a fat, disruptable middle. And game engines, with their lucrative subscription models, look like a prime target for someone with Google’s AI and cloud infrastructure.
A broader software reckoning
This isn’t just about games. Look, this selloff mirrors earlier drops in software-as-a-service stocks after breakthroughs from Anthropic’s Claude and other AI agents. The narrative is shifting. For years, “software is eating the world.” Now, the fear is that “AI is eating the software.” If an AI can generate functional code, worlds, or experiences on-demand, does every company need to pay for massive, complex software suites? Probably not in the same way. That’s the existential question hanging over Unity, Adobe, and a host of other toolmakers. The dip might be a buying opportunity for brave investors, as Becker suggests. But it’s also a stark signal: no tech stack is safe from the AI re-evaluation. The old rules are out the window.
