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Everyone wants to be the AI game engine now ​

By Oleg Sidorkin, CTO of Cinevva

In February 2026, the following things happened within about three weeks of each other.

Unity's CEO went on record saying they'll demo prompt-to-game at GDC. Roblox shipped a 4D creation tool that generates interactive objects from text. Moonlake AI opened a beta for their Generative Game Engine backed by $30 million from Nvidia, Jeff Dean, and YouTube's co-founder. Phaser Editor v5 launched with AI built directly into the scene editor through MCP. And at least half a dozen startups I'd never heard of popped up on Product Hunt with some variation of "describe a game, we'll build it."

Roblox's VP of AI on their Cube foundation model and 4D creation

This isn't a complaint. It's an observation about timing.

Two years ago, when we were pitching what Cinevva does, VCs from Sequoia, Pear, Draper, and dozens of other firms told us the market wasn't there. B2C game creation? Indies don't pay for tools. You can't simplify game development without gutting capability. The standard deck of objections dressed up as market analysis.

Now the biggest names in gaming are spending hundreds of millions racing to build variations of the same thing they said couldn't work.

These tools are not the same thing ​

Here's what matters and what most coverage misses. "AI game creation" is an umbrella that hides fundamentally different products.

Text-to-demo tools generate something that looks impressive in a tweet. You type a prompt, get a playable thing, share the GIF. The output is real, but it's a demo. Getting from that demo to a game someone would play for an hour is a different problem entirely. Moonlake and some of the newer startups live here. They're solving the initial spark.

AI copilot tools sit inside an existing engine and help you work faster. Phaser Editor v5 with MCP does this. Ziva does this for Godot. They don't replace the development process, they accelerate it. You still need to understand what you're building. The AI handles the grunt work.

Platform-native AI creation is what Roblox is doing with 4D. The AI is embedded in the runtime. Objects don't just look right, they behave right because the generation model understands the platform's physics and interaction systems. The tradeoff: you're locked to that platform.

Full-stack AI game engines are trying to handle everything from concept to shipping. That's what Unity is promising for GDC. That's what we've been building at Cinevva for years. Describe what you want, iterate on what comes back, ship to web, mobile, desktop, Steam. The game you prompt is the game you publish.

Phaser Editor v5 integrates AI through MCP for scene-level assistance

The gap between demo and ship ​

Every tool in this space can generate a thing that runs. That part got easy fast. The hard part is everything after. Does the game feel good on a phone? Does it handle edge cases? Can you iterate on the music, the difficulty curve, the pacing? Can you ship it to five platforms from the same project? Does the AI understand what makes a game actually fun versus what makes a screenshot look cool?

Some of these announcements will turn into real products. Some will get a round of funding, generate nice demos, and quietly disappear when the "ship a real game" part proves harder than the "generate a prototype" part.

What I think is actually happening ​

The market validation we couldn't get in a Sand Hill Road meeting is now coming from the industry itself. When Unity and Roblox bet their roadmaps on AI creation, they're confirming what we've been building toward: the tools should adapt to how creative people think.

The race isn't about who announces first. It's about who ships something people actually use to make games they're proud of. We have thousands of people doing that on Cinevva today. A Breaker Belt was two people and three days. Cinevva Radio has 362 community-created tracks. That's the difference between promising to build the future and already living in it.

The competition is good. It means the market exists. We've known that for a while.

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