Meta launches Horizon Create and Studio to build games with AI prompts

Meta has unveiled two new tools that let anyone build games for its Horizon social platform using AI prompts. According to The Verge, the announcement covers Horizon Create, a mobile app, and Horizon Studio, a browser-based tool offering more granular controls for creators who want them. Both are arriving in early access, with a waitlist open for interested users.

Complete games from a single idea

According to a Meta blog post cited by The Verge, the two tools can turn an idea into a finished 2D or 3D mobile game, complete with progression systems, balanced difficulty, art direction, multiplayer support and other components, all of which creators can then refine to their standards.

The Verge's Jay Peters draws a distinction between this and Google's Project Genie, which he characterizes as producing brief but empty AI-generated interactive experiences. Games from Create and Studio, by contrast, appear to include the structural elements of actual video games, though Peters writes that he is skeptical AI-generated titles will prove as engaging as handcrafted ones.

Distribution where people already are

Possibly the bigger news is how Meta plans to solve Horizon's reach problem. Games published through the new tools will be eligible for recommendations inside Facebook and Instagram, where they can also be played directly.

"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."

Distribution will not be purely neutral. Meta says titles that are engaging, stable, culturally relevant and effective at bringing players back will be given more reach.

A long way to Roblox

The move comes as Roblox, a platform with similar ambitions and far larger scale, makes its own significant push into AI-powered development, including a feature in its mobile app that likewise generates games from a prompt, The Verge reports.

The size gap between the two platforms is stark. Roblox counts 123 million daily active users, while Horizon has never truly taken off; The Verge reported in early 2022 that it had reached 300,000 monthly users. Horizon also began life as a VR application and has only recently pivoted to focus primarily on mobile, a shift that makes feed-embedded, no-download games a natural fit for where Meta is now steering the platform.

Why it matters

The announcement signals where Meta believes content creation is heading: the company is applying generative AI to production, not just consumption, and effectively wiring its enormous social feeds into a distribution channel for machine-assisted games. If the model works, a creator could reach Instagram's audience without an engine license, an app store listing or a marketing budget, because the pipeline from idea to playable multiplayer game collapses to a prompt plus some refinement.

It is also a defensive move. Roblox has already shown that user-generated games can sustain a platform at massive scale, and it is moving quickly on the same AI tooling. Meta's answer is to remove the download barrier entirely and meet players inside apps they already open every day. Whether AI-generated games can hold attention well enough for the recommendation-driven model to compound remains the open question, but the distribution mechanics alone make this one of the more consequential experiments in what a social platform becomes when games can be produced on demand.