It means you should go the other way. Open world winning against smaller, handcrafted environments and stories was generally a mistake, and so is this.

The endgame has nothing to do with gaming.

The goal of world models like Genie is to be a way for AI and robots to "imagine" things. Then, they could practice tasks inside of the simulated world or reason about actions by simulating their outcome.

It seems to be generating images in real time, not 3d scenes. It might still be useful for prototyping.

I would think that building a environment which can be managed by a game engine is the first pass. In a few years when we are able to render more than 60 seconds it could very well replace the game engine entirely by just rendering everything in realtime based on user interactions. The final phase is just prompts which turn directly into interactive games, maybe even multiplayer. When I see the progress we've made on things like DOOM, where it can infer the proper rendering of actions like firing weapons and even updating scores on hits and such it doesn't feel like we're very far off, a few years at most. For a game studio that could mean cutting out almost everything between keyboard and display, but for now just replacing the asset pipeline is huge.

I understand the ultimate end goal to be simulation of life. A near perfect replica of the real world we can use to simulate and test medicine, economy, and social impact.

Screensavers for robots?