The future of video game development is in game-creating platforms like Roblox, reckons Jacob Navok, former director of business at Square Enix and current CEO of Genvid, “the studio-grade AI production platform for film, TV, and branded video.”
Being at the top of a company explicitly specializing in generative AI for entertainment, it’s unsurprising that Navok has repeatedly painted a picture of a future in which the total merging of game development and gen-AI is inevitable. This is the man who made headlines for saying things like “Gen-Z loves AI slop,” “AI is a one-in-a-generation change in the entire digital order,” and Microsoft needs to “get on board, or perish.”
Unclear to me what stops Roblox from being a trillion dollar company in the future.Users are there, monetization is there, the lawsuits will be worked out (as they were for every major social media company before this) and as fidelity improves, the audience will age up.When I… https://t.co/GV6x7HElFvMarch 3, 2026
Navok points to Square Enix’s long-defunct cloud-based service Core Online as his former employer’s answer to Roblox, but as it was limited to “good browsers on good PCs,” it never took off.
Regardless, “these game building platforms are definitely where Tiktok goes,” argues Navok. “Prompt based instant experiences, AI algorithms providing suggestions, creators able to quickly enable experiences that people play with them together at scale.
“Add fidelity realism that’s coming from AI rendered textures + meshes, animation libraries called on demand and Lua managing repeatability + consistency, plus Roblox having the most scaled matchmaking services on the planet, and you have a very strong moat.”
Roblox is indeed frighteningly massive, with a record concurrent player count higher than all of Steam combined as of August 2025. Navok predicts the platform’s increasingly child-friendly AI prompts will result in “an explosion of creativity” that’ll make traditional AAA games look downright dated, if they don’t already, in his view.
“Already Roblox games are innovating in game design way faster than AAA- every AAA single player game since Bioshock is basically the same collection of fetch quests bookended by fight scenes,” Navok says. “But the speed by which the tycoon genre has been evolving on Roblox (GaG to Steal a Brainrot to Tsunami) moves as fast as Tiktok trends and mints overnight millionaires.”
In this incredibly harrowing vision for someone in his 30s who wants to make games one day, Navok says instead of becoming a programmer, you can just “be 15 and making a Roblox game and have access to the entire world instantly.”
Gen AI has proven extremely controversial among both gamers and game developers, and there’s a spectrum ranging from complete rejection and utter embrace. Navok seems to generally position himself on the latter end of that spectrum, while prominent game makers like Stardew Valley creator Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone have committed to never using AI in game development.
Meanwhile, many big names in game dev say the best approach lies somewhere in the middle, with Bethesda’s Todd Howard recently saying AI is a useful “tool” in making games but “not in generating things” because “the human intention of it is what makes our stuff special.”
“We here at Blizzard feel very lucky and happy that we’re not using generative AI”: World of Warcraft Midnight composer says devs are making “what we think is cool”
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