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Meta has announced two AI-powered game-building tools — Horizon Create, a mobile app, and Horizon Studio, a more granular browser-based editor — that let anyone generate playable games for its Horizon social platform using plain-language prompts, no programming experience required.
Horizon Create is Meta's new mobile app for building Horizon games with AI prompts.
Image: The Verge / The Verge AI
The announcement positions Horizon Create and Horizon Studio as complementary tools rather than competitors. Horizon Create is built for speed — pick up your phone, describe a game concept, and get something playable. Horizon Studio, accessed through a browser, gives creators finer control over the generated output: adjusting layouts, tuning game logic, and iterating on assets in ways the mobile app does not expose.
For creators already comfortable generating images with AI, the core interaction model here will feel familiar. You describe what you want — a platformer set in a neon city, a puzzle game in a forest — and the system produces environments, objects, and rules to match. The meaningful difference from a standalone image generator is that the output is interactive: geometry has collision, objects have behaviors, and the result runs as an actual game rather than a static frame.
That interactivity is also where the current limitations will surface fastest. Prompt-to-image tools have had years of refinement on visual fidelity; prompt-to-game systems are earlier in that curve. Creators who have used similar tools — like Roblox's AI generation features or early experiments from other platforms — will recognize the pattern: the broad strokes come out quickly, but fine details require manual iteration. Horizon Studio's browser editor appears designed specifically to handle that second pass.
Horizon has struggled to build the kind of dense, creator-driven content ecosystem that platforms like Roblox sustain. The barrier has always been technical: building a functional game, even a simple one, historically required scripting knowledge that most casual users do not have. By replacing that requirement with a prompt interface, Meta is betting it can unlock a much larger pool of potential builders.
According to The Verge, both apps will be available soon, though Meta has not specified an exact launch date or confirmed which regions get access first.
For creators who already work in AI-generated worlds and characters — building scenes, designing environments, populating spaces with generated figures — Horizon Create and Horizon Studio represent a logical extension of that workflow into an interactive medium. The prompt skills transfer directly; what changes is the output format.
The decision to split the toolset across two surfaces is worth paying attention to. Mobile-first generation is fast and low-friction, but browser-based tools historically offer the kind of precision that turns a rough AI draft into something polished. If the Horizon Studio editor exposes enough control over generated geometry and asset properties, it could serve as a genuine production environment rather than just a preview tool.
Creators curious about how Meta's broader AI ecosystem is developing — particularly around agentic and generative features — can track the company's recent moves in our coverage of Meta's Muse AI agent, which has been expanding rapidly across Meta's platforms. The same generative infrastructure almost certainly underpins parts of what Horizon Create is doing.
Meta has not published technical details about which models power the generation, what content policies govern what games can be built, or whether creators will have any monetization path for games they produce. Those gaps will determine whether Horizon Create becomes a serious creative tool or stays a novelty — and they are the questions worth watching when the apps actually ship.
