Meta opens waitlist for AI tools that turn prompts into games for its social feeds

Why it matters

Meta is bundling AI-assisted game creation with access to Facebook, Instagram and Horizon audiences, but creators' reach depends on Meta's recommendation systems and the new tools' monetization terms remain unspecified.

Meta opened a waitlist on September 24th for Horizon Create and Horizon Studio, two tools that use text prompts to generate 2D and 3D games and make them eligible for distribution across Facebook, Instagram and Horizon. The tools are still in testing with a creator community, and broader access is rolling out gradually, Meta said in its Connect announcement.

The pitch comes from Saxs Persson, Meta's vice president of Horizon and a veteran of game-making tools. Before joining Meta, Persson worked on Microsoft's Project Spark, a game-creation product designed to let players make and share their own games. He said creators should be able to build an idea and get it in front of players without spending months on tools, hardware and marketing. Meta's new offer tries to compress both the making and the audience-building into its own platforms.

Horizon Create is a standalone phone app. A user can start with a written prompt or a template, then ask the system to revise elements such as characters, art style, story and progression. Meta says users can playtest generated games, refine them and run multiple projects at once. Horizon Studio provides a browser-based workspace with visual editing, including tools to arrange scenes, swap assets, adjust script parameters and shape layouts. Meta says projects move between the two products with their assets and iteration history intact.

The distribution offer is central to the launch. A game published through either tool becomes eligible for native distribution across Meta's services; Meta describes an Instagram user tapping a game clip and joining a multiplayer session without downloading a separate app. Eligibility is not a promise of reach. Meta says its discovery system will give more distribution to games it considers engaging, stable, culturally relevant and capable of bringing players back. That leaves Meta in control of the route from a creator's prompt to an audience, as well as the recommendation system that decides whether a game gets seen.

That arrangement could make the tools more attractive to novice creators than a generator that stops at a playable prototype. It also ties creators' prospects to Meta's rules, review systems and ranking decisions. Meta says generated content will pass through its safety systems, games will be reviewed before publishing and distribution, and published games will receive automated age ratings with youth protections carried over from Horizon. Those are company descriptions of the planned safeguards; the tools have not yet opened to general access.

Meta says creators may earn through in-game monetization and the Meta Horizon Creator Fund, but it has not detailed the terms for either under the new tools. The company says further monetization details will come later. That leaves a basic business question open for prospective creators: how much control they will have over monetization and how earnings will relate to a game's discovery and reach.

The announcement extends Meta's push to bring Horizon creation beyond headset-based world-building. At Connect in 2025, Meta described Horizon Studio as a forthcoming tool for building worlds on its new Horizon Engine. The new announcement pairs a browser editor with a phone-first app and explicitly describes generated mobile games, while linking publishing to Facebook and Instagram as well as Horizon. The shift is from offering creators a more capable place to build to promising a shorter path from an idea to a playable experience inside Meta's social products.

For now, that path starts with a waitlist rather than a generally available product. Meta says the two tools share a backend and can produce games with progression systems, balanced difficulty, art direction and multiplayer support. Those are product claims, not independently established results. How reliably the tools generate games that hold players' attention, and how consistently Meta surfaces them, will determine whether prompt-based creation becomes a meaningful creator channel or simply an easier way to make content for a platform whose distribution Meta controls.