Meta has announced Horizon Create, a phone app intended to turn text prompts or templates into playable games. The company also introduced Horizon Studio, a browser-based tool with more granular editing controls. For anyone searching for Meta Horizon Create games, the immediate catch is access: Meta says early access is rolling out gradually, and prospective users must join a waitlist.
Meta made the announcement on September 24 at its Connect event. Horizon, which began as a VR app, has more recently shifted toward a mobile focus, according to The Verge.
How do Meta Horizon Create and Horizon Studio work?
Meta says a creator can describe a game in ordinary language in Horizon Create or begin with a ready-made template. Its system is supposed to produce a playable 2D or 3D game, then let the creator revise the art style, characters, story and progression with additional prompts.
The company says the generated games can include environments, mechanics, progression systems and multiplayer features. Those are Meta's stated capabilities, not independently tested results. Meta also says users can leave a build running, receive a notification when it is ready for playtesting, and work on more than one project at once.
Horizon Studio runs in a browser and gives users direct controls alongside text prompting. Meta says its editor can be used to arrange scenes, replace individual assets, adjust script parameters and edit spatial layouts manually. The company says it requires no installation or gaming PC.
Projects can move between the two tools, according to Meta. Assets, systems and iteration history transfer through their shared backend, so work started on a phone can be opened in the web tool and vice versa.
Where will games made with Meta's tools be played?
Meta says games published through Horizon Create or Horizon Studio can be recommended and played on Facebook and Instagram, as well as Horizon. The company says someone watching a game clip on Instagram could enter a multiplayer session from that clip without downloading another app or being sent elsewhere.
That distribution is not a promise that every published game will find an audience. Meta says it will give more reach to games it considers engaging, stable, culturally relevant and likely to bring players back; it says games that do not meet those criteria will be deprioritized.
Meta also says generated material will pass through its content-safety systems and that games will be reviewed before publication and distribution. The company has not supplied independent evidence here that those checks will catch every problem.
The announcement puts Meta in a field where Roblox is also pursuing prompt-based game creation. The more unusual part of Meta's proposal is the distribution layer: the company is pairing its creation tools with potential placement and play inside its existing social apps. For now, it remains a gradual early-access rollout rather than a broadly available game-development service.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
