Runway vs. Unreal Engine 5: Visual Parity Without Economic Parity
Generative AI can now match gaming visuals. It cannot match gaming's business model—and that gap defines the entertainment industry's dilemma.
Over the past two days, Nicolas Neubert—Principal Creative & Tech-Artist Manager at AI platform Runway—has been publishing videos that could very well come from a video game.
The pre-production was image generation and then two videos ("P H A N T O M ✦ C L A I R", second) were generated from those images.
Neuberg posted on X “This is not Unreal Engine 5. This is generated from scratch using AI.” The boast is not only that generative AI has reached visual parity with gaming, but that Runway has Epic Games in its sights. It recently raised $315 million in Series E funding to “pre-train the next generation of world models and bring them to new products and industries.”
That vision looks well beyond film production and video games towards enabling small teams and students around the world to “develop autonomous systems and test policies across millions of scenarios without physical infrastructure.”
Therein lies the problem: Runway’s vision statement has a vision for world-building to solve difficult problems in “Robotics, medicine, climate, materials, energy.” The vision for Unreal Engine is narrower—It “enables game developers and creators across industries to realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.” Those industries include architecture and automotive.
But what about entertainment?
