Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures.

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c...

> Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative AI-created assets in the game. When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.

There is a small irony that the Indie Game Awards rejects nominations of games using AI but The Game Awards does not. It is independent teams of developers who are less likely to be able to afford to pay an artists who may be able to produce something of value with AI assets that they otherwise would not have the resources for. On the other side, it is big studios with a good track record and more investment who are more likely to be able to pay artists and benefit from their artistry.

To me, art is a form of expression from one human being to another. An indie game with interesting gameplay but AI generated assets still has value as a form of expression from the programmer. Maybe if it's successful, the programmer can afford to pay an artist to help create their next game. If we want to encourage human made art, I think we should focus on rewarding the big game studios who do this and not being so strict on the 2 or 3 person teams who might not exist without the help of AI.

(I say this knowing Clair Obscur was made by a large well respected team so if they used AI assets I think it's fair their award was stripped. I just wish The Game Awards would also consider using such a standard.)

I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday. Last year's award show has <100k views on youtube, and the first article mentioning this (insider-gaming.com's) is written by one of the judges involved. I'll leave it up to the reader to judge how much of this is genuine and how much is jumping the twitter bandwagon to boost the award show's popularity.

There's an interesting question about scope.

The IGA FAQ states, in its entirety on this topic: "Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination." [1]

Sandfall probably interpreted this reasonably: no AI assets in the shipped product. They say they stripped out AI placeholders before release (and patched the ones they missed). But the IGA is reading it strictly: any use during development disqualifies.

If that's the standard, it gets interesting. DLSS and OptiX are trained neural networks in an infrastructure-shaped raincoat—ML models generating pixels that were never rendered. If you used Blender Cycles with OptiX viewport denoising while iterating on your scenes, you "developed using generative AI."

By a strict reading, any RTX-enabled development pipeline is disqualifying. I wonder if folks have fully thought this through.

[1] https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq (under "Game Eligibility")

I bet if they'd only used AI assisted coding would be a complete non-event, but oh no, some inconsequential assets were generated, grab the pitchforks!

The game won GOTY on its merits. Then the AI disclosure came out and it got stripped. If AI use produces obviously inferior work, how did it win in the first place? Seems like the objection is to the process, not the result.

Doubly so if the usage was de minimis.

I think it's the artists, not the tools, that make the art. Overuse of anything is gauche; but I am confident that beautiful things can be made with almost any tool, in the hands of a tasteful artist.

Is anyone else detecting a phase shift in LLM criticism?

Of course you could always find opinion pieces, blogs and nerdy forum comments that disliked AI; but it appears to me that hate for AI gen content is now hitting mainstream contexts, normie contexts. Feels like my grandma may soon have an opinion on this.

No idea what the implications are or even if this is actually something that's happening, but I think it's fascinating

You need to separate AI usage from automating certain parts of a pipeline from end to end creation.

Taking a scorched earth approach to AI usage is just being a luddite.

My objection to LLMs is the same that I had for TDD. There's all these people saying that you just gotta try it, but when I do, the effect is lesser than just using my preexisting skills. Oh, it's not for you? Wrong, here's some tautological or contradictory or poetic or nonsensical advice that'll be 'the wrong way' a week from now.

Does TDD and LLMs have a kernel of utility in them, yeah, I don't see why not. But what the majority of people are saying doesn't seem to be true and what the minority of people I can actually see using them 'for reals' are doing just doesn't applicable to anything I care about.

With that in mind, the only thing less real to me than a tool that I have to vibe with at a social zeitgeist level to see benefits from is an award when I already have major financial and industrial success.

Half the people in my team has played the game. For months all I would hear about w.r.t. games was how this game was smashing milestones and causing the entire industry to do some soul searching or putting their fingers in their ears.

I'm sure they can console themselves from having lost this award with their piles of money.

[An LLM did help me with a cryptography api that was pretty confusing, but I still had to problem solve that one because it got a "to bytes" method wrong. So... once in a blue moon acceleration for things I'm unfamiliar with, maybe.]

If a fraction of the AI money would go into innovative digital content creation tools and workflows I'm not sure AI would be all that useful to artists. Just look at all those Siggraph papers throughout the years that are filled with good ideas but lacked the funding and expertise to put a really good ui on top.

Gamer social movements always burn bright at first, then die when they demand too much purity to reconcile with the fundamental truths: people want to make games and, when they're good, people want to play them. Trying to stop people from using (even experimenting with!) new tools is doomed, just like the old attempts to boycott games over their business models or their creators' politics/sexuality/whatever.

This is crazy. Tools like photoshoot have gen ai tools in them. Does that mean that Photoshop is now a minefield for artists? If a single artist uses the wrong tool once they disqualify the entire final product for awards, even if the asset is fully removed on the final build.

Since it's not shown in the article, the placeholder was the newspapers here; https://rl.bloat.cat/preview/pre/bn8bzvzd80ye1.jpeg?width=16... via https://rl.bloat.cat/r/expedition33/comments/1k6yv8a/does_th...

As an indie developer, I take much more issue with E33 falling under the “Indie” category than them using AI.

This isn't even an indie game, with funding rivaling major studios, what are we doing?

To be consistent, if you wish to protect workers by rejecting artificially produced assets, you should feel the same about textiles produced by industrial machinary. Either this decision was wrong or the Luddites had a good point.

To help prevent confusion: Clair Obcur was not stripped of its record-breaking 9 awards at the Game Awards.

The Indie Game Awards, despite sounding similar to The Game Awards, is an unrelated organization that holds their awards the same week. They are small and this is their second year.

When it comes to AI im more of a luddite at the moment, things change like every 6 months when it comes to prompting the models.

But i don't mind people using AI it's their own choice, the focus then just becomes in the curation skill of the individual, team, company etc of the generated AI output. So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game.

> "Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable, etc."

Not if it's against the rule. They got caught with skidmarks. And while the "Ackshually, those skidmarks are just placeholders"-defense may elicit a few cheap laughs, it doesn't matter if you follow the rule to its logical conclusion. Any possible deception in such cases comes on top of it. As it always has; that doesn't change just because you found a new plaything (LLMs) in the box.

"While the assets in question were patched out, it still goes against the regulations we have in place. As a result, the IGAs nomination committee has agreed to officially retract both the Debut Game and Game of the Year awards"

Looks like "regulations nitpicking". In the end it doesn't represent the players best interests.

I just think it's fun to watch "artists" seethe.

>Of course I think we should study art! Why yes of course I studied the greats to hone my skills, sometimes even copying their work directly to strengthen a specific skill set!

>Ai "studies" prior works to hone it's skillset...

>No! Not like that!

This is like disqualifying Banksy because they use stencils

As an indie game developer the idiots who made this decision do not represent us and are completely detached from actual game production over the last 3 years.

For those who might care, we use generative AI as much as possible in every way possible without compromising our vision, this includes sound, art, animation, and programming. These are often edited or entirely redone (effectively placeholders). It's part of the process, similar to using procedural art generation tools like geometry nodes in Blender or fluid sim particles generators.

And btw, both UE5 and Unity now have gen AI features (and addons) that all developers can and will use.

Rather than going into a huge rant about this, let me just give a quick anecdote.

It used to be there were tons of websites, like textures.com, which curated a huge database of textures, usable by art professionals and hobbyists alike. Some of it was free, others you had to pay for, both generally speaking, it wasn't too expensive, and if you picked up 3d modeling as a hobby, you could produce pretty decent results without spending a dime.

Then came the huge companies (you know which ones) which slurped up all these websites, and turned them into these SaaS monstrosities, with f2p mechanics. Textures were no longer free, but you had to pay in 'tokens' which you got from a subscription, which pushed you into opaque pricing models, bundling subscriptions, accidental yearly signups with cancellation fees, you know the drill.

Then came AI, which is somehow fair use, and instead of having to pay for that stuff, you could ask SD to generate a tiling rock texture for you.

Is this blatant copyrightwashing? I'd argue yes. But in this case, does copyright uphold any morally supportable princible, or does it help artists get paid?

F no.

I wish they had CRUD application awards.

I wonder what definition of AI they're using? If you go by the definition in some textbooks (e.g., the definition given in the widely used Russell and Norvig text), basically any code with branches in it counts as AI, and thus nearly any game with any procedurally generated content would run afoul of this AI art rule.

People were against steam engines, tractors, CGI, self-checkouts, and now generative AI. After some initial outrage, it will be tightly integrated into society. Like how LLMs are already widely used to assist in coding.

Oh its AI that makes not indie, not the huge funding.

All press is good press.

Few care about the mainstream game review sites or oddball game award shows as their track record is terrible (Concord reviews).

Most go by player reviews, word of mouth, and social media.

Great opportunity for a new award body that allows AI use.

Why is usage of AI even a discussion point? Steam also now enforces publishers to disclose if they used AI during game creation. It is a tool, and as a consumer I judge the end product. I don't care what tools were used in the production, just as I don't care if you use Photoshop, Pixelmator, Maya, 3DSMax or whatnot. The end result is what counts. And if the end result is full of bullshit AI slop and is not fun to play, don't give them an award. I played Claire Obscure and it is an absolut stunning and beautiful game.

These things will keep happening and the bar to be against certain use cases of AI will shift gradually over time.

Before we know it we will have entrusted a lot to AI and that can be both a good or a bad thing. The acceleration of development will be amazing. We could be well on our way to expand into the universe.

deserved it wasn't even indie either

LOL this is beyond idiotic. Banning AI-generated assets from being used in the game is a red line we could at least debate.

But banning using AI at all while developing the game is... obviously insane on its face. It's literally equivalent to saying "you may not use Photoshop while developing your game" or "you may not use VS Code or Zed or Cursor or Windsurf or Jetbrains while developing your game" or "you may not have a smartphone while developing your game".

indie game? with their budget and staff? really?

those guys worked in AAA studios and they got a 10 millions budget

how "indie" is that?

Ironic ally at some point it will just be anti-indy.

We should probably strip the Indie Game Awards of their awards show because the accountant used ChatGPT.

If they want to ban AI from their show that is their perogative, but considering that every nominee probably used AI somewhere (I'd bet money on this), this feels like blatantly dishonest posturing.

This is a travesty. Where winds meet uses LLMs, yet everyone seems to love that. Wtf.

More and more AAA games are going to have AI. Whether it’s AI content, AI dialogue, AI driven storytelling, or AI driven animation.

Having game of the year title stripped over some texture use is some next level petty BS.

This is so ridiculous that I suspect that it will be even better publicity for them than the award itself.

It’s interesting, because we have examples of other sects in the past that also opposed human progress through technology. History is repeating itself.

For instance, see Luddites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

I think it's more the fact that they lied before nomination than the AI usage itself. Any institution is bound to disqualify a candidate if it discovers it was admitted on false grounds.

I wonder if the game directors had actually made their case beforehand, they would have perhaps been let to keep the award.

That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot, would they all be disqualified for it? Where does this arbitrary line start from?

[flagged]

This is a great thing for AI. Totally beclown the anti-AI zealots.

Well that’s a rule that makes no sense.

These awards are behind the times and risk irrelevance.

What software in 2025 is written without AI help?

Every game released recently would have AI help.

Excellent news.

A blanket ban is the way to go on this, people trying to muddy the waters professing they just have nuanced opinions know what they are doing... it's only a horse armour pack, it doesn't affect gameplay, you don't have to use it, you won't notice if it's not there...

After the huge impact on the PC gaming community, it's logical to despise AI and ban it from any awards. First cryptocurrencies pumped huge price raises on GPUs, then prices won't return to normal due to AI and now it's impacting RAM prices.

Next year a lot of families will struggle to buy a needed computer for their kids' school due to some multibillion techs going all-in.

This is a bit ironic in a way that video games in particular have been using "AI" since the beginning.

Correct decision. Skidmarks were detected to be present and it wasn't sabotage or somesuch. That means no award as skidmarks are considered so unprofessional at that particular award that, at this point, there's a rule against them.