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Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
(insider-gaming.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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at first I thought I was being an asshole asking this without reading the link but 1) it doesn't seem to have that info, still and 2) it demanded I un-adblock it and fuck that
They had some AI generated "placeholder" textures that were quietly patched out.
I can see both sides of this argument tbh. On one hand, that isn't really the kind of AI usage that I really want games to be disqualified for, it doesn't really affect anything and isn't a huge deal. On the other hand, the rule was no AI and they shipped the game with AI shit so it's a fair disqualification.
I lean more toward the latter just due to my seething hatred of all AI (seriously, you couldn't use any of the trillions of gigabytes of free shit out there as placeholder art, or just good ol' programmer art? you HAD to use AI slop? really?) but it's all pretty low stakes
I think the correct take is that the rule is at once silly but also necessary: an "indie game award" should be for small or solo devs building passion projects, which should be a category where "there is literally no budget to hire expensive contractors to make assets, because the actual devs working on the project need things like food, shelter, and electricity" is a legitimate excuse for generating assets if a work is otherwise legitimate and high effort instead of shovelware slop padded out with generated assets.
Clair Obscura shouldn't have been in contention in the first place, since it's a high budget AA game that would have been a AAA game a decade ago and which had huge backers and a massive studio behind it.
Are you a small team of developers building a game off of literal Christmas money you've saved up over the years? Are you deliberating between contracting all your games assets and textures out, or just using AI to generate it for you?
How about you redacted?
If you are making a third person story driven RPG on a budget of less than 5 million dollars, but it doesn't look like Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko, re-evaluate your priorities. If people care more about graphics than gameplay or story, they're gonna play something else anyways.
You know how many furries there are out there?You know how many incredibly talented furries are out there desperately looking for a way to earn slightly less money doing something they actually give a shit about?! (Instead of working at CATO's because they got confused, and thought they were gonna score an employee discount on neko themed breakfast cereal?)
It seems like the rules clearly stated no AI could be used to be considered for any awards for this contest. Sandfall could have withdrawn, they've won enough other awards, and it probably wouldn't be a big deal. But Sandfall instead proceeded through the nomination process, and only had the award stripped from them when it was discovered they were lying about not using AI.
Setting aside the fact that AI is a tool of capital to oppress and steal from labor, not disclosing the use of AI to win an indie award is tacky. The dishonesty to win a low-stakes award is why this is a bigger deal. Especially with the nepotism, budget and capital behind Sandfall vs. the much smaller studios that were in contention this year and created art, by hand, that deserves to be celebrated.
Using it as placeholder art during development is fine, I guess (though as you say, there's already a ton of free placeholder stuff they could use), but releasing it with AI art, and only changing it because people noticed it is just scummy.
Being the artist who's job it is to paint over the AI placeholder art sounds like a terrible job.
Not really. You just scrap it and start from scratch. The point of placeholder art is something that gives the development team the general idea of what something should look like without needing to put any effort in, and AI does a decent job of making something 80% correct for zero effort.
Taking something perceived as 80% correct without any creative vision behind it to 100% sucks.
Even if you are starting on a blank canvas you still have the preconceived notion. There is a similar problem with Film music where productions started using filler tracks which has limited composers to making something similar to the filler tracks rather than something whole.
It's a placeholder. Placeholders are not a source of artistic vision or a driving factor in design. It's a better looking way of a white panel with the text "newspaper" designed to take as little effort as possible. It doesn't matter what it is outside of ease and developer preference. I can assure you the Internet has spent more time thinking about this than the developers themselves.