They have been looking for any reason to disqualify E33 for months now from the indie game awards, as the team behind it are professional game devs, and it was made with a budget in the millions....
They have been looking for any reason to disqualify E33 for months now from the indie game awards, as the team behind it are professional game devs, and it was made with a budget in the millions. I won't fault them for it, but it is something that they have been actively looking to find any reason they can to remove them from the awards.
Now that they've clinched the GOTY from the game awards, it makes sense to give it to another game, as the Indie Game Awards won't be showcased on any of the box art as publicity/etc as the GOTY from GA will take higher priority.
Coming in as a curious outsider here… How come they weren't disqualified right off the bat for being professional game devs? One scenario I'm imagining is there's some entrance criteria for who is...
Coming in as a curious outsider here… How come they weren't disqualified right off the bat for being professional game devs?
One scenario I'm imagining is there's some entrance criteria for who is truely indie, such as (and I'm making this up), "It can't be a true indie game if you spent more than $10 million." And the E33 team had a budget of $9.5 million, so they said to themselves, hey, let's go enter our game for that award! We might step on a few toes because for other cultural reasons we're unlike everyone else there, but we satisfy the letter of the law, right?
(Again, I'm making up that scenario. But if the awards were searching for a technicality on which to throw them out, I'm curious how they got into it in the first place.)
Money isn't the qualifier for being indie or not. I can independently produce a game with my own stack of a billion dollars and it'd still be indie. Clair Obscur was independently developed even...
Money isn't the qualifier for being indie or not. I can independently produce a game with my own stack of a billion dollars and it'd still be indie. Clair Obscur was independently developed even if they had a bunch of money come from a lot of places. Indie budgets are significantly higher than they used to be already. A budget of a couple of million isn't even that farfetched.
Take Silksong. Independently developed with a monstrous budget. But nobody will tell you that Team Cherry isn't indie nor that they aren't professional developers.
The image we have for indie games is often different from reality. What made them stand out is that CO33 was developed like a high budget AA(A) game* which draws some ire when the image of your award show is games like VVVVVV and Hollow Knight or Blue Prince.
It's craft beer all over again. People get snobby over large, established players because their image of that is only microbrewers. Or indie music becoming a weird acoustic pop genre instead of...
It's craft beer all over again. People get snobby over large, established players because their image of that is only microbrewers.
Or indie music becoming a weird acoustic pop genre instead of just meaning "not signed with a label."
I mean as always it comes down to the same concept as "The Letter of the Law vs. The Spirit of the Law" with these sort of things, and people's inability to distinguish which one of those angles...
I mean as always it comes down to the same concept as "The Letter of the Law vs. The Spirit of the Law" with these sort of things, and people's inability to distinguish which one of those angles other people are approaching with when discussing these topics.
Both have merit, but once you distinguish between those two you realize that people are arguing entirely different things while using the same words to describe what they're talking about and because of that will never see eye to eye and the arguments are kind of pointless.
At a deeper level, this happens because people assume a shared definition where none actually exists. One side is operating on formal criteria, what technically qualifies under a given label. The other is operating on cultural meaning, what that label has evolved to generally represent over time. When those two frameworks get treated as the same thing, people seem to argue indefinitely about it.
In this case it seems that /u/bitshift asked their question coming from the "spirit" definition of "Indie Game," and /u/CptBluebear responded coming from the technical definition of "Indie Game". I think a valid question now becomes is there a better term to describe what /u/bitshift is describing and then create an award for that type of game?
A big part of this, at least from the "spirit" side, comes down to a lack of vocabulary for an evolving concept. There isn’t an easy, widely understood term for “low-budget, small team, visibly constrained, experimental, underdog game,” because for a long time "indie game" covered that entire space. The same thing happened with "indie music" and "craft beer."
You used to be able to say “indie game” or “indie music” or "craft beer" and people immediately understood the scope, the scale, and the aesthetic of what you were talking about. As those categories expanded and larger, more polished and financed players entered those categories while still meeting the technical definition of the label, that shorthand stopped working.
The problem is that no replacement terms ever emerged. There’s no single, accessible word that cleanly captures what “indie” used to signal culturally. Saying “low-budget experimental game” or “weird acoustic pop” technically works, but it doesn’t function as shared shorthand, and most people won’t parse it as efficiently as previously.
That’s why a lot of the “spirit” side of these arguments exists at all. I just see so many people arguing over stuff like this when they aren’t even on the same conceptual level, but they keep judging each other as if they are.
Totally agree that what makes a game "indie" is hard to quantify. I used budget as an example since that was something @macleod mentioned, and it was an easy way to demonstrate following the...
CO33 was developed like a high budget AA(A) game [...] Even that is hardly quantifiable.
Totally agree that what makes a game "indie" is hard to quantify. I used budget as an example since that was something @macleod mentioned, and it was an easy way to demonstrate following the letter of the rules without satisfying the spirit.
I still have a question, though. What qualifications does one currently need to enter a game for the Indie Game Awards?
Maybe the answer is there are no qualifications. Maybe accepting any and all games for consideration, then kicking out the ones that don't "feel right" on technicalities, is just an example of the system working. And if you're a big studio that's definitely not indie by any metric, you're probably going to filter yourself out because there's nothing to gain by trying.
Check their FAQ, they don't even really know what constitutes indie. Their first line starts with: "It's a tricky question without a strict, black-and-white answer."...
What qualifications does one currently need to enter a game for the Indie Game Awards?
Check their FAQ, they don't even really know what constitutes indie. Their first line starts with: "It's a tricky question without a strict, black-and-white answer." https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq
Games developed by studios and published by Devolver Digital are considered indie games, but major standalone studios like FromSoftware are not. Why? Hell if I know. I mean I agree, nobody would consider Elden Ring indie, but there's little rhyme or reason to it if you truly think about it.
Weight classes is genuinely not a bad idea though part of the magic of indie is that you can create Vampire Survivors with $1500 and still beat other high budget games. You'd also be surprised how...
Weight classes is genuinely not a bad idea though part of the magic of indie is that you can create Vampire Survivors with $1500 and still beat other high budget games.
You'd also be surprised how many games will end up in the heavy weight class. Hades is estimated to have cost $15 million. Silksong 5ish. CO33 10mil. TECHNICALLY Star Citizen is an indie at $900 million dollars.
Yeah I'd be happy to have numerous awards every year, for shoestring sub $500k, then small teams under $5m, small-medium like Hades....and then holy moly tier for star citizen and, Elden Ring as...
Yeah I'd be happy to have numerous awards every year, for shoestring sub $500k, then small teams under $5m, small-medium like Hades....and then holy moly tier for star citizen and, Elden Ring as you mention :/ it's crazy to have them all in one category
It'd be nice, but the vast majority of games do not want to report their development budget. That'd be one thing that would be nice to regulate if we were to have any intervention. Hollywood box...
It'd be nice, but the vast majority of games do not want to report their development budget. That'd be one thing that would be nice to regulate if we were to have any intervention. Hollywood box office numbers come from similar regulations.
Of course, the other big issue is cost of living. 500k in California wouldn't go far if you need to pay any engineer or artist. 500k in Belgium may as well be a AA production.
I'm curious as to why you think this. To me, this reads as a perfectly reasonable disqualification regardless of other factors. Personally, I find both disqualifications that the IGA did this year...
They have been looking for any reason to disqualify E33 for months now from the indie game awards
I'm curious as to why you think this. To me, this reads as a perfectly reasonable disqualification regardless of other factors. Personally, I find both disqualifications that the IGA did this year to be heartening, because the good reasoning behind them (and the presence of a GenAI ban to begin with) gives me cause to believe that they genuinely care about the games they judge.
(I'd say "genuinely care relative to The Game Awards," but that'd be damning with faint praise, because TGA is practically a marketing festival.)
It's hardly like the AI asset thing was a secret. That fact was in the public domain before they decided to issue this award. So they either planned it, or they're incompetent. I can't help but...
It's hardly like the AI asset thing was a secret. That fact was in the public domain before they decided to issue this award. So they either planned it, or they're incompetent.
I can't help but think they played this whole affair to get clicks. I'd never heard of their award programme until they pulled this stunt.
This is just silly. AI is the perfect tool to make Indy games competitive with major studios. We should be celebrating the use of AI for field leveling in these industries.
This is just silly. AI is the perfect tool to make Indy games competitive with major studios. We should be celebrating the use of AI for field leveling in these industries.
Isn't it? An EA sacking all of their artists to replace it with an AI is a problem. A lone coder without the money to hire an artist and without the skill to create more than programmer art now...
Isn't it? An EA sacking all of their artists to replace it with an AI is a problem.
A lone coder without the money to hire an artist and without the skill to create more than programmer art now has a competitive edge.
Though it also simultaneously creates a rift between indies that do and indies that don't. What I don't want is that indies should feel pressured to use AI or fall behind other indies.
There's a fine line there and I don't particularly fault an award show for taking a hardline stance, but it does feel a little stifling.
This isn't about that, and I would not celebrate such a thing. There's the problem of that normalizing AI art in production, which devalues artists, but it's not just about their livelihoods :...
A lone coder without the money to hire an artist and without the skill to create more than programmer art now has a competitive edge.
This isn't about that, and I would not celebrate such a thing. There's the problem of that normalizing AI art in production, which devalues artists, but it's not just about their livelihoods : it's also about creativity in general. If you have so little vision for your game that you prefer to resort to having a magic 8-ball make milquetoast visuals for it instead of giving it a go yourself, why even bother? I would prefer programmer art.
That's not what happened with Clair Obscur, though. They had placeholder assets generated by someone else and they replaced them quickly after finding them. They used it to accelerate production, not to eliminate the human element. Whatever we think about that, it's important to make a distinction here.
I think you're mixing concepts here about what AI enables. Consider someone with a physical defect unable to create a drawing to save their life but with oodles of vision that an AI can realise. I...
If you have so little vision for your game that you prefer to resort to having a magic 8-ball make milquetoast visuals for it instead of giving it a go yourself, why even bother? I would prefer programmer art.
I think you're mixing concepts here about what AI enables. Consider someone with a physical defect unable to create a drawing to save their life but with oodles of vision that an AI can realise. I do consider that something we should celebrate.
Now I also don't think we're at the point yet it's worthwhile doing so, "milquetoast visuals" is more than an apt description of what AI now produces, but there's a specific distinction I'm trying to make between people with art skills and art vision.
which devalues artists
I wouldn't be able to pay an artist on this shoestring budget anyway. AI use is all about being responsible and I know people find that difficult because there is indeed a real danger it devalues real artists' work (see the EA example), but being so vehemently against it when that might mean missing someone's brilliant artistic vision because they can't hold a pencil is a step in the other direction I find difficult to accept.
And yes of course, if you can pay the artists you should pay the artists.
So, two points to this. First, and less important, is that creativity often thrives under restriction. I don't know what you're imagining when you say "unable to create a drawing to save their...
Consider someone with a physical defect unable to create a drawing to save their life but with oodles of vision that an AI can realise.
So, two points to this.
First, and less important, is that creativity often thrives under restriction. I don't know what you're imagining when you say "unable to create a drawing to save their life" (given that there are many kinds of drawing and many ways to make each kind), but if someone was truly incapable in this way, I would adore to see what other solutions could work for them that aren't AI slop.
Second and more importantly, this is a high-minded idea that – while commendable as a goal – doesn't really work so well in our current vulture-capitalist-turn-technofuedalist world. The reality is that modern GenAI/LLMs are plagiarist energy hogs that cause mental health crises and mass unemployment, and don't even make anything half-decent in the process. That's a lot of harm to weigh against.
I've said before that this tech could've been good if it'd been spearheaded by open-source communities on small scales (and hell, 15.ai was a thing, wasn't it?), but instead we've got tech bros and CEOs, and all they want is to fire people. In a world like this, the "it's for the disabled" argument that'd otherwise be simple well-meaning allyship will get twisted by money into "Anything we do is justified, because disabled people could theoretically use it."
In practice, the argument is better left on the table for now, saved for a post-AI-bubble world, if or when AI stops damaging so much of the planet. Modern AI, as it is, does not deserve the defense.
No one is going to pay artists whose style will now become analogous with "programmer art" because a model was trained on their work without permission and then sold to random strangers without...
No one is going to pay artists whose style will now become analogous with "programmer art" because a model was trained on their work without permission and then sold to random strangers without compensation to them. They will have to evolve and keep ahead of the machine - out of their own pocket - only for their effort to keep getting stolen. Your expectation that AI will improve enough that it can be used to generate distinctive art for a videogame yet people will still choose to pay artists if they can doesn't seem consistent with the realities of videogame development in a capitalist society. Eventually the artist would be an added cost but bring no additional value.
I stipulate this should be the option for people that can't pay the artists, not for the ones that can. It's more of a hope than an expectation. Yours is not the future I'm looking forward to...
No one is going to pay artists
I stipulate this should be the option for people that can't pay the artists, not for the ones that can.
Your expectation that AI will improve enough that it can be used to generate distinctive art for a videogame yet people will still choose to pay artists if they can doesn't seem consistent with the realities of videogame development in a capitalist society. Eventually the artist would be an added cost but bring no additional value.
It's more of a hope than an expectation. Yours is not the future I'm looking forward to though, and it's an uncharitable interpretation of what I've said previously. Which, please don't get me wrong, I completely understand. There are a lot of people that do think artists will just land on their feet after their entire industry has been rocked and your outcome is the likely one.
On the flipside, there's a very strong argument to be made that we can't put the genie back in the bottle either and within this capitalist system I would rather see garage devs use AI to win, instead of sitting on their principles just so they can lose to the AAA behemoths that unscrupulously do it anyway and lay off the paid artists.
Typically I dislike arguments along these lines, because they excuse people from making ethical decisions. I can't put the genie back in the bottle, I can't control other people's actions, but I...
Typically I dislike arguments along these lines, because they excuse people from making ethical decisions. I can't put the genie back in the bottle, I can't control other people's actions, but I at least can control my own. I've been paying for indie games for twenty years, but if this were to become sufficiently normalized, I just might stop.
Also, indies are mostly not in direct competition with AAAs, fortunately. Most indie game development is already not a very good financial proposition (unfortunately), not unlike, say, writing. And much of it is artist-led to begin with (a good thing!) I'm only worried about the making of decisions with negative consequences for people who didn't sign up for any of this.
All games are in competition with each other. An hour playing Megabonk is an hour not playing Battlefield. Time is the most important currency, and an even playing field gives your multimillion...
All games are in competition with each other. An hour playing Megabonk is an hour not playing Battlefield. Time is the most important currency, and an even playing field gives your multimillion dollar marketing budget a run for its money when it competes against a Silksong.
I understand my line of thinking is easily characterized as centrist or fence sitting, but I disagree. Purposefully not participating in the system just makes you lose. Ethics don't exist in a vacuum. An automated machine that blandly homogenizes art isn't on the extreme end of my scale, since I can see some use as a good thing for people that might otherwise struggle to make something of themselves. I find it unethical if we prevent some people the tools they might need, more than I find it unethical that machines train on artwork. Mainly because the average artist won't be able to ask an image generator to "create something in my style".
It's late, I'm finding it difficult to create coherent thoughts around ethics and philosophy. I hope the above makes sense. If it didn't make sense, your takeaway should be that I'm voting against the current system while participating in it to make the best of it as long as it exists, I'm also mostly against all the generative AI stuff but see some potential upsides for individuals.
Though most of all I just want it to go away forever, it's so divisive while being barely more than a feature on my phone I rarely look at.
I'm so tired of everything AI.
I get the sentiment if you're a billion dollar corporation trying to appeal with everyone. Then sure, COD BLOPS 7 is in competition with Tiktok and Roblox. That's a futile perspective as an indie,...
All games are in competition with each other. An hour playing Megabonk is an hour not playing Battlefield.
I get the sentiment if you're a billion dollar corporation trying to appeal with everyone. Then sure, COD BLOPS 7 is in competition with Tiktok and Roblox.
That's a futile perspective as an indie, though. Your goal is not to appeal to the masses and make billions. You start by trying to carve out a few thousand sales and then see where to go from there. That step is already very hard without worrying about "but what about people playing Fortnite?"
Purposefully not participating in the system just makes you lose. Ethics don't exist in a vacuum.
That's fine. I've always been resistant to trend setters, so I suppose I've been a "loser" all my life.
But life doesn't set my definition of success, I do. It's influenced by life, but at the end of the day if I don't want to drink, I simply won't drink. Likewise here. I'll wait for the dust to settle before touching AI, unless my future job otherwise forces me to.
If we hit that reality, sure. I see the work here, though. And we're far, far far away from AAA adoption of such techniques. What they generate for anything more than static textures is unusable...
Your expectation that AI will improve enough that it can be used to generate distinctive art for a videogame yet people will still choose to pay artists if they can doesn't seem consistent with the realities of videogame development in a capitalist society
If we hit that reality, sure.
I see the work here, though. And we're far, far far away from AAA adoption of such techniques. What they generate for anything more than static textures is unusable for production. And I see LLM's tapering out instead of exponentially increasing quality.
Here's a popular indie RPG called Hylics that predates the modern LLM boom: https://store.steampowered.com/app/397740/Hylics/ The game makes extensive use of machine generated text which is...
If you have so little vision for your game that you prefer to resort to having a magic 8-ball make milquetoast visuals for it instead of giving it a go yourself, why even bother?
The game makes extensive use of machine generated text which is semi-nonsensical to give a particular atmosphere. Part of the game's art and direction is the "empty" writing. Does that make the game less artistic or creative than if they'd hired a professional writer to create reams of nonsense?
well the game is very trippy, but cohesive in its theme and mood. That's great. Clearly the author didn't just generate randomg text by itself and took time to adjust it for the game feel needed....
well the game is very trippy, but cohesive in its theme and mood. That's great. Clearly the author didn't just generate randomg text by itself and took time to adjust it for the game feel needed. If most AI generation took that care, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
but right now, we're trying to defend one A-student who was going to succeed with or without AI tools and arguing if they got more productive. Meanwhile the rest of the class is turning in slop and is in danger of failing. It's one good apple in a barrel of rot.
lone coder. I sure as heck do not have an edge on artists. Art sells. And right now using any gen AI is a PR disaster, legal minefield, and simply grifty industry as of now to contribute to. Just...
A lone coder without the money to hire an artist and without the skill to create more than programmer art now has a competitive edge.
lone coder. I sure as heck do not have an edge on artists. Art sells. And right now using any gen AI is a PR disaster, legal minefield, and simply grifty industry as of now to contribute to.
Just gotta do it the old fashioned way and spend a few years working on 3d modeling. That should at least get my stuff presentable to artists who can iterate on my game to make it truly shine.
If it helps any, I've seen a great many artists who've outright stated that even very simple/badly made references can be immensely helpful on their own. It might take less than you think to...
That should at least get my stuff presentable to artists who can iterate on my game to make it truly shine.
If it helps any, I've seen a great many artists who've outright stated that even very simple/badly made references can be immensely helpful on their own. It might take less than you think to communicate your idea to an artist, depending on what it is.
I'm surprised people haven't jumped on "procedural generation" yet. Not because it's necessarily the same as AI. But because gamers, at least on the Internet, are so worked up into a frenzy over...
I'm surprised people haven't jumped on "procedural generation" yet. Not because it's necessarily the same as AI. But because gamers, at least on the Internet, are so worked up into a frenzy over anything that isn't 110% human, artisanal game dev.
Maybe even autocomplete in IDEs will trigger the frothing masses.
Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but I'm so sick of the "discourse" surrounding AI in gaming, and in the world, period. I hate black and white anything, since clearly there are shades of gray in between and within all things. And even if you think that maybe there's some use for AI in certain stages of development -- gaming or otherwise -- you must be an AI bot or a paid shill for BIG AI that hates human created anything.
Several issues here: We kinda did back in the day, It's cool but when most your game is proc gen'd it does start to blend in as a variety of blandness. proc gen will always lack something compared...
I'm surprised people haven't jumped on "procedural generation" yet
Several issues here:
We kinda did back in the day, It's cool but when most your game is proc gen'd it does start to blend in as a variety of blandness. proc gen will always lack something compared to a hand crafted level.
It takes a lot of time to tweak a proc gen so it doesn't create impossible levels or weird hitches or bad interactions. And you need to tweak it for each game. It's not some oracle that creates infinite content. It will in fact take more time to develop that way unless you are a truly skilled engineer: https://xkcd.com/1319/.
proc gen is only using existing assets, not ones of dubious copyright origins. Its infringement depends on the input. And humans still needed to make that input. Ai meanwhile has scraped the internet and has several challenges in court ongoing.
OK, I was a little confused why you replied in this manner. Because my following sentence was: But rereading this, I can see how you might think I'm saying AI is the same as proc gen. That's my...
OK, I was a little confused why you replied in this manner. Because my following sentence was:
Not because it's necessarily the same as AI.
But rereading this, I can see how you might think I'm saying AI is the same as proc gen. That's my bad. I need to be more careful how I word things!
Anyway, yeah, I didn't mean to say they're the same thing. I'm saying two things: 1) not everyone knows they're quite different things like we do (I'm assuming most gamers do not know; there's nothing that says a gamer has to be technically-minded), and 2) it's easy, especially online for a dumb and/or bad actor to tenuously and mistakenly connect the dots between AI and proc gen through faulty logic and just not having topical knowledge, and then start screaming online on Twitter or reddit or wherever about it, creating a whole firestorm, witch hunts, etc, over nothing. Essentially creating misinformation and then spreading it.
If the ethical concerns and environmental effects with generative AI were the same as any other automated generative process then I imagine the outrage would be minimal in comparison, but that's...
If the ethical concerns and environmental effects with generative AI were the same as any other automated generative process then I imagine the outrage would be minimal in comparison, but that's not the case to my knowledge. It's not as much about the output as the process behind it.
Vampire Survivors used a bunch of free assets, and it became a massive hit. So much so that the creator was almost embarrassed by its success! Art is hardly the only element of a game. A developer...
Vampire Survivors used a bunch of free assets, and it became a massive hit. So much so that the creator was almost embarrassed by its success!
Art is hardly the only element of a game. A developer records silly filler noises with a cheap microphone, and it's creative art. The developer uses a generative tool, and it's devaluing artists??
That's because "AI" as a term tends to mean generative AI or large language models these days. In this specific case, it was the former. Those two tools have very concrete and severe negative...
That's because "AI" as a term tends to mean generative AI or large language models these days. In this specific case, it was the former. Those two tools have very concrete and severe negative consequences for their use; the same can't be said for most any pre-2020 techniques.
The problem is that generative data models are only levelling the field right now because it's the same cost and outcome for everyone. Anyone can pick it up and with some practice, get themselves...
The problem is that generative data models are only levelling the field right now because it's the same cost and outcome for everyone. Anyone can pick it up and with some practice, get themselves to the point that they can deliver passable art, VO, code and the like. Maybe they use that as a springboard to making games for a living.
Fast forward maybe 5 years. The AI companies now need to show return for their trillion dollars of investment. If someone is reliant on the cloud service, how do they keep up with escalating costs and degrading quality of service. A lot of digital artists that rely on Adobe tools are facing the same problem. So are Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts and social media creators.
These services provide financial security when they are not profitable for the companies providing it. But once you are dependent on them, then it's a lot easier to squeeze those users until the barrier to entry is already having a successful business model and revenue stream.
Now you are just another replaceable worker at a major studio or a freelancer that rents their tools.
At the rate models are becoming capable of running on local hardware, I’m seeing this as less and less of a concern. Pretty much all of the best in class image models are perfectly capable of...
At the rate models are becoming capable of running on local hardware, I’m seeing this as less and less of a concern. Pretty much all of the best in class image models are perfectly capable of being run on my (admittedly powerful) workstation. LLMs are still generally only effective on cloud scale hardware, but I think that will change in the relatively near future.
True. Image generation and even animation models can be run pretty effectively. I think the most recent big model is Illustrious after StabilityAI decided to go full corporate with SD3. Speaking...
True. Image generation and even animation models can be run pretty effectively. I think the most recent big model is Illustrious after StabilityAI decided to go full corporate with SD3.
Speaking of going corporate, the Flux model is owned by Black Forrest Labs, Illustrious is owned by Onoma AI, Qwen and Wan Video is developed by Alibaba. AuraFlow is by FalAI. The developers of Pony Diffusion seem to also be starting their own thing. Just saying that a lot of the Self Hosted solutions come with strings attached and the terms of any new model could change on a dime. These companies are crowdsourceing a lot of RnD and I'm a little concerned of how things turn out when they shift from Development to Profitability.
At the same time Disney has announced a partnership with OpenAI and I suspect a lot of non-OpenAI models trained on Disney works will be seeing some action taken towards them. Something that will set the president for any other rights holder.
Text based LLMs are probably the area that has the most room for improvement, but many of those models are similarly owned by one of the big tech players or an expensive startups. And most of the self hosting initiatives looks a lot like crowdsourced RnD again.
But the biggest issue is that now the barrier to entry has jumped up from anyone, to anyone that can meet the hardware requirements.
In the last few weeks there's already been several hardware vendors reporting a scaling back or withdrawal from the consumer market. Micron, Nvidia, TSMC to name a few. If AI tech is viable, it's going to be a long while before hardware costs are at reasonable levels (Think Micron forecast it going well into 2027). If it's not... I do not want to imagine what happens to chip market .
Like it or not, the rules do state to disclose if you use any Gen AI in development, not just release. Lying is never a good image, especially if your goal is to have widespread adoption.
Like it or not, the rules do state to disclose if you use any Gen AI in development, not just release. Lying is never a good image, especially if your goal is to have widespread adoption.
Indie games, taken as a category, already are competitive with major studios. The most fascinating artistic endeavors of the year almost all came from AA-or-smaller groups, with several being...
Indie games, taken as a category, already are competitive with major studios. The most fascinating artistic endeavors of the year almost all came from AA-or-smaller groups, with several being debut indies. They do not need GenAI or LLMs to accomplish any of this.
All introducing AI to the mixture does is waste time, money, energy, water and people, all for the sake of dramatically increasing homogeneity. It's a tool designed to try and save time on art so artists can spend more time on work; or in other words, the opposite of what we should strive for.
Almost all successful “Indie“ games are still multimillion dollar operations. AI tools have the potential to open the space to motivated single individuals.
Almost all successful “Indie“ games are still multimillion dollar operations. AI tools have the potential to open the space to motivated single individuals.
...What? This is a pretty wild claim to provide without any backing evidence. Motivated single individuals are already making games. We've had that since Cave Story released in 2004. I'm honestly...
Almost all successful “Indie“ games are still multimillion dollar operations.
...What? This is a pretty wild claim to provide without any backing evidence.
AI tools have the potential to open the space to motivated single individuals.
Motivated single individuals are already making games. We've had that since Cave Story released in 2004. I'm honestly starting to question how much attention you actually pay to the indie scene, because single-person dev teams are so frequent as to almost be common knowledge.
From The Indie Game Awards' FAQ page: (My edits to the question title are to keep focus on Expedition 33, since there was another award retracted this year due to the game in question – Chantey –...
Why [was] Clair Obscur: Expedition 33['s award] retracted?
The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself. When it was submitted for consideration, a representative of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination. While the assets in question were patched out and it is a wonderful game, it does go 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.
Each award will be going to the next highest-ranked game in its respective category:
Debut Game: Sorry We’re Closed
Game of the Year: Blue Prince
Both à la mode games and Dogubomb have been notified and were invited to record acceptance speeches. Since the IGAs premiere took place just ahead of the holiday break, we expect both acceptance speeches to be recorded and published in early 2026.
I added the bracketed text to the title of this post because I felt that the scope of the AI use was an important factor – don't want to spook anybody into thinking the game was ¼-AI or something – but if any title editors here feel it's unnecessary, I don't mind its removal.
I think that this is revealing. Your linked FAQ states: This tells us that the Indie Game Awards is comfortable applying essentially political, values-based standards as part of its eligibility...
[T]here was another award retracted this year due to the game in question – Chantey – being tied to ModRetro, which is in hot water due to ModRetro advertising that their consoles are made using the same metal that's used to manufacture attack drones.
I think that this is revealing. Your linked FAQ states:
Due to the ties with ModRetro, Indie Vanguard [for Chantey] has also been retracted as we do not want to provide the company with a platform.
This tells us that the Indie Game Awards is comfortable applying essentially political, values-based standards as part of its eligibility criteria. This in turn implies that the technical argument of whether Clair Obscur's AI use was significant might be beside the point: the IGA is willing to decide guilt by association.
That is, of course, the IGA's prerogative, but it means that all we can really do is divide ourselves into pro and anti-AI camps and shout the same arguments across the fence.
Not necessarily. One revocation can be values-based, whereas the other can be on strict rules basis. I could also see it being both. The existence for the rule is likely to discourage AI use,...
Not necessarily. One revocation can be values-based, whereas the other can be on strict rules basis.
I could also see it being both. The existence for the rule is likely to discourage AI use, which is values-based, for example. And of course, this isn't actually a dichotomy, and both factors could have played a part.
Not sure it matters in the end though, because...
all we can really do is divide ourselves into pro and anti-AI camps and shout the same arguments across the fence.
...this is still proving pretty accurate. Even if this was a wholly line-of-the-law decision, the rule itself still gets questioned, and exactly that has been happening here. So we still end up at largely the same place. Which can still be a valuable discussion, if perhaps a retreaded one.
This is a stupid publicity stunt. I'm sure at least some of the other winners and nominees also used AI in some part of the development process, even if none of it made it into the released...
This is a stupid publicity stunt. I'm sure at least some of the other winners and nominees also used AI in some part of the development process, even if none of it made it into the released product. Not to mention how ubiquitous gen AI is becoming in programming, and most indie games rely on preexisting game engines like Unity and Unreal that almost certainly have some lines of code that were written with gen AI assistance. Is it only artists and not developers that matter? Or how about the fact that tools that human artists use like Photoshop or Blender plugins have AI powered features, which said artists may even use without being aware of it? Or how the asset markets associated with popular game engines are flooded with AI generated content which may or may not be properly labeled, and which is commonly used for early development builds until more final assets are created?
It's unenforceable symbol politics. This company actually admitted their mistake, stated clearly that it wasn't intended to be present in the released product, and corrected it almost immediately. They're being punished for honesty. The intent behind the opposition to use of gen AI is to protect human creative workers. How is fairly innocent intended-for-internal-alpha-only use in any way a detriment to artists? It doesn't remove jobs for human artists. If anything, it creates them.
Well it's based on disclosure and includes development, and CO33 got caught. People are free to dig through the other nominees as well (and odds are with the internet, that they have). That point...
I'm sure at least some of the other winners and nominees also used AI in some part of the development process, even if none of it made it into the released product.
Well it's based on disclosure and includes development, and CO33 got caught. People are free to dig through the other nominees as well (and odds are with the internet, that they have).
This company actually admitted their mistake, stated clearly that it wasn't intended to be present in the released product, and corrected it almost immediately
Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
Not released, developed. It was clear at the time they submitted that they were using it. So they lied (or if you are really cynical, they managed to get caught lying). This is less about AI stances and more about sportsmanship and integrity. So it makes sense to punish someone caught to be defying both.
Not to mention how ubiquitous gen AI is becoming in programming
In the gaming space, we tend to use "generative AI" to refer to assets seen in game, not code. if "code generation" is a form of AI then no game since the 90's counts as "not using AI". This is especially because most games these days are made on top of engines, and developers cannot control what code Epic/Unity/etc. chooses to make under the hood. But devs do choose what artistic assets to include in their game.
How is fairly innocent intended-for-internal-alpha-only use in any way a detriment to artists?
I never considered how having generated concept art could mean clients push back harder against other potential designs for their world. I was always thinking that it could help provide something easier to communicate with than "well I want to have this cool looking gruff dude in dirty gold armor with a beard". But this perspective makes sense.
It does matter, because the overall point of my whole comment is that the rule is unreasonable and unenforceable, and therefore should not exist, or should be interpreted in a less strict manner....
That point doesn't matter
It does matter, because the overall point of my whole comment is that the rule is unreasonable and unenforceable, and therefore should not exist, or should be interpreted in a less strict manner. If I'm telling you the rules are unfair and unreasonable, it's not a counterargument to say that it's in the rules.
In the gaming space, we tend to use "generative AI" to refer to assets seen in game, not code. if "code generation" is a form of AI then no game since the 90's counts as "not using AI".
Large Language Models are AI that generate text. Whether the artificial neural network is trained on text to generate text or trained on images to generate images is not a relevant distinction. The same uproar would have happened if they shipped dialogue written by ChatGPT. I'm clearly not talking about code generation tools that existed in the 1990s. I'm talking about things like CoPilot or Claude Sonnet.
This is especially because most games these days are made on top of engines, and developers cannot control what code Epic/Unity/etc. chooses to make under the hood.
If the entire industry is built on top of the forbidden technique, time to pack it up or loosen the restrictions. Would it have mattered if the illegal assets were outsourced to a third party? Probably not. They were still part of the development process. Just like the engine is. You can always choose to develop your own game engine. It's just prohibitively expensive and time consuming to attempt to reinvent the wheel for an indie developer. It's not a reasonable ask, but it is the logical conclusion of strictly interpreting this rule. If you can't vouch for the non-AI-ness of every part of every tool ever used at any point in development, including dependencies, then you could be "lying" and therefore ineligible for the award.
We could have a reasonable conversation about the ethics of generative AI in video game development, but I don't think it can be had with an absolutist stance that has no concern for nuance, which cannot be enforced except through trust, and which requires making arbitrary distinctions about what counts and what doesn't count to justify.
Okay. We can have a discussion about that too. But the point here is that the rule exists and that's what they are using as criteria. Calling it unfair when it's being put in effect is working a...
the rule is unreasonable and unenforceable
Okay. We can have a discussion about that too. But the point here is that the rule exists and that's what they are using as criteria. Calling it unfair when it's being put in effect is working a tad too late IMO. It's an awards show, not national policy, so I'm going to be more lax in what some private organization decides to do in terms of their rulings.
Whether the artificial neural network is trained on text to generate text or trained on images to generate images is not a relevant distinction.
It is for this ruling. I'm simply giving you more context on why they made it this way.
If the entire industry is built on top of the forbidden technique, time to pack it up or loosen the restrictions.
Or we be more subtle and define proper lines. Like we did here.
I'm sorry you do not like the lines here, but your arguments break down to "I don't like this", and mine are simply "the rules are there". I don't have much to say to sway your opinion, I just want to illuminate that this isn't some grand revelation that came out of nowhere.
We can change it for next year if people feel strongly. But I feel more like this will blow over in a week and the rule will stay until the next AI controversy. So I don't know what to say to that. Again, this is just some organization giving recognition to games, so I'm in the camp of "they can rule how they want, as long as it is consistent".
First, I have seen a great many developers who've outright stated that they have zero interest in using AI. Some are outright hostile to the concept, and a lot of AI use is forced on people by...
First, I have seen a great many developers who've outright stated that they have zero interest in using AI. Some are outright hostile to the concept, and a lot of AI use is forced on people by their employers. So I feel you may be taking Silicon Valley hype at face value a little too much. Which is understandable given the AI hype machine, but still.
More concretely, though:
This company actually admitted their mistake, stated clearly that it wasn't intended to be present in the released product, and corrected it almost immediately.
That doesn't really matter much here. Generative AI use in development is prohibited for the purposes of the IGA. It doesn't matter if it was supposed to be published or not; using it at all disqualifies them automatically, and that's on them.
If you still like Sandfall despite this, that's perfectly fine! I'm sure the IGA judges do too. The GenAI use here is meager and hardly worth throwing out the team over. It's a matter of fairness, not of "Expedition 33 sucks actually."
Here are the results of the StackOverflow developer survey for 2025. You can dig into the numbers yourself, but suffice to say that the majority of respondents say they do use AI in their...
So I feel you may be taking Silicon Valley hype at face value a little too much.
Here are the results of the StackOverflow developer survey for 2025. You can dig into the numbers yourself, but suffice to say that the majority of respondents say they do use AI in their development process, including in writing code. Only a minority claim that they use AI to write "the majority" of code, but according to the strict interpretation, any use is grounds for disqualification. It only takes one dev, one line of code. Is that unreasonable? I think so, but that was my entire point.
Well, if you'd like to be technical: It didn't say anything about LLMs. Personally I'd want those out too, but detecting that's kinda hard, so here we are. As for the survey, you're going to get a...
It only takes one dev, one line of code.
Well, if you'd like to be technical:
Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
It didn't say anything about LLMs. Personally I'd want those out too, but detecting that's kinda hard, so here we are.
As for the survey, you're going to get a very different group of people responding to a StackOverflow developer survey than if you'd polled a large group of indie game developers. So my point stands.
Really though, I don't find this unreasonable at all. The rule is clear-cut, and it was clearly broken. As for whether the rule itself is justifiable, that's easy to me: GenAI is very harmful to the world and the people in it, and this rule strongly discourages its use. Hell, even moreso now that a prominent IGA GOTY winner had this rule enforced against them. So if you ask me, this brouhaha has actually done a lot of good.
Where I'm curious now is which part of my stance you disagree with. I'm assuming it's the justification for the rule, since the breaking of it hasn't been questioned. Do you feel that GenAI is not harmful? Or do you think it's inevitable and that we'll have no choice but to live with that harm? Something else?
Well now that just makes me wonder what perspective you're encountering that from! I don't want to drag you into this or anything, obviously. It's just that my experience has been that people tend...
Well now that just makes me wonder what perspective you're encountering that from! I don't want to drag you into this or anything, obviously. It's just that my experience has been that people tend to dislike "AI," which includes both (with a nebulous border) whereas "generative AI" doesn't usually include LLMs, with the possible exception of things like dialogue or creative writing.
Well… they work fairly similarly internally by training on a lot of data to mimic output. The same environmental and labor concerns apply. And a lot of people are very much including them within...
Well… they work fairly similarly internally by training on a lot of data to mimic output. The same environmental and labor concerns apply. And a lot of people are very much including them within Gen AI, at least from (vitriolic) discussions in gaming circles I frequent: https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3maj4jyzhps2r
I'm personally just over it. I'll wait and see how things settle after the investment bubble pops.
I've never heard of a definition of generative AI that didn't include LLMs. Is this how people are using the term now? If so, it must be a very new change. Wikipedia still lists LLM-generated...
I've never heard of a definition of generative AI that didn't include LLMs. Is this how people are using the term now? If so, it must be a very new change. Wikipedia still lists LLM-generated software code as an example of gen AI.
There is no definition of "Generative AI" in use in a technical or non-technical context I've encountered that excludes LLMs. The entire purpose of the term "generative AI" is to distinguish...
There is no definition of "Generative AI" in use in a technical or non-technical context I've encountered that excludes LLMs. The entire purpose of the term "generative AI" is to distinguish models that generate their outputs from those that do not, and it was almost certainly used among language models before it was used for other types of generative models, particularly in non-technical contexts as generative AI advances in language models preceded the subsequent advances in image generation afaik.
I saw someone claim that they only used the AI assets as placeholders, and some slipped into the game on release unintentionally. Regardless of the truthiness of this, I think AI gen assets as...
I saw someone claim that they only used the AI assets as placeholders, and some slipped into the game on release unintentionally.
Regardless of the truthiness of this, I think AI gen assets as placeholders is a bananas idea. If it's something you genuinely intend to replace, why not make it a big purple blob so you won't miss it? Why not prefix the asset title with "placeholder" and use that when scanning and refactoring the code prior to release?
I saw a video on YouTube a while back that talked about how CO33 came to be, and a lot of it had to do with the creator selling an idea to investors. That idea is what got them that budget. Purple...
I saw a video on YouTube a while back that talked about how CO33 came to be, and a lot of it had to do with the creator selling an idea to investors. That idea is what got them that budget. Purple blobs do not sell an idea.
There was a lot more to it so I'll try to find the video but that's the gist.
You can see a lot of early footage in that video and more than plenty is Unreal Engine placeholder assets. If they truly only used AI for placeholder purposes I think we should consider engine assets to be in the same vein. You need to have something to show to people or your game goes nowhere.
Also, pretty good video in general.
well of course not. That's why people making pitches make vertical slices. That just means you need to replace placeholders even earlier than usual. Epic hired artists to make those assets, and...
Purple blobs do not sell an idea.
well of course not. That's why people making pitches make vertical slices. That just means you need to replace placeholders even earlier than usual.
If they truly only used AI for placeholder purposes I think we should consider engine assets to be in the same vein.
Epic hired artists to make those assets, and they are actually of decent quality. You can break down a tree and see good modeling principles you can learn from.
I say Engine assets are fine, they are there specifically to help either with prototyping or common boilerplate texture/props. The issue is that these assets are not meant to be cohesive; they are there to provide examples for a variety of environments and genres of games. throwing them all together haphazardly does give the same low quality feel, but not because the assets are low quality. The art direction is.
This quote seems relevant to half our conversation here: https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq Emphasis mine. I think that's the most important trait of indie and the spirit of the original "without...
This quote seems relevant to half our conversation here:
What is an indie game?
It's a tricky question without a strict, black-and-white answer. No matter who is asked - developer, publisher, showcase curator, journalist, creator, or various industry professionals - the answer varies across all parties. There are endless interpretations of a definition, and it will likely change alongside the state of the industry in the years to come. But after many conversations over the years with these various groups, the current definition agreed upon by the IGAs Curation Jury is as follows:
Existing outside of the traditional publisher system, a game crafted and released by developers who are not owned or financially controlled by a major AAA/AA publisher or corporation, allowing them to create in an unrestricted environment and fully swing for the fences in realizing their vision.
Publishers such as Devolver Digital, Annapurna Interactive, and Kepler Interactive are considered to exist outside of the traditional publishing system and fit within the current IGA Curation Jury’s definition.
Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, is not considered indie, nor are major standalone studios such as FromSoftware, Kojima Productions, or Valve as a few examples. First parties (Xbox, Nintendo, and Sony) and studios under their ownership, as well as third parties such as EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Sega, and Bandai Namco (to name a few) are considered AAA. Companies such as THQ Nordic are considered AA .
Emphasis mine. I think that's the most important trait of indie and the spirit of the original "without publisher" definition. I consider Sandfall to only technically be indie on paper if we look at the traditional publishing angle their definition opens with. Just how beholden to investors are they?
But more to the point of portion I emphasized. When you have a team of hundreds (shouldn't ignore the contractors, outsourced staff, and other uncredited folks...), can you honestly say you're bringing a fully realized vision to light, and not something assembled by committee?
I can't give a dividing line number, it'd be arbitrary and quickly tested as time goes on and the environment... develops. None of this is pertinent to the gen AI point unless you consider that point as a scapegoat for trying to nix a dubiously indie game. I suppose I think they shouldn't have been left out for making a mistake, owning it, and fixing it? But I thought they shouldn't be included to begin with.
That definition seems circular. An indie dev is a dev that’s not owned by an AA/AAA developer? Now we’re back to defining what an AA developer is. That’s like defining “low income” as “not medium...
That definition seems circular. An indie dev is a dev that’s not owned by an AA/AAA developer? Now we’re back to defining what an AA developer is.
That’s like defining “low income” as “not medium or high income”.
I wonder if the new prize winners will accept their awards, or whether they will say that they also used ai in some way. There is some chatter online but no sources provided so far. I wait with...
I wonder if the new prize winners will accept their awards, or whether they will say that they also used ai in some way. There is some chatter online but no sources provided so far. I wait with bated breath.
They have been looking for any reason to disqualify E33 for months now from the indie game awards, as the team behind it are professional game devs, and it was made with a budget in the millions. I won't fault them for it, but it is something that they have been actively looking to find any reason they can to remove them from the awards.
Now that they've clinched the GOTY from the game awards, it makes sense to give it to another game, as the Indie Game Awards won't be showcased on any of the box art as publicity/etc as the GOTY from GA will take higher priority.
Coming in as a curious outsider here… How come they weren't disqualified right off the bat for being professional game devs?
One scenario I'm imagining is there's some entrance criteria for who is truely indie, such as (and I'm making this up), "It can't be a true indie game if you spent more than $10 million." And the E33 team had a budget of $9.5 million, so they said to themselves, hey, let's go enter our game for that award! We might step on a few toes because for other cultural reasons we're unlike everyone else there, but we satisfy the letter of the law, right?
(Again, I'm making up that scenario. But if the awards were searching for a technicality on which to throw them out, I'm curious how they got into it in the first place.)
Money isn't the qualifier for being indie or not. I can independently produce a game with my own stack of a billion dollars and it'd still be indie. Clair Obscur was independently developed even if they had a bunch of money come from a lot of places. Indie budgets are significantly higher than they used to be already. A budget of a couple of million isn't even that farfetched.
Take Silksong. Independently developed with a monstrous budget. But nobody will tell you that Team Cherry isn't indie nor that they aren't professional developers.
The image we have for indie games is often different from reality. What made them stand out is that CO33 was developed like a high budget AA(A) game* which draws some ire when the image of your award show is games like VVVVVV and Hollow Knight or Blue Prince.
*Even that is hardly quantifiable.
It's craft beer all over again. People get snobby over large, established players because their image of that is only microbrewers.
Or indie music becoming a weird acoustic pop genre instead of just meaning "not signed with a label."
I mean as always it comes down to the same concept as "The Letter of the Law vs. The Spirit of the Law" with these sort of things, and people's inability to distinguish which one of those angles other people are approaching with when discussing these topics.
Both have merit, but once you distinguish between those two you realize that people are arguing entirely different things while using the same words to describe what they're talking about and because of that will never see eye to eye and the arguments are kind of pointless.
At a deeper level, this happens because people assume a shared definition where none actually exists. One side is operating on formal criteria, what technically qualifies under a given label. The other is operating on cultural meaning, what that label has evolved to generally represent over time. When those two frameworks get treated as the same thing, people seem to argue indefinitely about it.
In this case it seems that /u/bitshift asked their question coming from the "spirit" definition of "Indie Game," and /u/CptBluebear responded coming from the technical definition of "Indie Game". I think a valid question now becomes is there a better term to describe what /u/bitshift is describing and then create an award for that type of game?
A big part of this, at least from the "spirit" side, comes down to a lack of vocabulary for an evolving concept. There isn’t an easy, widely understood term for “low-budget, small team, visibly constrained, experimental, underdog game,” because for a long time "indie game" covered that entire space. The same thing happened with "indie music" and "craft beer."
You used to be able to say “indie game” or “indie music” or "craft beer" and people immediately understood the scope, the scale, and the aesthetic of what you were talking about. As those categories expanded and larger, more polished and financed players entered those categories while still meeting the technical definition of the label, that shorthand stopped working.
The problem is that no replacement terms ever emerged. There’s no single, accessible word that cleanly captures what “indie” used to signal culturally. Saying “low-budget experimental game” or “weird acoustic pop” technically works, but it doesn’t function as shared shorthand, and most people won’t parse it as efficiently as previously.
That’s why a lot of the “spirit” side of these arguments exists at all. I just see so many people arguing over stuff like this when they aren’t even on the same conceptual level, but they keep judging each other as if they are.
Totally agree that what makes a game "indie" is hard to quantify. I used budget as an example since that was something @macleod mentioned, and it was an easy way to demonstrate following the letter of the rules without satisfying the spirit.
I still have a question, though. What qualifications does one currently need to enter a game for the Indie Game Awards?
Maybe the answer is there are no qualifications. Maybe accepting any and all games for consideration, then kicking out the ones that don't "feel right" on technicalities, is just an example of the system working. And if you're a big studio that's definitely not indie by any metric, you're probably going to filter yourself out because there's nothing to gain by trying.
Check their FAQ, they don't even really know what constitutes indie. Their first line starts with:
"It's a tricky question without a strict, black-and-white answer."
https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq
Games developed by studios and published by Devolver Digital are considered indie games, but major standalone studios like FromSoftware are not. Why? Hell if I know.
I mean I agree, nobody would consider Elden Ring indie, but there's little rhyme or reason to it if you truly think about it.
Maybe we need a different label....or weight class: under $500k, under $5 mil
Weight classes is genuinely not a bad idea though part of the magic of indie is that you can create Vampire Survivors with $1500 and still beat other high budget games.
You'd also be surprised how many games will end up in the heavy weight class. Hades is estimated to have cost $15 million. Silksong 5ish. CO33 10mil. TECHNICALLY Star Citizen is an indie at $900 million dollars.
Yeah I'd be happy to have numerous awards every year, for shoestring sub $500k, then small teams under $5m, small-medium like Hades....and then holy moly tier for star citizen and, Elden Ring as you mention :/ it's crazy to have them all in one category
It'd be nice, but the vast majority of games do not want to report their development budget. That'd be one thing that would be nice to regulate if we were to have any intervention. Hollywood box office numbers come from similar regulations.
Of course, the other big issue is cost of living. 500k in California wouldn't go far if you need to pay any engineer or artist. 500k in Belgium may as well be a AA production.
What's the budget of Silksong?
I'm curious as to why you think this. To me, this reads as a perfectly reasonable disqualification regardless of other factors. Personally, I find both disqualifications that the IGA did this year to be heartening, because the good reasoning behind them (and the presence of a GenAI ban to begin with) gives me cause to believe that they genuinely care about the games they judge.
(I'd say "genuinely care relative to The Game Awards," but that'd be damning with faint praise, because TGA is practically a marketing festival.)
It's hardly like the AI asset thing was a secret. That fact was in the public domain before they decided to issue this award. So they either planned it, or they're incompetent.
I can't help but think they played this whole affair to get clicks. I'd never heard of their award programme until they pulled this stunt.
This is just silly. AI is the perfect tool to make Indy games competitive with major studios. We should be celebrating the use of AI for field leveling in these industries.
Isn't it? An EA sacking all of their artists to replace it with an AI is a problem.
A lone coder without the money to hire an artist and without the skill to create more than programmer art now has a competitive edge.
Though it also simultaneously creates a rift between indies that do and indies that don't. What I don't want is that indies should feel pressured to use AI or fall behind other indies.
There's a fine line there and I don't particularly fault an award show for taking a hardline stance, but it does feel a little stifling.
This isn't about that, and I would not celebrate such a thing. There's the problem of that normalizing AI art in production, which devalues artists, but it's not just about their livelihoods : it's also about creativity in general. If you have so little vision for your game that you prefer to resort to having a magic 8-ball make milquetoast visuals for it instead of giving it a go yourself, why even bother? I would prefer programmer art.
That's not what happened with Clair Obscur, though. They had placeholder assets generated by someone else and they replaced them quickly after finding them. They used it to accelerate production, not to eliminate the human element. Whatever we think about that, it's important to make a distinction here.
I think you're mixing concepts here about what AI enables. Consider someone with a physical defect unable to create a drawing to save their life but with oodles of vision that an AI can realise. I do consider that something we should celebrate.
Now I also don't think we're at the point yet it's worthwhile doing so, "milquetoast visuals" is more than an apt description of what AI now produces, but there's a specific distinction I'm trying to make between people with art skills and art vision.
I wouldn't be able to pay an artist on this shoestring budget anyway. AI use is all about being responsible and I know people find that difficult because there is indeed a real danger it devalues real artists' work (see the EA example), but being so vehemently against it when that might mean missing someone's brilliant artistic vision because they can't hold a pencil is a step in the other direction I find difficult to accept.
And yes of course, if you can pay the artists you should pay the artists.
So, two points to this.
First, and less important, is that creativity often thrives under restriction. I don't know what you're imagining when you say "unable to create a drawing to save their life" (given that there are many kinds of drawing and many ways to make each kind), but if someone was truly incapable in this way, I would adore to see what other solutions could work for them that aren't AI slop.
Second and more importantly, this is a high-minded idea that – while commendable as a goal – doesn't really work so well in our current vulture-capitalist-turn-technofuedalist world. The reality is that modern GenAI/LLMs are plagiarist energy hogs that cause mental health crises and mass unemployment, and don't even make anything half-decent in the process. That's a lot of harm to weigh against.
I've said before that this tech could've been good if it'd been spearheaded by open-source communities on small scales (and hell, 15.ai was a thing, wasn't it?), but instead we've got tech bros and CEOs, and all they want is to fire people. In a world like this, the "it's for the disabled" argument that'd otherwise be simple well-meaning allyship will get twisted by money into "Anything we do is justified, because disabled people could theoretically use it."
In practice, the argument is better left on the table for now, saved for a post-AI-bubble world, if or when AI stops damaging so much of the planet. Modern AI, as it is, does not deserve the defense.
No one is going to pay artists whose style will now become analogous with "programmer art" because a model was trained on their work without permission and then sold to random strangers without compensation to them. They will have to evolve and keep ahead of the machine - out of their own pocket - only for their effort to keep getting stolen. Your expectation that AI will improve enough that it can be used to generate distinctive art for a videogame yet people will still choose to pay artists if they can doesn't seem consistent with the realities of videogame development in a capitalist society. Eventually the artist would be an added cost but bring no additional value.
I stipulate this should be the option for people that can't pay the artists, not for the ones that can.
It's more of a hope than an expectation. Yours is not the future I'm looking forward to though, and it's an uncharitable interpretation of what I've said previously. Which, please don't get me wrong, I completely understand. There are a lot of people that do think artists will just land on their feet after their entire industry has been rocked and your outcome is the likely one.
On the flipside, there's a very strong argument to be made that we can't put the genie back in the bottle either and within this capitalist system I would rather see garage devs use AI to win, instead of sitting on their principles just so they can lose to the AAA behemoths that unscrupulously do it anyway and lay off the paid artists.
edit to add: commers r hard yo
Typically I dislike arguments along these lines, because they excuse people from making ethical decisions. I can't put the genie back in the bottle, I can't control other people's actions, but I at least can control my own. I've been paying for indie games for twenty years, but if this were to become sufficiently normalized, I just might stop.
Also, indies are mostly not in direct competition with AAAs, fortunately. Most indie game development is already not a very good financial proposition (unfortunately), not unlike, say, writing. And much of it is artist-led to begin with (a good thing!) I'm only worried about the making of decisions with negative consequences for people who didn't sign up for any of this.
All games are in competition with each other. An hour playing Megabonk is an hour not playing Battlefield. Time is the most important currency, and an even playing field gives your multimillion dollar marketing budget a run for its money when it competes against a Silksong.
I understand my line of thinking is easily characterized as centrist or fence sitting, but I disagree. Purposefully not participating in the system just makes you lose. Ethics don't exist in a vacuum. An automated machine that blandly homogenizes art isn't on the extreme end of my scale, since I can see some use as a good thing for people that might otherwise struggle to make something of themselves. I find it unethical if we prevent some people the tools they might need, more than I find it unethical that machines train on artwork. Mainly because the average artist won't be able to ask an image generator to "create something in my style".
It's late, I'm finding it difficult to create coherent thoughts around ethics and philosophy. I hope the above makes sense. If it didn't make sense, your takeaway should be that I'm voting against the current system while participating in it to make the best of it as long as it exists, I'm also mostly against all the generative AI stuff but see some potential upsides for individuals.
Though most of all I just want it to go away forever, it's so divisive while being barely more than a feature on my phone I rarely look at.
I'm so tired of everything AI.
I get the sentiment if you're a billion dollar corporation trying to appeal with everyone. Then sure, COD BLOPS 7 is in competition with Tiktok and Roblox.
That's a futile perspective as an indie, though. Your goal is not to appeal to the masses and make billions. You start by trying to carve out a few thousand sales and then see where to go from there. That step is already very hard without worrying about "but what about people playing Fortnite?"
That's fine. I've always been resistant to trend setters, so I suppose I've been a "loser" all my life.
But life doesn't set my definition of success, I do. It's influenced by life, but at the end of the day if I don't want to drink, I simply won't drink. Likewise here. I'll wait for the dust to settle before touching AI, unless my future job otherwise forces me to.
If we hit that reality, sure.
I see the work here, though. And we're far, far far away from AAA adoption of such techniques. What they generate for anything more than static textures is unusable for production. And I see LLM's tapering out instead of exponentially increasing quality.
Here's a popular indie RPG called Hylics that predates the modern LLM boom: https://store.steampowered.com/app/397740/Hylics/
The game makes extensive use of machine generated text which is semi-nonsensical to give a particular atmosphere. Part of the game's art and direction is the "empty" writing. Does that make the game less artistic or creative than if they'd hired a professional writer to create reams of nonsense?
well the game is very trippy, but cohesive in its theme and mood. That's great. Clearly the author didn't just generate randomg text by itself and took time to adjust it for the game feel needed. If most AI generation took that care, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
but right now, we're trying to defend one A-student who was going to succeed with or without AI tools and arguing if they got more productive. Meanwhile the rest of the class is turning in slop and is in danger of failing. It's one good apple in a barrel of rot.
lone coder. I sure as heck do not have an edge on artists. Art sells. And right now using any gen AI is a PR disaster, legal minefield, and simply grifty industry as of now to contribute to.
Just gotta do it the old fashioned way and spend a few years working on 3d modeling. That should at least get my stuff presentable to artists who can iterate on my game to make it truly shine.
If it helps any, I've seen a great many artists who've outright stated that even very simple/badly made references can be immensely helpful on their own. It might take less than you think to communicate your idea to an artist, depending on what it is.
People have used automatically generated assets, levels, etc since the beginning of video games. But put the term “AI” on it and people freak out.
I'm surprised people haven't jumped on "procedural generation" yet. Not because it's necessarily the same as AI. But because gamers, at least on the Internet, are so worked up into a frenzy over anything that isn't 110% human, artisanal game dev.
Maybe even autocomplete in IDEs will trigger the frothing masses.
Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but I'm so sick of the "discourse" surrounding AI in gaming, and in the world, period. I hate black and white anything, since clearly there are shades of gray in between and within all things. And even if you think that maybe there's some use for AI in certain stages of development -- gaming or otherwise -- you must be an AI bot or a paid shill for BIG AI that hates human created anything.
Several issues here:
We kinda did back in the day, It's cool but when most your game is proc gen'd it does start to blend in as a variety of blandness. proc gen will always lack something compared to a hand crafted level.
It takes a lot of time to tweak a proc gen so it doesn't create impossible levels or weird hitches or bad interactions. And you need to tweak it for each game. It's not some oracle that creates infinite content. It will in fact take more time to develop that way unless you are a truly skilled engineer: https://xkcd.com/1319/.
proc gen is only using existing assets, not ones of dubious copyright origins. Its infringement depends on the input. And humans still needed to make that input. Ai meanwhile has scraped the internet and has several challenges in court ongoing.
OK, I was a little confused why you replied in this manner. Because my following sentence was:
But rereading this, I can see how you might think I'm saying AI is the same as proc gen. That's my bad. I need to be more careful how I word things!
Anyway, yeah, I didn't mean to say they're the same thing. I'm saying two things: 1) not everyone knows they're quite different things like we do (I'm assuming most gamers do not know; there's nothing that says a gamer has to be technically-minded), and 2) it's easy, especially online for a dumb and/or bad actor to tenuously and mistakenly connect the dots between AI and proc gen through faulty logic and just not having topical knowledge, and then start screaming online on Twitter or reddit or wherever about it, creating a whole firestorm, witch hunts, etc, over nothing. Essentially creating misinformation and then spreading it.
If the ethical concerns and environmental effects with generative AI were the same as any other automated generative process then I imagine the outrage would be minimal in comparison, but that's not the case to my knowledge. It's not as much about the output as the process behind it.
Vampire Survivors used a bunch of free assets, and it became a massive hit. So much so that the creator was almost embarrassed by its success!
Art is hardly the only element of a game. A developer records silly filler noises with a cheap microphone, and it's creative art. The developer uses a generative tool, and it's devaluing artists??
That's because "AI" as a term tends to mean generative AI or large language models these days. In this specific case, it was the former. Those two tools have very concrete and severe negative consequences for their use; the same can't be said for most any pre-2020 techniques.
The problem is that generative data models are only levelling the field right now because it's the same cost and outcome for everyone. Anyone can pick it up and with some practice, get themselves to the point that they can deliver passable art, VO, code and the like. Maybe they use that as a springboard to making games for a living.
Fast forward maybe 5 years. The AI companies now need to show return for their trillion dollars of investment. If someone is reliant on the cloud service, how do they keep up with escalating costs and degrading quality of service. A lot of digital artists that rely on Adobe tools are facing the same problem. So are Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts and social media creators.
These services provide financial security when they are not profitable for the companies providing it. But once you are dependent on them, then it's a lot easier to squeeze those users until the barrier to entry is already having a successful business model and revenue stream.
Now you are just another replaceable worker at a major studio or a freelancer that rents their tools.
At the rate models are becoming capable of running on local hardware, I’m seeing this as less and less of a concern. Pretty much all of the best in class image models are perfectly capable of being run on my (admittedly powerful) workstation. LLMs are still generally only effective on cloud scale hardware, but I think that will change in the relatively near future.
True. Image generation and even animation models can be run pretty effectively. I think the most recent big model is Illustrious after StabilityAI decided to go full corporate with SD3.
Speaking of going corporate, the Flux model is owned by Black Forrest Labs, Illustrious is owned by Onoma AI, Qwen and Wan Video is developed by Alibaba. AuraFlow is by FalAI. The developers of Pony Diffusion seem to also be starting their own thing. Just saying that a lot of the Self Hosted solutions come with strings attached and the terms of any new model could change on a dime. These companies are crowdsourceing a lot of RnD and I'm a little concerned of how things turn out when they shift from Development to Profitability.
At the same time Disney has announced a partnership with OpenAI and I suspect a lot of non-OpenAI models trained on Disney works will be seeing some action taken towards them. Something that will set the president for any other rights holder.
Text based LLMs are probably the area that has the most room for improvement, but many of those models are similarly owned by one of the big tech players or an expensive startups. And most of the self hosting initiatives looks a lot like crowdsourced RnD again.
But the biggest issue is that now the barrier to entry has jumped up from anyone, to anyone that can meet the hardware requirements.
In the last few weeks there's already been several hardware vendors reporting a scaling back or withdrawal from the consumer market. Micron, Nvidia, TSMC to name a few. If AI tech is viable, it's going to be a long while before hardware costs are at reasonable levels (Think Micron forecast it going well into 2027). If it's not... I do not want to imagine what happens to chip market .
Like it or not, the rules do state to disclose if you use any Gen AI in development, not just release. Lying is never a good image, especially if your goal is to have widespread adoption.
Indie games, taken as a category, already are competitive with major studios. The most fascinating artistic endeavors of the year almost all came from AA-or-smaller groups, with several being debut indies. They do not need GenAI or LLMs to accomplish any of this.
All introducing AI to the mixture does is waste time, money, energy, water and people, all for the sake of dramatically increasing homogeneity. It's a tool designed to try and save time on art so artists can spend more time on work; or in other words, the opposite of what we should strive for.
Almost all successful “Indie“ games are still multimillion dollar operations. AI tools have the potential to open the space to motivated single individuals.
...What? This is a pretty wild claim to provide without any backing evidence.
Motivated single individuals are already making games. We've had that since Cave Story released in 2004. I'm honestly starting to question how much attention you actually pay to the indie scene, because single-person dev teams are so frequent as to almost be common knowledge.
From The Indie Game Awards' FAQ page:
(My edits to the question title are to keep focus on Expedition 33, since there was another award retracted this year due to the game in question – Chantey – being tied to ModRetro, which is in hot water due to ModRetro advertising that their consoles are made using the same metal that's used to manufacture attack drones.)
I added the bracketed text to the title of this post because I felt that the scope of the AI use was an important factor – don't want to spook anybody into thinking the game was ¼-AI or something – but if any title editors here feel it's unnecessary, I don't mind its removal.
I think that this is revealing. Your linked FAQ states:
This tells us that the Indie Game Awards is comfortable applying essentially political, values-based standards as part of its eligibility criteria. This in turn implies that the technical argument of whether Clair Obscur's AI use was significant might be beside the point: the IGA is willing to decide guilt by association.
That is, of course, the IGA's prerogative, but it means that all we can really do is divide ourselves into pro and anti-AI camps and shout the same arguments across the fence.
Not necessarily. One revocation can be values-based, whereas the other can be on strict rules basis.
I could also see it being both. The existence for the rule is likely to discourage AI use, which is values-based, for example. And of course, this isn't actually a dichotomy, and both factors could have played a part.
Not sure it matters in the end though, because...
...this is still proving pretty accurate. Even if this was a wholly line-of-the-law decision, the rule itself still gets questioned, and exactly that has been happening here. So we still end up at largely the same place. Which can still be a valuable discussion, if perhaps a retreaded one.
This is a stupid publicity stunt. I'm sure at least some of the other winners and nominees also used AI in some part of the development process, even if none of it made it into the released product. Not to mention how ubiquitous gen AI is becoming in programming, and most indie games rely on preexisting game engines like Unity and Unreal that almost certainly have some lines of code that were written with gen AI assistance. Is it only artists and not developers that matter? Or how about the fact that tools that human artists use like Photoshop or Blender plugins have AI powered features, which said artists may even use without being aware of it? Or how the asset markets associated with popular game engines are flooded with AI generated content which may or may not be properly labeled, and which is commonly used for early development builds until more final assets are created?
It's unenforceable symbol politics. This company actually admitted their mistake, stated clearly that it wasn't intended to be present in the released product, and corrected it almost immediately. They're being punished for honesty. The intent behind the opposition to use of gen AI is to protect human creative workers. How is fairly innocent intended-for-internal-alpha-only use in any way a detriment to artists? It doesn't remove jobs for human artists. If anything, it creates them.
What a joke.
Well it's based on disclosure and includes development, and CO33 got caught. People are free to dig through the other nominees as well (and odds are with the internet, that they have).
That point doesn't matter. https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq
Not released, developed. It was clear at the time they submitted that they were using it. So they lied (or if you are really cynical, they managed to get caught lying). This is less about AI stances and more about sportsmanship and integrity. So it makes sense to punish someone caught to be defying both.
In the gaming space, we tend to use "generative AI" to refer to assets seen in game, not code. if "code generation" is a form of AI then no game since the 90's counts as "not using AI". This is especially because most games these days are made on top of engines, and developers cannot control what code Epic/Unity/etc. chooses to make under the hood. But devs do choose what artistic assets to include in their game.
glad you asked, I read this piece a few days ago that gave me a different light on concept art: https://thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/concept-artists-in-games-say-generative-ai-references-only-make-their-jobs-harder/
I never considered how having generated concept art could mean clients push back harder against other potential designs for their world. I was always thinking that it could help provide something easier to communicate with than "well I want to have this cool looking gruff dude in dirty gold armor with a beard". But this perspective makes sense.
It does matter, because the overall point of my whole comment is that the rule is unreasonable and unenforceable, and therefore should not exist, or should be interpreted in a less strict manner. If I'm telling you the rules are unfair and unreasonable, it's not a counterargument to say that it's in the rules.
Large Language Models are AI that generate text. Whether the artificial neural network is trained on text to generate text or trained on images to generate images is not a relevant distinction. The same uproar would have happened if they shipped dialogue written by ChatGPT. I'm clearly not talking about code generation tools that existed in the 1990s. I'm talking about things like CoPilot or Claude Sonnet.
If the entire industry is built on top of the forbidden technique, time to pack it up or loosen the restrictions. Would it have mattered if the illegal assets were outsourced to a third party? Probably not. They were still part of the development process. Just like the engine is. You can always choose to develop your own game engine. It's just prohibitively expensive and time consuming to attempt to reinvent the wheel for an indie developer. It's not a reasonable ask, but it is the logical conclusion of strictly interpreting this rule. If you can't vouch for the non-AI-ness of every part of every tool ever used at any point in development, including dependencies, then you could be "lying" and therefore ineligible for the award.
We could have a reasonable conversation about the ethics of generative AI in video game development, but I don't think it can be had with an absolutist stance that has no concern for nuance, which cannot be enforced except through trust, and which requires making arbitrary distinctions about what counts and what doesn't count to justify.
Okay. We can have a discussion about that too. But the point here is that the rule exists and that's what they are using as criteria. Calling it unfair when it's being put in effect is working a tad too late IMO. It's an awards show, not national policy, so I'm going to be more lax in what some private organization decides to do in terms of their rulings.
It is for this ruling. I'm simply giving you more context on why they made it this way.
Or we be more subtle and define proper lines. Like we did here.
I'm sorry you do not like the lines here, but your arguments break down to "I don't like this", and mine are simply "the rules are there". I don't have much to say to sway your opinion, I just want to illuminate that this isn't some grand revelation that came out of nowhere.
We can change it for next year if people feel strongly. But I feel more like this will blow over in a week and the rule will stay until the next AI controversy. So I don't know what to say to that. Again, this is just some organization giving recognition to games, so I'm in the camp of "they can rule how they want, as long as it is consistent".
First, I have seen a great many developers who've outright stated that they have zero interest in using AI. Some are outright hostile to the concept, and a lot of AI use is forced on people by their employers. So I feel you may be taking Silicon Valley hype at face value a little too much. Which is understandable given the AI hype machine, but still.
More concretely, though:
That doesn't really matter much here. Generative AI use in development is prohibited for the purposes of the IGA. It doesn't matter if it was supposed to be published or not; using it at all disqualifies them automatically, and that's on them.
If you still like Sandfall despite this, that's perfectly fine! I'm sure the IGA judges do too. The GenAI use here is meager and hardly worth throwing out the team over. It's a matter of fairness, not of "Expedition 33 sucks actually."
Here are the results of the StackOverflow developer survey for 2025. You can dig into the numbers yourself, but suffice to say that the majority of respondents say they do use AI in their development process, including in writing code. Only a minority claim that they use AI to write "the majority" of code, but according to the strict interpretation, any use is grounds for disqualification. It only takes one dev, one line of code. Is that unreasonable? I think so, but that was my entire point.
Well, if you'd like to be technical:
It didn't say anything about LLMs. Personally I'd want those out too, but detecting that's kinda hard, so here we are.
As for the survey, you're going to get a very different group of people responding to a StackOverflow developer survey than if you'd polled a large group of indie game developers. So my point stands.
Really though, I don't find this unreasonable at all. The rule is clear-cut, and it was clearly broken. As for whether the rule itself is justifiable, that's easy to me: GenAI is very harmful to the world and the people in it, and this rule strongly discourages its use. Hell, even moreso now that a prominent IGA GOTY winner had this rule enforced against them. So if you ask me, this brouhaha has actually done a lot of good.
Where I'm curious now is which part of my stance you disagree with. I'm assuming it's the justification for the rule, since the breaking of it hasn't been questioned. Do you feel that GenAI is not harmful? Or do you think it's inevitable and that we'll have no choice but to live with that harm? Something else?
Not looking to get into this conversation (I'm just scrolling by) but LLMs are widely considered a subset of generative AI.
Well now that just makes me wonder what perspective you're encountering that from! I don't want to drag you into this or anything, obviously. It's just that my experience has been that people tend to dislike "AI," which includes both (with a nebulous border) whereas "generative AI" doesn't usually include LLMs, with the possible exception of things like dialogue or creative writing.
Well… they work fairly similarly internally by training on a lot of data to mimic output. The same environmental and labor concerns apply. And a lot of people are very much including them within Gen AI, at least from (vitriolic) discussions in gaming circles I frequent: https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3maj4jyzhps2r
I'm personally just over it. I'll wait and see how things settle after the investment bubble pops.
I've never heard of a definition of generative AI that didn't include LLMs. Is this how people are using the term now? If so, it must be a very new change. Wikipedia still lists LLM-generated software code as an example of gen AI.
There is no definition of "Generative AI" in use in a technical or non-technical context I've encountered that excludes LLMs. The entire purpose of the term "generative AI" is to distinguish models that generate their outputs from those that do not, and it was almost certainly used among language models before it was used for other types of generative models, particularly in non-technical contexts as generative AI advances in language models preceded the subsequent advances in image generation afaik.
I saw someone claim that they only used the AI assets as placeholders, and some slipped into the game on release unintentionally.
Regardless of the truthiness of this, I think AI gen assets as placeholders is a bananas idea. If it's something you genuinely intend to replace, why not make it a big purple blob so you won't miss it? Why not prefix the asset title with "placeholder" and use that when scanning and refactoring the code prior to release?
I saw a video on YouTube a while back that talked about how CO33 came to be, and a lot of it had to do with the creator selling an idea to investors. That idea is what got them that budget. Purple blobs do not sell an idea.
There was a lot more to it so I'll try to find the video but that's the gist.
Edit: Found it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e57JN5V6NbM
You can see a lot of early footage in that video and more than plenty is Unreal Engine placeholder assets. If they truly only used AI for placeholder purposes I think we should consider engine assets to be in the same vein. You need to have something to show to people or your game goes nowhere.
Also, pretty good video in general.
well of course not. That's why people making pitches make vertical slices. That just means you need to replace placeholders even earlier than usual.
Epic hired artists to make those assets, and they are actually of decent quality. You can break down a tree and see good modeling principles you can learn from.
I say Engine assets are fine, they are there specifically to help either with prototyping or common boilerplate texture/props. The issue is that these assets are not meant to be cohesive; they are there to provide examples for a variety of environments and genres of games. throwing them all together haphazardly does give the same low quality feel, but not because the assets are low quality. The art direction is.
This quote seems relevant to half our conversation here:
https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq
Emphasis mine. I think that's the most important trait of indie and the spirit of the original "without publisher" definition. I consider Sandfall to only technically be indie on paper if we look at the traditional publishing angle their definition opens with. Just how beholden to investors are they?
But more to the point of portion I emphasized. When you have a team of hundreds (shouldn't ignore the contractors, outsourced staff, and other uncredited folks...), can you honestly say you're bringing a fully realized vision to light, and not something assembled by committee?
I can't give a dividing line number, it'd be arbitrary and quickly tested as time goes on and the environment... develops. None of this is pertinent to the gen AI point unless you consider that point as a scapegoat for trying to nix a dubiously indie game. I suppose I think they shouldn't have been left out for making a mistake, owning it, and fixing it? But I thought they shouldn't be included to begin with.
That definition seems circular. An indie dev is a dev that’s not owned by an AA/AAA developer? Now we’re back to defining what an AA developer is.
That’s like defining “low income” as “not medium or high income”.
I wonder if the new prize winners will accept their awards, or whether they will say that they also used ai in some way. There is some chatter online but no sources provided so far. I wait with bated breath.