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Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
(insider-gaming.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Also what about AI code tools? Like if they use cursor to help write some code does that disqualify them?
If you do that and proceed to say "No we didn't use any AI tools". Then yes, that should be a disqualification.
"When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33."
That’s fair.
But the Game Awards should reconsider that label next year. The connotation is clearly “AI Slop,” and that just doesn’t fit for stuff like cursor code completion, or the few textures E33 used.
Otherwise studios are just going to lie. If they don’t, GA will be completely devoid of bigger projects.
…I don’t know what the threshold for an “AI Slop” game should be through. It’s clearly not E33. But you don’t want a sloppy, heavily marketed game worming its way in, either.
You have to draw the line somewhere, saying any game cant use AI is much simpler than an arbitrary definition of what slop is. Also means we reward real artistry everytime.
Awards like these are inherently subjective. You don't have to draw an objective line anywhere.
Then you’re going to get almost no games.
Or just get devs lying about using cursor or whatever when they code.
If that’s the culture of the Game Awards, if they have to lie just to get on, that… doesn’t seem healthy.
How have we all forgotten that games were made perfectly fine for decades without AI? Better games even.
I'd rather give an award to a "worse" game that didnt use AI, than to a game that did.
Devs can lie, but the truth always comes out eventually.
"the truth" being that a few generated placeholder textures were accidentally left in and promptly replaced? crazy
A willingness to play with Sauron's One Ring is a signal that they're not all that bothered about playing with Sauron's One Ring.
Did you know that most domestic abuse cases don't actually start with some guy beating his future wife on their first date? That kind of behavior builds up over time.
A stance that is perfectly relatable in 2025, but not as much when Expedition 33 was in early development.
Games were made by a single person not sleeping for a week.
But people expect more now and one person can’t do it fueled just by passion. The other people want to get paid now, not when the game is released.
Limiting the tools people can use to make games is ableist, elitist and just stupid.
Theyre not limiting their tools, they're limiting some awards they could win by doing the art themselves.
No no. The rules didn’t say “art” it was ALL AI use for the whole duration of the project. Planning, emails, research everything.
Not a single drop of AI is allowed.
Then most just won't go on the Game Awards, and devs will go on using Cursor or whatever they feel comfortable with in their IDE setup.
I’m all against AI slop, but you’re setting an unreasonably absolute standard. It’s like saying “I will never use any game that was developed in proximity to any closed source software.” That is possible, technically, but most people aren’t gonna do that. It’s basically impossible on a larger team. Give them some slack with the requirement; it’s okay to develop on Windows or on Steam, just open the game’s source.
Similarly, let devs use basic tools. Ban slop from the end product.
By this logic you could also ban Photoshop, tablets and any other software or hardware tool that has improved accessibility and workflow over the years.
AI is a tool, flat out banning it won't and can't work. It's too fucking useful.
People said that anyone who used Photoshop wasn't a real artist, people said computer graphics weren't real art.
At some point you DO have to draw an arbitrary line. Because that's all. Art is arbitrary all of it since the dawn of mankind making art. It's all arbitrary. If you only make hard lines that completely block tools, all you're doing is harming artists.
The entire point of drawing arbitrary lines is to allow for artists to keep making art. Why dissuading people from abusing others.
So do you want no one to be able to do anything or do you want things to actually have artistic expression which is arbitrary.
Ai has plenty of great usage in game development, generating LOD textures, random dirt or rock textures, creating automated systems of pallet replacements. There's plenty of tools that can cut down huge amounts of repetitive workload, so small teams can actually spend their limited resources on actual art that has direct major impact on their vision without wasting huge chunks of time and money on low end. Small parts that realistically wouldn't have had any artists hired or any actual real impact on the experience of those who consume the work, but would have huge negative impacts on those making it.
Just because companies abuse a tool does not make a tool bad. Every artistic tool throughout all of human history has been abused by someone to hurt others. Photography, movies, Photoshop, paints. You name it. It's been used and abused to hurt artists and every time artists adapt bring the new tool on to create new forms of expression. Even if that expression is too rebel against the tool.
You cannot ban a tool no matter what. You only cause more problems becoming worse than those who abuse the tools.
It's highly likely that EVERY video game dev team has at least one person who is using cursor, whether it violates their AI policy or not. It's massively popular, looks just like VSCode, and can be hard to detect.
^ The olympic steroids user telling me I can't prove they used steroids.
You can't reliably detect all steroids. The Olympics has a long history of under detecting novel steroids. A lot of sporting competitions below the Olympics level have a tendency to undertest as well and underdetect. You could have a long and successful career as an athlete from doping.
And more to the point, AI usage can be a factor of 100 harder to detect than steroids to a trained eye.
You don't even need to use cursor. All the major IDEs are including LLMs nowadays to help with code completion and code generation. There's zero chance no gen ai code is in any project that has more than a few people nowadays.
The question is, if having better for-loop completion the same as "create this feature".
Doesn't matter, the rules ban all AI. The rules are stupid.
Edit: I mean the rules are so stupid it probably covers you googling an exception and reading the answer Google provides at the top which is gen ai as if the answer was used to help make the game even if you used nothing from the answer.
Edit: or Sentry even has AI insights into crashes in their default service.
Yeah.
A lot of devs may do it personally, even if it’s not a company imperative (which it shouldn’t be).
Yes. Shit's buggy enough as it is, infect it with this crap and it's outright malware.