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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tangentially, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46369590

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

Really makes it clear how ridiculous the mania about AI usage is. The game is great and there is absolutely nothing in it that would suggest to the player that AI was used for anything.

Putting essentially arbitrary limitation on which tools game developers are allowed to use is just nonsensical. Yes, the output of AI models can be really bad, but then a game obviously does not deserve an award. Especially for an indie game, with limited resources, AI can be a huge force multiplier. Gatekeeping awards based on these meaningless characteristics seems just very strange.

The real reason Clair Obscure should not have received indie game of the year in the first place is that it was developed by Sandfall interactive and published by Kepler interactive and as such is not an independent game.