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

thegamer.com

331–340 of 421 posts

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would the limit be in your mind? Does it include marketing?

regardless of the definition of the word. i don't think anybody would call a game indie that has tens of millions in production budget, over 300 developer working on it and a movie deal before it was even released.

So under ten million max then?

What's the maximum developer count? Do outsourced assets count, if so, how? By the amount of people who directly worked on the assets by the outsource company or the whole headcount?

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday Very curious to hear what channels you follow and how often per week. My RSS feed was spammed by it this and previous years

That was probably The Game Awards[0], which is a big deal. I guess whoever is behind Indie Game Awards sees the name confusion as a feature rather than a bug. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2025

Indeed I was confused. I am an idiot and sorry!

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

#333
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they can most likely prove the actual assets were on their version control years ago but weren’t applied to the models.

How? We don't have access to their version control. How do you validate an external version control to be accurate and reflective of the state years ago? Git histories can be rewritten as one pleases.

A forensic auditor would find that out, unless they do a full company wide purge of all local and remote Git histories.

But I'm kinda thinking this isn't THAT serious =)

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will literally get a fine for going three miles per hour over the speed limit in many countries.

I think the metaphor here would be more like getting your license permanently suspended for going 3 mph over. Whether that happens anywhere or not in reality, the point is, it would be an absurd overreaction.

Not getting the "didn't go over the speed limit" award when you did in fact go over the speed limit shouldn't be a big deal to anyone.

Nobody is preventing the studio from working, or from continuing to make (ostensibly) tons of money from their acclaimed game. Their game didn't meet the requirements for one particular GOTY award, boo hoo

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also against it because they believe it will compete with them and they will get paid less.

That’s also a valid reason to be against it!

I disagree, this is the worst reason to be against it. It's choosing horses over trains. Manual labor over engines, mail over e-mail. It's basically purely egotistical, placing something as fleeting as your current job over the progress of humanity.

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

#336
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in giving someone a reasonable amount of time to correct their mistakes. Yes, it was a terrible mistake to release the game in that state, but I think correcting it within days is sufficient.

It's not a "terrible mistake" to accidentally ship placeholder textures. Let's tone it down just a wee bit, maybe. Anyway, I don't agree with banning generative AI, but if the award show wants to do so, go ahead. What has caused me to lose any respect for them is that they're doing this for such a silly reason. There's a huge difference between using AI to generate your actual textures and ship those, and.... acciden…

How could a gen AI ban be anything but ideological?

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blanket ban on generative AI? Games have been using some form or another every since the days of RTS map generation and perlin noise

That is not the sort of thing people are referring to when they use the term “generative AI”. It’s basically a completely different technology and the ethical concerns around data sourcing and energy usage are not the same at all.

It's extremely tiring how people pretend like there's no difference between these technologies. The comments on the article are the epitome - "oh they used a computer to make a computer game, the horror"

Just a cudgel to shut down discussion

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

#338
post #129

The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c... > Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative AI-created assets in the game. When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, insta…

From the submitted article: > "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. 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." Whatever placeholder you…

> “witch hunt” is most often used by bad actors attempting to discredit legitimate investigations).

By that logic, "fake news" is now unusable because Trump weaponized it, despite the term accurately describing a real phenomenon that existed before and after his usage. "Gaslighting" would be suspect because it got picked up by people dramatizing ordinary disagreements. Every useful term for describing social dynamics gets captured by someone with an agenda eventually.

Hitler liked chocolate, doesn't mean you shouldn't eat chocolate. "You used a word that bad people also use" is not interesting - it's a way of avoiding the object-level debate while still claiming moral high ground.

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

#339
post #3

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

That’s not how awards work. Awards trade on prestige. In order for an award to matter, the people you’re giving it to have to care. I think you’ll find most of the small teams making popular indie video games aren’t going to be interested in winning a pro-AI award.

I don't think pro-AI was discussed. It was rather not being anti-AI.

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

#340
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was probably The Game Awards[0], which is a big deal. I guess whoever is behind Indie Game Awards sees the name confusion as a feature rather than a bug. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2025

I'm not trying to defend "The Indie Game Awards", which I also have never heard of, but The Game Awards are universally acknowledged to be a joke, and always have been. By runtime, it's 80% soulless, samey trailers for AAA games, 10% Imagine Dragons, 5% rooting for that coked-up clarinet player on the edge of the orchestra, and 5% Jeff Keighley rapid-firing off the winners of made-up award categories in under five se…

This years was pretty good on trailer side, barely anything from AAA studios like Activision, ea, etc. They're not winning any awards either.
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