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Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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For stuff like dirt/stone/brick/etc textures I'm less strict for the use of generative stuff. I even think having an artist make the "core" texture and then using an AI to fill out the texture across the various surfaces to make it less repetitive over a large area isn't a problem for me.
Like, I agree that these things gernally are ethically questionable with how they are trained, but you can train them on ethically sourced data and doing so could open up the ability to fill out a game world without spending a ton of time, leaving the actual artists more time to work on the important set pieces than the dirt road connecting them.
And little tools like that give studios like this an edge over AAAs. It’s the start of negating their massive manpower advantage.
In other words, the anti-corpo angle seems well worth the “cost” of a few generations. That’s the whole point of AI protest, right? It really against the corps enshittifying stuff.
And little niche extensions in workflows is how machine learning is supposed to be used, like it was well before it got all the hype.
100% agree. I'm glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art.
That’s precisely not what happened with E33.
The implication here is that you can gain manpower without hiring more men, no?
More that an existing smaller studio doesn’t have to sell their soul to a publisher (or get lucky) to survive. They can more safely make a “big” game without going AAA.
My observation is that there’s a “sweet spot” for developers somewhere around the Satisfactory (Coffee Stain) size, with E33 at the upper end of that, but that limits their audience and scope. If they can cut expensive mocap rigs, a bunch of outsourced bulk art, stuff like that with specific automation, so long as they don’t tether themselves to Big Tech AI, that takes away the advantage AAAs have over them.
A few computer generated textures is the first tiny step in that direction.
So no. AI is shit at replacing artists. Especially in E33 tier games. But it’s not a bad tool to add to their bucket, so they can do more.
Right, so the barrier was that they had to pay for this "outsourced bulk art", and now with AI they don't have to. It looks like we are in agreement when I say "I’m glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art"?
It takes less time for the actual in house artists to use GenAI with a dataset trained with the company’s own style to generate “bulk art” than it takes them to manage an outsourced company doing the same thing.
Sauce: work in gaming, just talked about this with our art producer.
The outsourcing work is literally “make this texture we made ourselves by hand look like it was snowing” type of shit. You can use GenAI and have it done in 30 minutes or spend 2 hours talking back and forth with the outsourcing partner in 10 minute intervals over a week - interrupting your flow every time.
I think AI is too dumb, and will always be too dumb, to replace good artists.
I think most game studios can’t afford full time art house across like 30 countries, nor should they want the kind of development abomination Ubisoft has set up. That’s what I’m referring to when I say “outsourced”; development that has just gotten too big, with too many people and too generic a target market. And yes, too many artists working on one game.
I think game artists should have a more intimate relationship with their studio, like they did with E33.
And it’d be nice for them have tools to make more art than they do now, so they can make bigger, richer games, quicker, with less stress and less financial risk. And no enshittification that happens when their studio gets too big.
One builder only uses hand tools, other uses power tools.
That’s the difference, nobody is hiring less people because the tools are better.
Except, right now, they absolutely are. The tools are largely as you describe - though thinking about it, I think I'd describe it more as an airbrush vs a paint brush - but that's not the way that upper management sees it for the most part, and not how the average supporter of GenAI sees it even if they don't recognize that that's their view. Both of these groups see it as a way to cut costs by reducing manpower, even if the GenAI folk don't recognize that that's what their stance is (or refuse to accept it). It's the same as in the programming side of the conversation: vibe coders and prompt generators being hired instead of skilled professionals who can actually use the tools where they're truly useful. Why pay an artist or programmer to do the work when I can just ask an LLM trained on stolen work to do it for me instead.
I read a great post probably a year ago now from somebody who works for a movie studio on why the company has banned hiring prompters. The short of it is, they hired on a number of prompters to replace some jobs that would normally be filled by artists as a test to see if they could reduce their staff while maintaining the same levels of production. What they found was that prompters could produce a massive volume of work very quickly. You ask the team for pictures of a forest scene and the artists would come back in a week with a dozen concepts each while the prompters had 50 the next day. But, if you asked them to take one of their concept pieces and do something like remove the house in it or add people in the foreground, they'd come back the next day with 50 new concept pieces but not the original. They couldn't grasp the concept of editing and refining an image, only using GenAI to generate more with a new set of prompt parameters, and therefore were incapable of doing the work needed that an artist could do.
A feel-good story for artists showing what AI is actually capable of and what it isn't, except for one thing: the company still replaced artists with AI before they learned their lesson, and that's the phase most of the world is in right now and will probably continue to be in until the bubble bursts. And as Alanah Pierce so eloquently put it when talking about the record setting year over year layoffs in the gaming industry (each year has been worse than during the 2008 financial crash): "Most of those people will never work in games again. There's just too many people out of work and not enough jobs to go around." These companies currently in the fuck around phase will find out eventually, but by then it won't matter for many people. They'll never find a job in their field in time and be forced into other work. Art is already one of the lowest paying jobs for the amount of effort and experience required. Many artists who work on commissions do so for less than minimum wage, and starting wages in the game industry for artists haven't increased since I was looking at jobs in the field 15 years ago.
“Replace tools, not jobs” is the best way to use AI.
And also the one that works the best both for people and businesses.
Replacing jobs feels cooler for bosses though…
Oh fuck off with that sentiment. You're very well aware that that's not what happened here, nor is it what's happening in a majority of genAI usage cases. In fact in most cases it IS artists using genAI to speed up the design process.
What AI does here is allowing small teams to get art done what otherwise would eat up their budget, aka they literally couldn't afford. No artists were harmed in these cases because if AI didn't exist they simply wouldn't have been hired.
Yes, there IS a currently ongoing shift. Just like there was e.g. with the mechanic loom. Did that kill off handmade clothing? No - even today we still have artists making handmade clothing and in fact making tons more off of it, while the masses got access to cheap clothing. The initial sudden rush to the new tech is annoying and yes it exposes some people to hardships (which is why we should switch from capitalism, and start providing UBI), but it WILL balance out. Remember, the luddites were wrong at the end.
Language 😠.
Yes, I know I'm kinda strict on that, but there are no reason here to come to insults.
You got a good point here, and the message you answered to got downvoted to oblivion.
If you disagre, downvote away, don't feed the possible troll with your anger.
That excuse can be used by big publishers as well, no?
Oh, yes. Big publisher will try it on a huge scale. They cant help themselves.
And they’re going to get sloppy results back. If they wanna footgun themselves, it’s their foot to shoot.
Some mid sized devs may catch this “Tech Bro Syndrome” too, unfortunately.
For reference, see the latest McDonalds Christmas advert scandal. Or was it Coca Cola?
Like with any new tech, companies will try to exploit it to reduce expenses on people, then quickly realise that just because you replaced a hammer with a hydraulic smithing press, you haven't suddenly become a blacksmith yourself and still need the blacksmith to make shit happen - but now one blacksmith can do ten times more.
Yes, like we went over before, it's literally OK to use AI if the studios that I support use it to generate things that I like.
I think the Luddites weren't just wrong, but actively harmed the masses. They should have been trying to take control of the machines to help themselves, not destroying them, so that they can set more ethical working conditions and pay. The wealthy will always build and use the machines, it is a question whether there are good people running their own businesses who can compete against the feckless elite.
That is why I am opposed to anti-AI people, because they are doing the work of ensuring the 1% get sole agency over the usage of AI. Knowingly or not, Luddites are serving the worst of humanity.
If 1 guy I know gets sole agency over allll the cocaine in my neighborhood, I don't really care that much. I don't think we should live in a cocaine-based society, haha.
I’ve been programming as a hobby since I was 9. It’s also my job so I rarely finish the hobby projects anymore, but still.
On my first computer (Apple II) I was able to make a complete game as a kid that I felt was comparable to some of the commercial ones we had.
In the 1990ies I was just a teenager busy with school but I could make software that was competitive with paid products. Published some things via magazines.
In the late 90ies I made web sites with a few friends from school. Made a lot of money in teenager terms. Huge head start for university.
In the 2000s for the first time I felt that I couldn’t get anywhere close to commercial games anymore. I’m good at programming but pretty much only at that. My art skills are still on the same level as when I was a kid. Last time I used my own hand drawn art professionally was in 2007.
Games continued becoming more and more complex. They now often have incredibly detailed 3D worlds or at least an insane amount of pixel art. Big games have huge custom sound tracks. I can’t do any of that. My graphics tablets and my piano are collecting dust.
In 2025 AI would theoretically give me options again. It can cover some of my weak areas. But people hate it, so there’s no point. Indy developers now require large teams to count as indy (according to this award); for a single person it’s difficult especially with limited time.
It’d be nice if the ethical issues could be fixed though. There are image models trained on proprietary data only, music models will get there too because of some recent legal settlements, but it’s not enough yet.
It's been proven time and time again that a game doesnt need to compare to AA and AAA shit to be successful. You dont need a big game with a big world. There's an endless list of simple indie games that had a captivating charm that are crazy successful, all without a single bit of AI used.
I fully agree with the ethical parts, but not with the bit of people hating it.
Reality is that people on platforms like Reddit or Lemmy (or the tech side of the Fediverse in general) can be incredibly fervent about their AI hate, but they don't represent the average people, whose work has become ever so slightly more convenient thanks to AI - let that be due to meeting summarisation, or writing tools making complex emails easier, or maybe they're software engineers whose workload has been reduced by AI too... I am a software engineer and I use our own Claude instance extensively because it's really good at writing tests, KDoc, it's super helpful at code discovery (our codebase is huge, and I mostly work on a very small subsegment on it, going outside of my domain I can either spend an hour doing manual discovery, or tell Claude to collate all the info I need and go for a coffee while it does so), or to write work item summaries, commit messages, and so on. It doesn't even have to generate (production) code for it to be incredibly useful. And general sentiment within my co-workers is that it's a great tool that means we can achieve targets quicker, and luckily our management realises that we do need the manpower to do things manually still, so it's not like they're reducing teams by expanding on AI. They'd rather take the improved performance, thus the improved revenue, than keep revenue stagnant-ish and reduce expenses.
So yeah the sentiment isn't all negative.
According to research, the overwhelming majority of gamers across all ages and genders do hate genAI though:
Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. - Quantic Foundry
Gamers also don't generally reflect the opinions of the entire population.
The way the question is asked is also important. Obviously a majority will hate genAI slop, but a good (indie) game where the developer had absolutely no chance of hiring actual people (therefore no artist, software engineer, etc. was hurt in the process), now that's a different story.
See this here for example. People are freaking out because AI was mentioned. Not because COE33 is a bad game (though I do think it's overhyped, personally), but because AI got mentioned - in a way that doesn't even affect them.
Thing is, there are some malicious actors in the AI sphere, both for AI and against - and the ones against are pushing absolute BS stories to ragebait people and build "consensus" on AI being bad.
Oh, so it is the gamers who are anti-AI, and the artists who are in favor of it. That makes sense.
It's interesting to me how a project fronted by somebody without two nickels to contract an artist can use the power of AI to create assets they'd never otherwise be able to, but they're not replacing anyone; AI can't just make a bunch of assets that a person could. That's some black magic, right there.
Who made the textures or took the photos that them AI generated ones were derived from, do they get a cut? That justification is even more bizarre now, considering the tools we have to photoscan.