Submitted 3 weeks ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to gaming@beehaw.org
Clair Obscur won multiple awards but used generative AI art as placeholders during production.
The Indie Game Awards revoked Clair Obscur’s Debut and Game of the Year after the AI disclosure.
IGAs reassigned the awards (Blue Prince, Sorry We’re Closed) and reignited debate on gen-AI use.
This debate is getting really really on my opinion.
Oh I like that expression!
They were already floating against bad publicity because of famous “anti-woke” streamers constantly giving them shit, this move sadly doesn’t help: I understand they wanted to shift away the focus from COE33 - after all, it got enough publicity as it stands.
But they could’ve taken so many different approaches; like, for example, instituting a different prize and move Clair Obscur to their own category (I don’t know, call it “shine of the year” or something), but CLEARLY state you are doing this in honor of Indie Awards core concept, which is to highlight less known games.
Calling out a very minimal and almost accidental usage of AI that has been patched out for months just to ban it out… meh.
From my understanding, they got banned because Sandfall declared it as not having used AI at time of submission which was proved incorrect by the AI placeholder assets.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
This feels kind of more like finding a valid excuse after the indie-or-not debate and backlash, but fuck it. Blue Prince is a great Indie GOTY (the correct choice imo).
I don’t think E33 should have qualified as an indie game to begin with.
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Besides the Ai talk, why do you think so? It is an independent game, without a publisher.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
They do have a publisher: Kepler Interactive. But so does Blue Prince in fairness, it was published by Raw Fury.
What constitutes an indie game will always be debated, because it’s almost impossible to define it through black and white rules. If Kojima created a game with a budget of $300m, a cast of Hollywood A-listers and a development team of 200 people and published it himself, would that be an appropriate nomination for the Indie Awards?
Larian self published BG3, should that have been nominated for Indie Awards?