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.
Agreed, the assets did make it to production, but were replaced in a patch 5 days later. That definitely seems like it was placeholders that just got missed. Which happens, especially for a new small studio releasing their first game.
GenAI being used for temporary placeholders is arguably a correct use case for it. Especially with a smaller development team. If you have a limited number of artists, having them spend time crafting unique placeholders that will be replaced is a poor use of their time and talents that would otherwise be spent working on final art that will actually be in the released game. That is a 100% valid use case scenario for it, as long as the assets are replaced for the launch. And missing a few and fixing that within a week is entirely understandable, not something they should be indicted for.
There is some concern about the exact wording I’ve seen in various articles. Some say that Sandfall told the awards that GenAI wasn’t used in the development, but the articles don’t use a specific quote on their side, and then later saying it was used for placeholder assets. They seem to imply that Sandfall lies about the use to qualify, then later came clean. I’m wondering if that is simply miscommunication, potentially language issues, about the final game not using GenAI. Just because people speak multiple languages, that doesn’t mean that they understand nuanced differences in meaning when not using their native language. I can see the difference between the final game release and overall development being misunderstood depending on the exact wording used.
it’s kinda irrelevant to the make it to production part though: the rule is no gen ai used during development… there’s no ifs, buts, or maybes here: there definitively was, and nobody is denying that
Why don’t they just use a grey box as placeholder? Or a photo of John Oliver?
Could it make testing less conclusive? Part of testing is to see whether people actually enjoy the game. And I’d conjecture immersion-breaking placeholder assets could lead to worse testing reviews.
I would strongly agree with you. I know so many people that will completely discount a game if the graphics isn’t bleeding edge “photorealistic”-adjacent.
I know a bunch of friends that love base building, automation, logistics, trains, programming and so on. But they completely discounted even trying a game like Factorio because “the graphics are ugly”… Instead opting for Satisfactory or similar. Satisfactory is an awesome game too, but it lacks a lot of technical depth compared to Factorio.
There’s a lot of other games where the atmosphere or art direction are also hugely important, and a grey or black/purple checkered texture just doesn’t convey the same feeling as if something looks like a rusty iron pipe.
I can see many situations where either AI generated placeholder textures or just textures from an asset library could help a lot with prototyping, and play testing.
From my experience of selling and apartment almost a decade ago, it’s clear that many people lack imagination. We heard that several people didn’t want to buy the apartment because they didn’t like the furniture… which wasn’t even part of the sale, or didn’t like the colour of the walls… Which they could of course just paint over… So I can definitely see that many playtesters would have trouble envisioning the game, if all the textures are solid grey, and the models are square.
I’m however also very much dislike the current state of things where developers will AI generate huge portions of the game and assets releasing it as the final product. It’s a shame that the craft of artists is getting dumped and replaced by AI gen…
In my book, the developers can use AI as much as they want, but they should clearly declare where AI gen has been used. Then the consumer can make an informed decision of whether to support it or not. I would personally avoid games that ship AI assets, but wouldn’t at all have a problem with the developer using AI assets during development and prototyping.