Indie Game Awards revoke Expedition 33 top prizes

The Indie Game Awards has stripped Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 of its Game of the Year and Debut Game honours, citing the role-playing game’s use of generative artificial intelligence.

Organised by Six One Indie, the annual awards are intended to recognise independent game development. Under the awards’ eligibility rules, games are not eligible if generative AI was used at any stage of development.

In a statement released over the weekend, the organisers said a representative of Sandfall Interactive had agreed, when the title was submitted, that no generative AI had been used. However, the developer later confirmed that generative AI art was used during production, prompting the awards body to disqualify the game.

The organisers noted that the assets in question had been patched out, but said the use still breached their regulations.

The Game of the Year and Debut Game trophies will now go to the second-highest scoring titles in each category. Debut Game has been reassigned to à la mode games’ survival horror title Sorry We’re Closed, while Game of the Year will go to Dogubomb’s puzzle adventure Blue Prince.

Sandfall Interactive had previously disclosed in a July interview with Spanish newspaper El País that it had used “some AI” during production, though it did not explicitly confirm at the time that the tools were generative.

In a later update to the article, the studio said no generative AI assets remain in the game, but confirmed that generative AI had been used to produce placeholder textures during development.

It said some of those textures were mistakenly left in the released version due to oversights in the quality assurance process and were replaced within five days of the game’s April 24 launch.

Players reported spotting suspected AI-generated textures after release, including posters shared on social media. Less than a week later, a hotfix update stated that a placeholder texture had been replaced with the correct visual asset.

The Indie Game Awards said that it did not become aware of the game’s use of generative AI until December 18, the day the winners were announced.

Reaction to the decision has been mixed. Some players welcomed the awards’ strict stance against generative AI, while others argued that the use of the technology for a small number of placeholder assets should not have led to disqualification.

The awards body’s rules, however, prohibit the use of generative AI regardless of scale.