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.



I don’t understand why they need GenAI for placeholders; part of the fun of the creative process is coming up with fun, crude drawings that are clear placeholders.
Because games are about the feels. And having crudely drawn dicks doesn’t exactly make QA work easy.
Also there’s lighting, reflections etc that need that shit to be close to real.
For the same reason movies use stand-ins to adjust lights and not a can of beans, which would be more fun
I heard being a video game developer is easy and fun. Just dicking around all day, never dealing with deadlines, not having to pay a staff $200000 dollars a week with investors down your throat.
If you’re working within such constraints you’re not an indie developer and thus not eligible for indie game awards anyway.
Regardless of that, prompting for AI textures is more work than just popping on a placeholder asset anyway. You’re not saving time, particularly not if you don’t have a good way to manage what is and isn’t placeholder thus have to hunt down all the AI generated placeholders before you hit production.
It’s a waste of time.
Yes you are. Just small scale. Unless you’re working solo and not taking a pay cut development costs are huge. It’s amazing how you people will also just inject your own opinion on usefulness. I guess you’re just a better artist than everyone on the team. You should start your own studio, you seem to have every skill you need and have mastered the efficient dev process.
Yes, I do speak from the stance of a professional developer. In what fantasy world are you residing in where a small-scale indie studio has the ability to burn nearly $10 million a year on staff alone?
Plus they probably wouldn’t have forgotten to change them before production if they were quick and bad drawings
You would think that but there have been many examples of placeholder textures getting missed and ending up in shipped games.