The Indie Game Awards took place on December 18, and, as many could assume, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home the awards for Game of the Year and Debut Game. However, things have changed and The Indie Game Awards are making a big decision to strip the Clair Obscur and developer Sandfall Interactive of their awards over the use of gen AI in the game.
In an announcement made on Saturday afternoon, Six One Indie, the creators of the show, said that it’s removal comes after the discovery after voting was done, and the show was recorded.
“The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” the statement reads. “When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
“In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination.”
Six One Indie ended by thanking the community for being patient and providing feedback on the situation.
“The organizational team behind the ceremony is a small crew with big ambitions, and The Indie Game Awards can only grow with your help and support,” they said. “We already can’t wait for the 2026 ceremony!”
With Clair Obscur’s disqualification, the awards will now go to the runner ups. That means the award for Debut Game goes to Sorry We’re Closed while Game of the Year now goes to Blue Prince.
What do you think of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being disqualified and having their awards stripped at The Indie Game Awards due to gen AI? Leave your thoughts down below and join the discussion in the official Insider Gaming Discord server.
Bit of a tangent, but that “Sorry We’re Closed” game just got made free for today only on Epic Games store.
Clair Obscure had a large team working on it, external contractors and backing by a publisher. Why is it running for indie games awards in the first place.
Gamers are illiterate.
The real divide is between modders vs game devs, not AAA games vs “indie” games.
Leave your thoughts down below and join the discussion in the official Insider Gaming Discord server.
Unlimited Genocide on Discord and also The First World.Discord sucks ass of course but it is also one of the only ways I can talk (like actually verbally speak) to most of my best friends. If you got an alternative I would love to hear it.
Matrix/Element is the main option, though I don’t know if it covers all the same use cases as Discord. IIRC they added the voice room features, and Spaces act like Discord servers, so it should be similar.
It’s not that Discord is conceptually bad, it’s that it’s a corporate scam meant to harvest your data and manipulate you for various other corporate and state interests.
Matrix is terrible though.
IDK, Matrix works fine for me. I don’t use all the features, though.
You get all the usual federation problems, but unlike with the fediverse I feel like there is basically no upside.
The cryptography is a complete nightmare UX wise. A lot of matrix clients also use an outdated, insecure and unsupported implementation of the crypto protocol (libolm).
The company behind matrix is shit, they have given up on the Matrix.org foundation and are only pursuing enterprise contacts.
In addition to the technical problems you get the moderation problems which results in mods telling users that there is really nothing the mods can do when users get CSAM dmed. This is a direct result from the federation model. It’s not worth it.
You get all the usual federation problems, but unlike with the fediverse I feel like there is basically no upside.
You sign up for one Matrix account on your server of choice and it can be used to communicate with all accounts on every other server. You’re not locked in to a single provider. That’s the same upside as all the other federated platforms.
The cryptography is a complete nightmare UX wise.
If I click “reset”, it wants to “Set up secure backup”, which I don’t want, because I don’t need it. The benefit of using gitter for project communication is 0-overhead and working with my github-account. I don’t want extra passwords, keyfiles or any of that.
This issue is just describing someone using it wrong on purpose. All they have to do is enable the encrypted backup (which is the default IIRC) and save the backup key, which they refuse to do. That solves all the problems with encrypted messages AFAIK. If they’re just looking for a non-encrypted chat platform, they should use one.
In addition to the technical problems you get the moderation problems which results in mods telling users that there is really nothing the mods can do when users get CSAM dmed. This is a direct result from the federation model. It’s not worth it.
No idea about this.
You sign up for one Matrix account on your server of choice and it can be used to communicate with all accounts on every other server. You’re not locked in to a single provider. That’s the same upside as all the other federated platforms.
The only accounts ever contacting me from other servers are all spam. I would much rather create one account per server that I’m interested in and chat with other people that have accounts on that server. This would allow for actual moderation too.
This issue is just describing someone using it wrong on purpose.
It’s very difficult to setup correctly across multiple devices (because it doesn’t work right half the time). “Set up secure backup” does nothing for the user in question. In practice basically all channels have encryption disabled and that information isn’t prominently displayed.
No idea about this.
See the discussion here for example to get an idea of the scope of the problem
First and foremost Matrix (through e.g. the client Element) and maybe Signal
Yeah I am already on matrix. I meant more for voice chat
Theres Mumble for VoIP.
The ideal would be to nationalize Discord and treat it as a public utility
Not even that. Just make it so that the discord API is fully published and people can make third party clients approved by TOS. Most of my issue with discord is that their proprietary client is literally unusable for me due to overstimulation, adware, and confusing settings and non existent features (not to mention the resource hog and just recently functioning Linux support)
But of course that would take away from the main business model of being a lifestyle brand for very saavy gamers and people after work who have no where to go but online. The porkies know that software made for humans and not capital doesnt get them their megayacht.
Retvrn to having teamspeak ventrilo and mumble installed at the same time for different clans/guilds
Element and thus Schildichat has voice chat implemented quite well, not sure if they still use Jitsi
This reads like a ploy to get media attention. It was a singular asset used for testing that snuck through QC. This is just another “Allen, please add details” mistake. The texture was removed 4 days after release and the indie game awards must have known about this for ages and just wanted the publicity of a DSQ.
“When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33”
It’s not just a, “Whoopsie, this snuck through QC,” it’s outright lying in their submission. Whereas before they could have made the case that, “Oh, it was just François on his own who did that and we fixed it,” now they came out and said, “Naw, we were doing that left and right.” You don’t need AI to make a placeholder asset. It’s as simple as just painting your placeholder neon yellow and sticking it in the world. That way you also are less likely to gloss over it when doing your QC because it will stick out like a sore thumb. Its usage was also not disclosed on Steam, which requires disclosing the usage of AI, so it also erodes trust with those buying games. Even if you want to defend using it for concept art, I would push back on that as the point of concept art is to depict new ideas. When using the plagarism machine 5000, you’re only going to get some amalgamated mass of rehashed ideas from whatever was fed into it. I don’t care about intellectual property or w/e, but what I’m trying to get at is that it’s not gonna be a novel concept coming out the other end.
“Sorry We’re Closed” is an overall great game (drags a bit towards the end) but it must sting to win as a technicality to disqualification. It also feels weird to lump in games that have a megabux budget with games made out of living off ramen, yeah they’re both indie but if that’s the case then what’s the point.
At this point it makes more sense to sort games by budget in the same way combat sports have weight classes. The indie category means little.
Yeah, the singledev, indie, A, AA, AAA. AAA+ categories need some actual definition
Good
lol, lmao
what did they use AI for
at first I thought I was being an asshole asking this without reading the link but 1) it doesn’t seem to have that info, still and 2) it demanded I un-adblock it and fuck that
They had some AI generated “placeholder” textures that were quietly patched out.
I can see both sides of this argument tbh. On one hand, that isn’t really the kind of AI usage that I really want games to be disqualified for, it doesn’t really affect anything and isn’t a huge deal. On the other hand, the rule was no AI and they shipped the game with AI shit so it’s a fair disqualification.
I lean more toward the latter just due to my seething hatred of all AI (seriously, you couldn’t use any of the trillions of gigabytes of free shit out there as placeholder art, or just good ol’ programmer art? you HAD to use AI slop? really?) but it’s all pretty low stakes
I think the correct take is that the rule is at once silly but also necessary: an “indie game award” should be for small or solo devs building passion projects, which should be a category where “there is literally no budget to hire expensive contractors to make assets, because the actual devs working on the project need things like food, shelter, and electricity” is a legitimate excuse for generating assets if a work is otherwise legitimate and high effort instead of shovelware slop padded out with generated assets.
Clair Obscura shouldn’t have been in contention in the first place, since it’s a high budget AA game that would have been a AAA game a decade ago and which had huge backers and a massive studio behind it.
Are you a small team of developers building a game off of literal Christmas money you’ve saved up over the years? Are you deliberating between contracting all your games assets and textures out, or just using AI to generate it for you?
How about you redacted?
If you are making a third person story driven RPG on a budget of less than 5 million dollars, but it doesn’t look like Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko, re-evaluate your priorities. If people care more about graphics than gameplay or story, they’re gonna play something else anyways.
You know how many furries there are out there?You know how many incredibly talented furries are out there desperately looking for a way to earn slightly less money doing something they actually give a shit about?! (Instead of working at CATO’s because they got confused, and thought they were gonna score an employee discount on neko themed breakfast cereal?)
It seems like the rules clearly stated no AI could be used to be considered for any awards for this contest. Sandfall could have withdrawn, they’ve won enough other awards, and it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But Sandfall instead proceeded through the nomination process, and only had the award stripped from them when it was discovered they were lying about not using AI.
Setting aside the fact that AI is a tool of capital to oppress and steal from labor, not disclosing the use of AI to win an indie award is tacky. The dishonesty to win a low-stakes award is why this is a bigger deal. Especially with the nepotism, budget and capital behind Sandfall vs. the much smaller studios that were in contention this year and created art, by hand, that deserves to be celebrated.
Using it as placeholder art during development is fine, I guess (though as you say, there’s already a ton of free placeholder stuff they could use), but releasing it with AI art, and only changing it because people noticed it is just scummy.
Being the artist who’s job it is to paint over the AI placeholder art sounds like a terrible job.
Not really. You just scrap it and start from scratch. The point of placeholder art is something that gives the development team the general idea of what something should look like without needing to put any effort in, and AI does a decent job of making something 80% correct for zero effort.
Taking something perceived as 80% correct without any creative vision behind it to 100% sucks.
Even if you are starting on a blank canvas you still have the preconceived notion. There is a similar problem with Film music where productions started using filler tracks which has limited composers to making something similar to the filler tracks rather than something whole.
i think it was for placeholder art, someone check me if that’s wrong
