this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Gaming

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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.

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[–] TheRealKuni@piefed.social 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How? It's a well defined term. If you don't have a publisher and are independent, that's what indie means. It has nothing to do with budget. Even an indie game can be AAA, because the term AAA refers to how expensive it was. These are two different subjects.

That’s not how the term is used. Definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. Wikipedia’s definition is far more useful.

Take the game “Animal Well.” Go look it up if you haven’t heard of it. Animal Well was programmed by a single person, Billy Basso, as developer “Shared Memory.” It was then published by Videogamedunkey’s company “Bigmode,” the very first title Bigmode published.

By your definition, Animal Well is not an indie game. But it’s exactly the kind of game meant by the term “indie game.” So your definition isn’t a useful one.

[–] Datz@szmer.info 2 points 1 day ago

For an even more funny example, Devolver digital (who published Enter the Gungeon, Cult of the Lamb, and I think Ball X Pit to name a few) market themselves as "an indie game publisher". An oxymoron by previous definition, yet most would agree it's true.

I thought of "not publicly traded" since shareholders usually are the ones to kill creativity, but it turns out DD IS public. And Valve isn't, so that'd be a bit silly. (Even if I think the game dev part of Valve had/has the indie spirit of "fuck it, we do whatever")