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.
They were already floating against bad publicity because of famous “anti-woke” streamers constantly giving them shit, this move sadly doesn’t help: I understand they wanted to shift away the focus from COE33 - after all, it got enough publicity as it stands.
But they could’ve taken so many different approaches; like, for example, instituting a different prize and move Clair Obscur to their own category (I don’t know, call it “shine of the year” or something), but CLEARLY state you are doing this in honor of Indie Awards core concept, which is to highlight less known games.
Calling out a very minimal and almost accidental usage of AI that has been patched out for months just to ban it out… meh.
From my understanding, they got banned because Sandfall declared it as not having used AI at time of submission which was proved incorrect by the AI placeholder assets.