Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free'

Summary

Earlier this month, Junghun Lee — CEO of Nexon, the parent company behind current live-service shooter du jour Arc Raiders — made waves in the game development community with a straightforward statement. “It’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI,” he explained. Indie developers were quick to loudly and vociferously call bullshit. “It’s just not true,” Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou, cofounder of Röki and Mythwrecked developer Polygon Treehouse, tells The Verge.As similar reactions poured in over social media, many developers shared that avoiding generative AI was not only a matter of personal pride, but also a matter of professional marketing — one that developers are leveraging to let their players know their games were made by humans.For Kanaris-Sotiriou, the question of adopting the use of gen AI to make games was an easy one to answer. “The foundations that it’s built upon, the idea of using other people’s work without permission to generate artwork [...] are unfair,” he says.Lee’s comments are just the latest in a string of notable gaming CEOs declaring that gen AI is the future of the medium. But Kanaris-Sotiriou, along with many of his game development peers, wanted to push back against this assertion. So earlier this year they collaborated on a solution — a simple image file of a golden cog-shaped seal that declares, “This developer assures that no gen AI was used in this indie game.”They made the image (which Kanaris-Sotiriou tweaked to ensure it didn’t too closely resemble a more famous seal of approval) freely available for any studio to use in their marketing materials, websites, or game pages. While Kanaris-Sotiriou doesn’t have hard numbers on its use, the seal shows up on the store pages for Rosewater, Astral Ascent, Quarterstaff, and more. In the Bluesky thread announcing the seal’s creation, multiple indie developers shared that they put it on their Itch.io pages and on Steam, where it serves as the antithesis to the platform’s gen AI...