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 disclosure rules.
Other developers are adopting their own bespoke solutions that act both as an informative statement against gen AI and a philosophical one.
“Absolutely everything in Unbeatable was created by human beings without any generative assistance,” reads a graphic posted by D-Cell Games on Bluesky about its upcoming game Unbeatable. The image was created specifically in response to Lee’s comments. “Every frame drawn, every word written, every model sculpted, every line of code typed, every song sung with a real voice, every guitar played with a real hand, every moment flawed and messy because we are, also.”
Where other developers have taken a simple declarative approach against gen AI, the passion in D-Cell’s statement is apparent and it reads almost like a challenge to those who use the tools. “Ignoring all of the ethical, moral, and legal concerns of using generative AI, it’s a huge waste of effort,” says Jeffrey Chiao, studio producer at D-Cell Games, in an email to The Verge. “We can produce results that meet our quality standards without its assistance.”
Gen AI enthusiasts see the technology as a way to unlock hidden creative potential, and to many it’s a tool to speed up the time-consuming and costly processes inherent to video game production. Some of the biggest companies are taking advantage of that; EA has announced a partnership with Stability AI, for instance, while Microsoft is using AI to generate gameplay.
Ubisoft in particular has had a lot to say about gen AI, with CEO Yves Guillemot calling it “as big [of] a revolution for our industry as the shift to 3D” in a recent earnings call. Players can converse with Ubisoft’s gen AI-powered Neo NPCs while the company’s Ghostwriter tool generates short snippets of dialogue called barks. Subnautica 2 and PUBG publisher Krafton suggested its employees voluntarily resign if they can’t abide by the company’s new “AI-first” reorganization. Meanwhile, gen AI assets are showing up in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (and again in Black Ops 7), Anno 117: Pax Romana, The Alters, The Finals, Arc Raiders, InZoi, and more.
Video game development budgets are ballooning and games are taking longer to release. A tool that can help get games to market quicker and cheaper is an attractive proposition — especially in the indie space, where investment has significantly dried up and smaller teams require developers to do multiple jobs. And while generative AI is being used across all levels of the industry (with notable exceptions), the loudest pushback is coming from the space that ostensibly stands to benefit from it the most. “Constraints we face as indies inspire us to develop with really creative solutions,” Kanaris-Sotiriou says.
“Constraints we face as indies inspire us to develop with really creative solutions.”
Tom Eastman, president of Battle Suit Aces developer Trinket Studios, echoes that sentiment. He says that the problems gen AI purportedly solves are the very things that make game development so rewarding. He spoke about how, in the final days of working on the studio’s previous title, Battle Chef Brigade, several key locations in the game didn’t have finished art. Rather than go through the process of creating the hand-drawn line art that dominates the game’s aesthetic, the team decided to use less time-consuming watercolors instead. “Those are the interesting creative decisions that are fun to work through, instead of ‘please magic box solve my problems.’”
The developers I spoke to acknowledged that as gen AI technology improves, there will be more pressure to use it. And while it’s difficult to pin down with hard numbers, they also see how their official anti-gen-AI declarations have resonated with their players and communities. “It’s almost definitely going to be all around us at this current rate, but I think the things people want in our works aren’t going to change because of it,” says Chiao. “So we’ll hold on our own and continue doing things our way — it’s more fun that way.”