According to IGN, the Indie Game Awards has officially retracted the Game of the Year and Debut Game awards from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This follows the discovery that developer Sandfall Interactive used generative AI to create temporary placeholder textures that shipped with the game at launch on July 17, 2025. Sandfall co-founder François Meurisse confirmed the use of AI in a July interview with El País, stating the team briefly experimented with early AI tools in 2022. The studio patched the placeholder textures out just five days after release, calling it a QA oversight, but the Indie Game Awards committee enforced its strict no-AI policy, disqualifying the game. The awards have been reassigned to Sorry We’re Closed for Debut Game and Blue Prince for Game of the Year.
The QA slip and the rules
Here’s the thing about this whole mess: it’s a perfect storm of procedural failure and shifting industry ethics. Sandfall’s explanation—that AI-generated placeholder art slipped through QA and was live for less than a week—is technically plausible. Game development is chaotic, and placeholder assets that get forgotten are a classic dev horror story. But the critical failure wasn’t the technical slip; it was the breach of trust with the award body. The Indie Game Awards state clearly in their FAQ that they have a “hard stance” against gen AI use, and Sandfall’s representative allegedly agreed during submission that none was used. So it doesn’t really matter if the assets were temporary or not. The violation was categorical.
A broader industry panic
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Clair Obscur situation resurfaced amid a huge backlash to Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke discussing his team’s exploratory use of AI for concepts and placeholders. That backlash, in turn, has put every studio’s casual AI experiments under a microscope. We’ve seen similar fan outcry over AI elements in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Anno 117: Pax Romana. The industry is in a deeply awkward transitional phase. On one side, you have executives like EA’s Andrew Wilson calling AI “the very core of our business,” and on the other, you have awards bodies and storefronts like Steam implementing strict disclosure rules. Studios are caught between internal pressure to experiment with efficiency tools and external pressure to maintain artistic purity. It’s a no-win scenario for communication.
The real question is transparency
So what’s the way forward? Look, AI tools are in the pipeline, whether we like it or not. The core issue this debacle highlights isn’t really about the technology itself—it’s about transparency and definition. What counts as “using AI”? Is it only final, shipped assets? What about AI-assisted coding, or upscaling tools, or concept brainstorming? The Indie Game Awards have drawn a very bright, very hard line. Valve’s Steam requires a disclosure. But many studios are still figuring out their own internal policies, and as Vincke’s promised AMA suggests, there’s a desperate need to explain these processes to a skeptical public. The Clair Obscur penalty, for what was essentially a production error, shows how high the stakes have become. One studio’s placeholder is another award body’s disqualifying offense. And that gap in understanding is where careers and reputations are getting burned.
