Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lost the award at The Indie Game Awards due to… using AI! – Game News

On December 18, the awards ceremony for The Indie Game Awards was held Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won the “Best Game of the Year” and “Best Debut Game” categories.

However, now, everything has changed significantly because the program managers decided to take back the game’s prize because the game used generative AI technology (Gen AI).

Above its official websitethe event organizers shared the following:

“The Indie Game Awards opposes the use of generative AI throughout the nomination process and in the awards ceremony itself. When submitted for review, a Sandfall Interactive representative confirmed that the product did not use generative AI during development.

However, because Sandfall has confirmed that it used AI-generated images on the awards day of The Indie Game Awards 2025, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was removed from the nomination list.

Even though AI content has been removed and it’s a great game, this behavior still goes against the rules we’ve established.

Because of that, the IGA nomination committee has agreed to withdraw two nominations for the Best Game of the Year and Best Debut Game categories.”

For those who don’t know, during the launch days of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (about 8 months ago), the online community discovered a pattern in the game that used generative AI technology.

Specifically, a pillar in the game has images of AI-generated newspapers pasted on it. The online community knows that this is an image created by AI because the letters in the image are strangely distorted.

However, not long after launch, the team at Sandfall Interactive replaced these sprites with hand-generated images.

Although many people think the existence of this AI texture in the game is because the company used a texture pack from Unreal Engine’s store but forgot to check carefully, an article from the website Elpais (a Spanish newspaper) said this AI content may be created by the company.

Specifically, in the interview between Elpais site and Francois Meurisse – Producer of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – confirmed that the company used AI in the development of the game.

“We do use a little bit of AI technology, but not much.

The important thing is that we have clearly defined what we want to do and what we need to invest in. Of course, technology has allowed us to do things that were previously impossible.

The technologies and resources of Unreal Engine 5 have played a vital role in improving graphics, gameplay and cutscenes.”

As for why this content is in the game, there’s a pretty good chance that this AI content is a temporary placeholder content that would have been set up quite early in the production process that the team forgot to put in.

As mentioned above, the content was quickly “patched” and is no longer available in the game.