If you use AI in your game I will not play it. Indie or not. I'm clearly not alone in this thinking, since the CEO of Epic Games is spreading AI-generated propaganda claiming that AI labels "hurt developers" due to significantly reduced sales.
"My plan for Spirit Call was a game like Genshin Impact (原神), with a new character every few weeks."
In other words, their plan was to get really rich with as little effort as possible, copying the essence of a highly profitable and exploitative gacha game.
Exploring new games or any media, to me, is all about avoiding the authors who have that as an objective. And right now, AI use for creative media (and even more AI praise in games, like this article) is a stronger warning sign than bargain bin asset packs.
But, I don't hate AI. It'd be hypocritical of me. I am still the person who got fascinated by the first blurry dogslug, and struggled to get Lua Torch running on my already then ancient GPU so I could play with the DCGAN code and make flowers from the Oxford dataset. Generative AI is damn amazing. It's people who would use it to get rich quick who suck.
Certainly not Epic, given that Unreal 6 development workflow is strongly based on AI as announced recently on the Tokio Unreal 2026 event, and will even drop C++ for gameplay, it will only be supported on the core engine.
Play more old games. Classic games. I've been playing a lot of old Nintendo games through and emulator and there's a genuine quality to them not in the slop we see today.
We've created so many cool things in the past that there's plenty of things to enjoy now that weren't tainted with AI.
There is in the indie scene a large group of people and studios that refuse to adopt it, and proudly advertise this fact. In fact it might turn out to be the very thing that separates ‘indie’ from everything else. And as a player of indie games, I actively steer away from games who have been created through AI assistance, as far as it is possible to tell.
It doesn't really matter because in practice, the people who use AI seem to be the type not afraid to admit it, and the people who don't use AI hate it personally so they are usually honest about it. Unlike commercial advertising, there really isn't a great benefit to lying about AI use.
Play older games until there is a robust community to identiy human-made art. Enough of those old games to last a lifetime if society doesn't stop eating its own tail before then.
AI is exposing everyones poor workflow management, and in the gaming industry this not only hurts profit but it hurts pride.
If your workflow sucks, your product sucks - and users can sense this from a distance, AI or no-AI.
There will come a point soon where you won't be able to spot the AI in the workflow. This is already happening all over many other industries - some of which, do have proper, robust software development workflows in place as an entrenched standard.
