IGF, or the Independent Games Festival is a big celebration of indie games, developers and more that drops in every year for another go around to help support and enjoy a variety of creators from around the world. Each year they take in hundreds of entries that are judged, and processed by a large team of industry professionals from basically every part of the game development process.
Just like every awards show, they’ll select the finalists, and share the winner at their own Ceremony on March 3rd, 2027 to celebrate these winners for the 29th year in a row. But this year, they’ve had to make an extra statement, and this ones on the use of AI in the games industry.
One of the Jurors; Austin Walker, shared this post on Bluesky showcasing the results of numerous discussions around AI, and its usage in the games industry. I highly recommend giving this full statement a read, as the constant use of AI does have a longterm impact on the viability of gaming as a platform as well as the world surrounding us as a whole, but the summary lands simply as. The named jurors will be declining to vote for any game that is found to be using generative AI in any capacity to create their game.
This isn’t every juror on the list, and this isn’t even a statement that’s representative of IGF as a whole, but when a good number of people on this platform have come together to make this stance, it’s worth listening to it.
This decision is going to have an impact on a number of games that have been dumped onto Steam this year, but that scales further to some of the most popular games this year like Big Walk, who confirmed they were using LLM tools to help aid through difficult bugs.
And while for many this may not be worthy of disqualifying a game from consideration, the IGF Jury members that signed onto this statement agreed that AI for code in any capacity was not an exception to their decision. As a whole, I’ll be curious to see if this has an impact on gaming awards and shows in the future, but for now all we can do is sit and see what happens.
