Big Walk studio House House confirmed it used AI in the game’s development, turning one of the year’s most prominent indie projects into one of its most contentious overnight.
As game studios worldwide gear up for awards season, one group of jurors from the Independent Games Festival issued a statement clarifying that they would not vote for or support any submission developed using generative AI in any capacity.
The lengthy statement was shared to Bluesky by podcaster and game designer Austin Walker. “Over the past month, IGF judges and jurists have had intense, difficulty [sic], generous, and deeply engaged conversations about AI and the games industry,” Walker wrote. “This statement is the result of those conversations.”
Attached images show the complete statement and 19 jurors’ names.
“This year’s IGF entries have been incredible. We’ve been lucky to play games that surprise, connect, and challenge us, and we’re excited to vote for our favorites.
“Unfortunately, there has also been a significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools.
“This has set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools, and at this point there is no universal consensus on what (if anything) is to be done.
” […] this year we are declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity,” signees affirm.
“We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.” The statement then includes the names of the IGF jurors who signed it.
Big Walk developer House House addresses AI-generated elephant in room
One judge told Aftermath that, while they’re “officially discouraged” from detailing formal Festival goings-on, they said “it’s pretty clear that the number of entries using AI was a sore spot” for many judges and jurors.
“It got to the point where the most-discussed game this year almost *entirely* involved its AI usage, overshadowing pretty much everything else. Like, it was such a shocking amount of comments that I feel like I have to at least share that part, just to reiterate how much we’ve reached a boiling point.”
The jurors’ statement does not name studio House House or Big Walk specifically. Still, social media sleuths quickly identified Big Walk as the title in question, eventually prompting the game’s developers to confirm AI usage in a Frequently Asked Questions update.
“In the final stretch of Big Walk’s development, LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs,” the updated FAQ explains.
“In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point to be modified into game code—we’d estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage, and generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.”
Independent Games Festival jurors release anti-AI statement
Read the full statement from nearly two dozen IGF jurors here, and find out which titles take the top prizes when the Festival kicks off in early March 2027.
IGF jurors’ anti-AI statement (Austin Walker/Bluesky)
This year’s IGF entries have been incredible. We’ve been lucky to play games that surprise, connect, and challenge us, and we’re excited to vote for our favorites.
Unfortunately, there has also been a significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools. This has set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools, and at this point there is no universal consensus on what (if anything) is to be done.
The IGF has affirmed that we may cast our votes according to our own tastes and values. But we, a contingent of IGF jurors, feel that this trend and the games embracing it deserve stronger pushback than a vote in silence.
While IGF leadership has approved the release of this statement, it’s important to note that we do not speak for IGF as an organization, or for all IGF jury members. Many jurors had differing perspectives and significant reservations about this statement. Some jurists additionally voiced concern about their ability to safely sign without professional blowback, and we do not intend this letter to serve as a censure of those who were unable to sign.
Above all: Our goal is to state solidarity with those who despair over the future of their art, their craft, and their industry—including those who have experimented with these tools in the past, but who now believe they are not in our best interest.
We know that change does not come at the individual level, but as independent developers, we also know firsthand the value of pushing back on what an industry has deemed “inevitable.” As jurists, we feel a responsibility to push past defeatism and aspire to a higher ideal.
The future is not yet settled. You are not alone. We can stand together.
We, the undersigned IGF jury members, believe the following:
- That generative AI has these negative effects:
• Ecological harms at community and planetary levels
• Economic harms to working developers and artists
• Cognitive and psychological harms to its users
• Harm to the increasingly fragile information landscape
• Harms to labor and worker power in creative fields- That these harms do not depend on what is generated, be it music or writing, art or VO, marketing assets or code.
- That AI-generated code is not an exception to these harms. Programming is a creative discipline whose labour deserves the same respect we extend to any part of making a game. This extends to the past work used to train these models without the creators’ consent.
- Finally, that the use of these tools is neither a foregone conclusion in our industry nor that their adoption has been wholly voluntary. We stand in solidarity not only with those developers who have the freedom to unilaterally reject them, but also with those who have been compelled by their employers to adopt their use, those working to establish or improve their workplace policies, and especially with those in positions of precarity who are so often those most pressured to abandon their values.
For these reasons, this year we are declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.
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