Yeah sure they're free to set the rule for their award show however they like, but I think going with a name like the "Indie Awards", kinda signals to the outside, that they wanna be taken seriously and like an authority on indie games. In my opinion, by adding clearly ideologically motivated rules (because let's be honest, something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI), they'll just achieve, that they won't be taken seriously in the future. I know I won't take their award seriously, and I don't think I'm the only one.

They're free to define their rules however they want, I'm free to disagree on the validity of those rules, and the broader community sentiment will decide whether these awards are worth anything.

> something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI

A gorgeous otherwise-monochrome painting that happens to use a little bit of mauve isn't a worse painting because of the mauve. If that painting is nominated for inclusion to a contest that requires the use of only one color, it is correct to reject that painting from consideration. This rejection would only be a problem if the requirement wasn't clearly disclosed up-front.

As for the rest of your commentary; you're free to gather likeminded buddies and start the "Robot-Generated-Art-Inclusive Indie Awards". As a bonus, I expect the fuckoff-huge studios would be quite excited to quietly help fund the project through cutouts.

Yea as I said, the award can reject them, I still think that this award doesn't actually represent the best indie games then, and therefore it will fade into obscurity. Funnily enough, this year's game Awards (the actual game Awards), were basically swept by small studios with tiny budgets compared to AAA studios. That's because these Studios had a coherent vision for their game, people that really cared about making it good, corporate AAA games are bad not because of usage of AI, but because monetization is more important than the gameplay.

To play devil's advocate, AI helps small studios with a limited budget actually way more, because they can bring a game to market, that maybe would've needed 10 people before, but needs only 3 people now. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that that's the new reality, whether we like it or not. As I said, I'm against GenAI in many fields, e.g. I absolutely despise AI generated "Music", cancelled my Spotify subscription because of it (they insist on putting it into playlists and you can't disable it), but that doesn't mean, anything which was produced with 0.1% AI is bad, unethical, etc.