Everyone is using AI in the gaming industry. What you gonna do now?

Not everyone, quit with the doomer propaganda.

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.

And there is no way to verify it in any way.

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.

[citation needed]

Common sense. Except maybe most of the graphical artists, but coders, with common engines like UE? Surely.

Stop playing games. Just like I stopped reading AI generated blogs.

Although that won't happen. There will always be some people passionate to create amazing and fun experiences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Game guys will catch up.

That's your call. But I see a deeper problem:

"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.