Some IGF Jurors Say They Will Not Vote for Games Using Any Generative AI
Some Independent Games Festival jurors have published a statement saying they will not vote for games that use generative AI (software that produces new images, text, or audio) "in any capacity". The statement, dated 10 November 2026, names Sam Barlow and Lena Raine among its signatories. It also says it does not speak for the IGF as an organization or for all of the festival's jury members.
The statement arrives in the middle of a live case. Big Walk is the third game from House House, and the studio has acknowledged using generative AI during its development. According to the studio, it used AI sparingly in the final stretch of the project to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs. House House estimated that well under 0.1% of the game's code had anything to do with LLM (large language model, the technology behind chatbots) usage. It said generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.
The studio described its primary LLM use case as researching issues encountered with third-party code through chatbots. One example it gave was a shadows issue, which it fixed by modifying code the LLM had suggested. The distinction matters for the question jurors are now asking. Asking a chatbot to diagnose a fault in someone else's middleware (the libraries and engines a game is built on) is a different act from generating art, text, or audio that ships to players. The jurors' phrasing does not draw that line.
Disclosure is where the two processes diverge. House House said it disclosed its AI usage as part of its IGF submission. It did not disclose that usage on Big Walk's Steam page, because the storefront does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. The studio also said it did not have an AI policy in place when it developed Big Walk, and that it will work to have a more comprehensive policy going forwards.
House House's catalogue gives some sense of the studio's footprint. The studio states that its first game, Push Me Pull You, is available on PS4 and home computers. Its second, Untitled Goose Game, is available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and home computers. Big Walk is available on Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, and home computers, according to the studio's website.
In my view, the most useful thing to watch is not the headline tally but the gap between the two disclosures. A festival submission and a storefront page serve different audiences, and a jury statement that rules out any generative AI use depends on what developers are asked to declare in each place. If a storefront does not ask about chatbot-assisted debugging, a developer who answers the festival's question truthfully and the storefront's question literally can end up with two different public records of the same project.
The broader context here is an industry still working out its vocabulary. "Generative AI in any capacity" is a broad standard, and it leaves open whether a debugging session with a chatbot falls inside it. Festivals, storefronts, and publishers will each need to decide where that line sits, and developers will need clearer terms before they can comply with confidence. Tools that shorten the search for an obscure rendering or engine fault have real value to small teams. A rule that separates generation from diagnosis would let those teams keep that help while still giving players and jurors a clear answer about what shipped.
