Is AI making everybody crazy…

Big Walk’s studio says AI touched well under 0.1% of the game’s code, about 10 lines to fix a shadow bug, and the game got 366 negative Steam reviews in one day. Here’s what actually happened.

Big Walk is the co-op game from House House, the studio behind Untitled Goose Game. It sold over a million copies in six days and sits at 91 on Metacritic. On November 9, 19 jurors at the Independent Games Festival said they would not vote for any game that used generative AI in any capacity, programming included. House House then posted its disclosure: a chatbot was used sparingly near the end of development, mostly to research problems in code they didn’t write, and the one example they give is a Unity shadow bug that made the game run 50% slower at every sunrise and sunset.

I go through what the studio says it did in its own words, why the jurors and the customers get to have their opinion, and where I think both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides get it wrong. I cover the difference between AI-assisted and AI-generated code, what Unity, Unreal and Steam already do with AI, what Tim Sweeney has said, and why I think this market splits three ways, with price being a bigger part of it than people admit.

I’m not a master coder and I’ve never worked in game development. I did work in tech before any of this, and every source I use is on screen.

Chapters
00:00 Big Walk and the AI backlash
00:36 What Big Walk is
01:26 How it came out: the IGF jurors and Steam reviews
02:42 What House House says it used AI for
04:31 People get to have an opinion
05:04 Does this prove Tim Sweeney right?
06:10 Where I’m coming from
06:35 AI-assisted vs. AI-generated code
07:25 The ladder of AI help
09:23 The anti-AI side, fairly
10:55 Where the pro-AI side gets it wrong
12:08 It’s already in the tools: Unity, Unreal, DLSS
14:38 Steam’s AI disclosure rules
15:29 My prediction: the market splits
16:34 It’s also about price
17:28 Know what you’re objecting to

Watch next
AI and the Midterms: https://youtu.be/UTuNFv9BC2Y
AI’s Circular Money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5skS4Q1Tm8
You’re Not Paying What AI Costs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn5KexaWk0o

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Sources, post and photo credits are on screen in the video. Game footage: House House / Panic. Keynote footage: Epic Games.

#BigWalk #AI #GameDev #Steam #EricJuly