Last week, Recreate Games apologised after an AI-generated video competition for its popular casual brawler Party Animals drew significant criticism from its community. Now, it’s cancelled the competition entirely.
Recreate announced on X yesterday that after receiving “a significant amount of negative feedback”, Party Animals’ AI video contest has been cancelled effective immediately.
“Even though our original intention was to encourage more diverse forms of creative expression and lower the barrier to entry, allowing more players who love Party Animals to participate, we mistakenly tied ‘lowering the barrier’ together with ‘using AI’,” Recreate wrote.
“In doing so, we overlooked the potential offense and harm that the ongoing debate surrounding AI-generated content could cause to our players and the creator community. We feel deeply uneasy and apologetic about this, and we sincerely accept the criticism.”
The post goes on to explain how the developers plan to collect and act upon player feedback in the future, although without mentioning specifics. Responses to the announcement seem to be mostly negative, with some even suggesting the post might have been written by AI.
Looking at the wider games industry and the ongoing discussion about AI and its role in game development, we know of publishers and studios embracing it; some have even attempted (and failed) to create entire games, like Amazon. Even Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi is somewhat intrigued by it. On the other hand, there are those refusing to give generative AI any space. How should a studio use it, if at all? The debate rages on.