IGF Jurors Refuse to Vote for Games Using Generative AI; Big Walk Developer Discloses <0.1% LLM Code Usage
Some Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors issued a statement refusing to vote for any game using generative AI. In response, House House, the developer of the hit indie game Big Walk, disclosed that it used LLMs "sparingly" in the final stretch to solve technical challenges, estimating that less than 0.1% of its code involved this usage.
According to The Verge, some Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors published a joint statement on November 9, 2026, declaring they would not vote for games that use generative AI in "any capacity." Signatories include Sam Barlow, creator of Telling Lies and Immortality, and Lena Raine, composer of Celeste. The statement noted a significant increase in games developed with generative AI tools, leading to intense internal disagreement without universal consensus. The jurors asserted that generative AI has negative effects and that AI-generated code is no exception.
This stance quickly sparked a specific industry dispute. House House, the developer of the popular indie game Big Walk, immediately released a statement acknowledging that it had used AI "sparingly" during the "final stretch" of development to "help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs." House House detailed that snippets from LLM responses were sometimes copied as starting points and modified into game code, but estimated this affected well under 0.1% of the total codebase, with generative AI not used in any other context. The primary use case was researching third-party code issues via chatbots, such as fixing shadow rendering errors.
House House stated it disclosed this AI usage in its IGF submission but did not disclose it on Steam because the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. The company emphasized that this was not an endorsement of AI tools and expressed concern that voluntary disclosures might contribute to normalizing the technology. Barlow later clarified that Big Walk was not the direct impetus for the discussion but became a "tricky edge case," prompting the community to consider the boundaries of minimal AI use.