// KOTAKU — GAMING
A Big Talk About Big Walk’s AI Fallout
Big Walk, the game that was likely at or near the top of a lot of people’s game of the year lists, was made in very small part with the use of AI. This was not previously disclosed publicly or on Steam because, according to House House’s statement on the matter, “the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage.” And we’re only finding out about this now, long after the game has released to universal acclaim, because Big Walk was apparently at the heart of a fractious discussion about AI usage in development and the game’s eligibility for awards among the jury members for the 2027 Independent Games Festival.
Over the past month, IGF judges and jurists have had intense, difficulty, generous, and deeply engaged conversations about AI and the games industry.
This statement is the result of those conversations.
— austin_walker (@austinwalker.bsky.social) 2026-11-09T22:42:15.552Z
Some jurors felt that a hard, no-exceptions line needed to be drawn in the sand, and made a public, signed statement to that effect. Others felt that considering how House House used the tech was worth consideration in determining Big Walk‘s eligibility. House House claims that “well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage and generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game,” and it seems like some jurors felt that such limited use shouldn’t disqualify a game that was very likely in the running for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the IGF’s top award.
The discussions about this event at Kotaku mirror those playing out amongst gamers and developers on social media. But at the heart of it all, this sucks man.
Ash Parrish: Where do you all come down on this? Rebekah Valentine: As the person on this team who went to bat, hard, for this game, who loved it completely, who bullied you all so much to play it and wrote about it incessantly, I will start by saying: God damn it.
Ash: I have not played the game because I haven’t taken the time to round up friends to play it with. It was important that I make an effort to try because this game seems so special to everyone I’ve seen talk about it. This whole thing, not just how AI was used but how we found out about it, definitely removes that urgency. Rebekah: I am not naive enough to believe that every game I play has zero AI touching it in any way. In fact, I assume many of them do. But I, and I think many others, made an assumption that based on the past stances of this dev team and their general attention to a lot of hand-crafted detail, AI would not even be a factor.
Carolyn Petit: I’m actually playing it right now with friends and it was certainly strange to emerge from our play session last night (for those who’ve played it, we just got the ski lift working!) and into the online discourse. My feeling is that the goal should be an expectation of zero AI usage on any level. It’s stolen labor no matter how you cut it. Does that mean I think House House should be crucified in the court of public opinion? Maybe not, but I do think we need to be clear about establishing and holding to that expectation moving forward, and I don’t think it should receive honors at IGF. John Walker: I think it’s really important to recognize that of all the games we’ve loved this year, almost all of them will have used LLMs as part of the coding process. I hate that, and I wish they had not, and I appeal to developers to stop doing it. But of all of the games to do this, I suspect Big Walk did it about the very least. So I feel like this is a public flogging that will achieve demoralizing or demolishing a great studio and little else. Ash: Then why not tell us up front and give consumers the choice? I think a lot of people would have been OK with the exact disclosure we were given today. That folks did not have that option to choose feels way worse than the fact AI was used at all. John: I believe the reason why (and again, this isn’t my justifying it, but trying