Party Animals, the physics-based party game from Recreate Games, has had quite an interesting week. On May 13th, the studio announced the “Golden Paw Awards”, described as Party Animals’ first AI Video Contest, with a staggering prize pool of $75,000 and a rule requiring generative AI to be the core tool used for every submission. Almost instantaneously, the community pushed back hard on this contest, and the game started to get review-bombed on Steam, with some reviews stating things such as:
Holding an AI contest and adding “no plagiarism” as a rule is a level of tone-deaf that I’ve rarely seen. The game itself is pretty decent, but do not support these developers for their blatant support of genAI. – TimTam
Within a day, Recreate Games had apologized, paused the contest, and handed the decision about what to do next to the players via a community poll, and as we can all probably guess, the results weren’t even close, with the vast majority of users wanting them never to do an AI contest.
What The Contest Required
The contest asked players to submit short files, no longer than five minutes, paying tribute to their favorite Party Animals characters. The only catch was that generative AI must be at the core of content creation, including, but not limited to, AI-generated images, videos, music, voiceovers, and 3D assets. This wasn’t AI being an optional tool that was allowed for submissions, which would’ve still had backlash, but it had AI as the mandatory core tool required in every submission. Human-made content was effectively disqualified, no matter how much of a Party Animals fan you were or how much you wanted to get a share of the $75,000 prize.
To make things worse, the announcement post itself appeared to have been written using AI, which several community members instantly noted. The contest framed the event in a way where “In the past, ideas like these could only exist in your head. Now, with AI, they finally have a chance to become reality.” Giving the implication that human creativity needs AI in order to actually have your vision become something others can see and interact with. It’s the kind of message that you don’t want to send with your game, as these experiences, in a way, are art forms made by humans.
The Apology Made Things Worse
You would think that with them moving quickly enough to issue an apology on May 14th, acknowledging that they’d upset players and hadn’t communicated clearly enough before the contest launched, that there would at least be maybe a shred of morality or good intentions behind it. The real problem is that when they posted a follow-up apology on May 19th, people spotted that it was entirely written by AI, not even by themselves.
This is a type of blow that causes players to lose even more trust in the company, because if they’re trying to get away with an AI contest mistake by using AI to make an apology for them, who knows what true motives they really have for the longevity of the game, and if the game is even having modern updates made by humans or made by AI.
Industry Struggles
Recreate Games isn’t the first studio to face backlash for the use of AI. Arc Raiders faced significant pushback from players in the past after it revealed that generative AI was used in creating voice lines, something that was also done in The Rivals. Neverness to Everness is also a situation in the past where content creator Ironmouse cancelled a sponsorship after discovering AI had been used without any disclosure. As you can probably tell, the gaming community mostly agrees that generative AI has no place in video games, as even when developers are found to be using it outside of the finished product, they also receive backlash.
I feel like it’s inevitable for us to see AI being used in games as time goes on, but at the same time, I’m glad to see the general community pushback on developers trying to just throw slop out the window. There have been too many times recently where AI has infested the media I love in negative ways, so if we are going to have AI, can we just have it be the Titanfall 2 NPC type, please?
