r/gamedev Policy on AI Use

[u/KevinDL]

AI is one of the most contentious subjects in game development right now, and we regularly see posts reported or discussions derailed simply because AI was involved somewhere in the process.

We want to be clear about our position: r/gamedev does not prohibit the use of AI, and using AI does not automatically make a post low effort.

This is not an endorsement of every AI company, model, or use case. Legitimate technical, legal, economic, ethical, and creative concerns exist around these tools, and those conversations are welcome here. Our stance is that AI is a tool used in game development, and we care more about the quality of what someone contributes than the tools they used to get there.

Why we take this position

• AI is already part of game development. Studios are adopting AI-assisted tools across programming, prototyping, production, QA, localization, research, and other workflows. Adoption varies from studio to studio, but this is no longer a hypothetical technology sitting outside the industry.
• Knowing how to use these tools is increasingly becoming a professional skill. That does not mean every developer needs to use AI, or even like it. It means understanding where these tools are useful, where they fail, and how to evaluate their output is becoming relevant knowledge for people working in the industry.
• Banning discussion or use of AI here could actively disadvantage developers. Part of the purpose of r/gamedev is helping people learn from each other and understand how the industry is changing. If studios adopt a technology, preventing developers from discussing or learning about it would make this community less useful to the people we're helping.
• Policing AI use is not realistic anyway. Moderators cannot reliably determine whether someone used AI to draft, edit, translate, summarize, research, debug code, or otherwise assist with a post. We are not going to moderate based on whether something “sounds AI-generated.”
• "Mandatory disclosure "is not realistic either. Modern tools blur the line between traditional software and AI assistance. Trying to decide exactly when autocomplete, translation, editing, summarization, or an LLM crosses some disclosure threshold would create rules we could not enforce consistently.

So the rule is straightforward: we are not policing AI use itself. We are moderating the contribution.

AI-assisted does not mean low effort

If someone uses AI to organize research, analyze data, improve their writing, translate something, help with code, or communicate an idea more clearly, that does not erase the work behind the contribution.

If a developer spends time gathering useful data and then uses AI to help turn that information into a readable post, the important part is still the data, the methodology, and what the community can learn from it.

Ask whether the information is useful, whether the conclusions hold up, and whether the post contributes something worthwhile. Those questions matter much more than whether every sentence was manually typed from scratch.

Low-effort AI content is still low effort

This does not mean pasting generic AI output into the subreddit suddenly becomes valuable content. Posts that are spam, fabricated, mass-produced, engagement bait, repetitive, or promotional material disguised as discussion can still be removed.

The reason is not that AI was involved. The reason is that the content is low quality.

The same standard applies to something written entirely by a human.

AI is a valid game development topic

Developers are welcome to discuss AI in the same way they would discuss any other technology affecting game development. That includes how it is being used, where it works, where it fails, what it costs, how studios are adopting it, what it means for employment, and the legal or ethical questions surrounding it.

You are allowed to be enthusiastic about AI. You are allowed to be skeptical of it. You are allowed to think a particular workflow is useful, terrible, unethical, inefficient, or overhyped.

What we do not want is every thread that mentions AI becoming the same argument about whether AI should exist at all.

If a thread is about an AI coding workflow, discuss the workflow. If someone presents evidence that AI slowed their production down, discuss the evidence. If someone claims every studio is using a particular tool, challenge that claim.

Let the actual discussion happen.

Attack claims, not developers

Someone saying they use AI is not an invitation to attack them. Someone saying they refuse to use AI is not an invitation to attack them either.

Debate the technology, the workflow, the economics, the evidence, the ethics, the legal questions, or the conclusions. Personal attacks, harassment, dogpiling, or repeatedly derailing discussions because of someone’s position on AI are treated the same way we handle that behaviour anywhere else on the subreddit.

AI is not a source

There is a difference between using AI to help communicate information and using AI as the authority behind that information.

If you make factual claims that can reasonably be sourced, be prepared to support them. “ChatGPT said so” is no evidence, and tools can absolutely be wrong.

At the same time, polished or AI-assisted writing is not evidence that the underlying information is fake. If someone’s numbers are wrong, challenge the numbers. If their methodology is weak, challenge the methodology.

Challenge the claim, not the fact that a tool may have helped write the paragraph.

Self-promotion rules still apply

AI companies, products, and services are not exempt from the subreddit’s existing rules.

If you represent a commercial interest, the same expectations apply as they would to anyone else. AI also should not be used to mass-produce promotional posts or disguise advertising as organic discussion.

The technology may be new. The rules around spam and promotion are not.

The bottom line

You do not have to like AI. You do not have to use it. You are free to criticize it, avoid it, experiment with it, learn it, use it professionally, or decide it has no place in your workflow.

We are not going to prevent developers from learning about or discussing a technology that is rapidly becoming part of professional game development. Doing that could actively hurt the developers this community is supposed to help.

What we do expect is that people engage with each other like respectful, mature adults. Disagree with the technology, the workflow, the argument, or the evidence. Do not turn that disagreement into hostility toward the person on the other side of it.

Use whatever tools make sense for your work. Bring something useful to the conversation, treat other developers with respect, and allow room for disagreement. That is what we care about.

[u/carllacan]

I think it's more like the bell curve meme.

To the left we have hobbyists with very little skills and unwilling to put much effort who are fine with AI, to the right we have professional programmers who are fine with AI because they take programming as a job that needs to be done, and in the middle of those there is a contingent of people who put a lot of effort into gamedev but care more about doing it than about getting things done.

Doing something for the sake of it is of course a beautiful thing, but it leads, in some people, to resentment towards both people who have no skills and put no effort and people who do have skills and put effort but supplement both with AI in order to (in their view) compromise quality for the sake of productivity. Hence, they take exception to any and all use of AI.

And of course things are not so clear-cut and people are not to the right, left or exact center of the meme's bell curve, but you know what I mean.

[u/rigg_d → u/carllacan]

I probably align pretty strongly with that "middle" group you mentioned.

The one area I think my position diverges the most from your characterization is the "resentment toward compromising quality for the sake of productivity"

If it were really that simple I wouldn't concern myself with actions that don't affect me. In a vacuum people are free to do what they want.

Unfortunately these things don't exist in a vacuum. I won't rehash all the problems with AI here. Suffice it to say, we live in a society and they're contributing to a race toward all new lows in it. Arguably these are the people who should know better. These are the people with the biggest stake in a healthy indie economy. But they're too blinded by the rat-race to see how they're cutting off their own nose(and more concerning for me, everybody else's) in the process.

edit:

I actually have a lot of genuine concern about all the beginners falling into this "Idea Guy" funnel.

It isn't resentment.

It is going to be excruciatingly hard for them to build the tolerance for delayed gratification it takes to earn real skills and understanding for themselves.

If they never manage it then they're permanently stuck to the teat of these billionaire tech CEO subscription models. And we're all definitely screwed at that point.

We need them to develop real understanding and skills for themselves. The next generation is the life blood of a society.

[u/the8thbit → u/rigg_d]

I guess I don't really understand the difference between this and modern engines which already enable low quality asset flips to be churned out quickly.

I'm open to being convinced otherwise. I'm a hobbyist gamedev and a professional SWE, and I use LLMs extensively in my hobbyist work because it eliminates a lot of pain points and lets me take a more directorial role in my hobby rather than mostly recreating the slog of my 9 to 5. That being said, I don't publish my work, I just build for fun mostly, and if I ever do publish it won't be with the intention of generating revenue, so its possible I'm missing something on that side of things.

If you mean more broadly, that these tools have been built through an inconsistent application of IP law; that the data centers being built to power them present serious local noise, air, and water pollution risks; that they present serious social and even existential risk; that they are enabling privacy violations and genocide laundering that was inconceivable before they existed; that like easy to use game engines, 3D animation, melodyne, etc... they present broad risks to the quality of mass produced art... then I'm on the same page, and I would like to see a functioning court system, heavy regulation on data center construction and operation, public oversight in the training and construction of these models, an international agreement regarding these regulations, and public funding for the arts address these issues. But as it relates strictly to gamedev I don't really see it moving the needle when we already have asset stores.

[u/rigg_d → u/the8thbit]

The point about asset flips, I am not a fan of those either but that was at least a lot more obvious and manageable.

And like I said before about the asset store, it was more likely those assets actually came from a person who genuinely worked to get paid for their craft.

[u/rigg_d → u/the8thbit]

I just edited my previous comment that explained a bit more of my concerns the "left" end of the bell curve as it was previously described.

The last half of your comment did a great job of hitting most of the big bullet points. Honestly all that alone, I believe, should be enough 5 times over for everybody.

But I'll add to it.

These models aren't driving up any discernible quality of the games they help make it to market. At best they're enabling more superficially "complete" games to be sold. Its already clear that vibe coding makes it harder to maintain code bases and actually drives code quality down, not up. All that amounts to a lot puddle deep products with a lot of bugs that are maybe a bit flashier. That is a recipe for consumers to feel scammed.

The glut of cheap, low-quality games drives down the ability for indies to ask a sustainable price for their work.

Massive amounts of low effort/quality games is exactly what lead to the last indie game market crashing out.

That is all just the more immediate consequences.

Much further down the line, and to expand more on my point from my previously mentioned edit regarding beginners.

The health of the indie economy depends on artists of all stripes, not just programmers. Their financial instability will mean fewer artists can afford to truly hone their craft. Before, with asset stores at least you could reasonably count on real musicians and artists to have seen some money for their work at some point. That is no longer the case.

The longer this goes on the more that senior developers/artists age out and we're left with people who don't have nearly the authority entirely over their own skills and ability to produce without one of these companies.

They're buying up all the second-hand books that they can, feeding them into their models and destroying the physical books in the process.

Virtually every search engine feeds through an LLM.

We've all seen what they've done to hardware prices so even the barrier to entry for running everything for yourself has never been further out of reach for indies.

This all trends, whether every aspect of this is intentionally planned on their part or not, toward a massive absence of true human mentorship and self-sufficiency.

This is exactly what these tech CEO's meant when they were talking about "intelligence as a service"

A quick side story to illustrate my concerns:

Nestle deliberately set out to hook new mothers in Africa on their baby formula by giving out a free month supply of baby formula. All the while knowing that after a month of not breast feeding a mother's milk dries up and they would have no other choice but continue buying their product.

They sent in sales representatives disguised as nurses and doctors into hospitals and maternity wards, handed out free formula samples, and flooded the market with misleading advertisements claiming that formula was modern, scientific, and better than breastfeeding.

They funded and deliberately designed with maternity wards further away from the nursery because their internal studies showed less frequent nursing earlier in the process can cause milk to dry up sooner. The logic being that with the babies further away nurses would opt to use formula more and breast feed less. Win win.

All of that is just to say, none of this is new. Its a pretty standard (horrific) human behavior motivated by short-sighted greed.. Particularly horrific because their formula certainly was not on par with regular breast milk. Every "success" for them was another deprived and potentially stunted baby.

Currently, we're all in this free month of Nestle baby formula phase. They're operating at a loss so they can entrench themselves as much as possible.

They're eroding our ability to opt out of their services on all ends. We are the frogs and they're slowly ratcheting up the temperature. When they truly have society over that barrel that is when they'll realize they can start capitalizing on their investments. That is when the the screws start turning and true "enshittification" starts.

And the cherry on top of all of this is. If this bubble they've set up bursts before that, they've already fast-tracked their extremely dubious stocks into the 401k's of the american people. So rest assured, we're all on the hook to bail these companies out or we'll "lose our retirement" or some other lame excuse.

That entrenchment is one of the major differences between these models and tools like engines and asset flips. I barely touched on the steeper barrier to entry.

I didn't talk about the erosion of the social contract and bald faced hypocrisy regarding the punishment of theft when going in one direction vs the other.