Labeled "Zero AI", my sales quintupled, yet I'm trapped in the "human touch" dilemma.
"What AI generates are just 'body parts'."
Chen Mo described his feelings about AI "invading" the game industry in this way. He is an independent game developer, 41 years old this year. He used to be a game planner in a large company. After being laid off in 2023, he started making independent games. He wrote a line on his Steam page: "All the content of this game is hand - crafted by humans, and no generative AI is used." And this line of words won him a lot of support from players.
The change brought by AI to the game industry has become an established fact. However, a minority like Chen Mo who "refuses to yield" to AI has joined forces with players to form a "barrier" - not using AI in any part of game creation has become their creed.
The outcry began on December 18, 2025. "Light and Shadow: Expedition 33" won two awards, the Game of the Year and the Best Debut Game, at the "Independent Game Awards" ceremony. But on the same day, the developer, Sandfall Interactive, admitted to using generative AI during the development process, and as a result, the awards were revoked.
It should be noted that this game is no ordinary one. It previously set a historical record at the TGA 2025, known as the "Oscars of the game industry", winning 9 out of 12 nominations. The same game experienced heaven and hell on two different award - giving platforms.
The netizens' anger came fast and hard.
"I spent so much money, and you tell me that what I've been getting are 'AI body parts'." "I don't want to play a game that even the production team doesn't want to create."...
The data also speaks. The latest survey results from the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2026 show that 52% of developers believe that AI has a negative impact on the industry, while only 7% think it's positive. In 2024, the former figure was only 18%, and the aversion is rising sharply.
The latest data from Quantic Foundry shows that 63% of players have a "very negative" attitude towards the use of AI in games. In February 2025, Steam players launched a petition, asking the platform to add an AI filtering function.
However, there are still 7,818 AI - powered games on Steam, accounting for 7% of the total. Among the newly released games in 2025, 20% adopted AI technology, an increase of about 8 times compared to 2024. On one hand, there is rejection, while on the other hand, there is embrace. The two curves are diverging like scissors.
"This is no longer a discussion about whether the technology is good or bad," Chen Mo said. "When a person is optimized by algorithms at work during the day and then comes home at night to play a game, only to find that the NPCs (non - player characters) are also generated by AI - he will feel that even his last refuge has been occupied by algorithms."
"Body Parts"
Chen Mo's independent game career began with a fiasco.
In the spring of 2023, he was laid off from a large company in Shenzhen. It wasn't because of his incompetence, but because "the entire business line was cut". He sent out 47 resumes, and only 3 companies replied, two of which were automatic email responses. "That's when I realized that I'm a middle - aged man, and the skills on my resume are all from ten years ago." He took the severance pay and started trying to make independent games.
At first, he fully embraced AI - concept art, copywriting, and character illustrations were all generated by AI. "It was incredibly fast," he recalled. "What used to take an art team three months to do, I finished in two weeks by myself. On the day I finished the first - version demo, I even had some celebratory wine, thinking I'd found a shortcut."
But the game didn't sell well - in the first month, it sold less than 300 copies, at 20 yuan each. Chen Mo couldn't even cover the cost of using AI tools. A player left a message saying, "The art is good, but playing it feels like eating plastic bags." Chen Mo was so angry that he wanted to reply, "If you can do better, come and try." In the end, he held back. He suddenly realized that the criticism was right.
He self - mocks that the turning point in his career was an "early - morning three o'clock" moment. He was extremely annoyed while debugging the plot, thinking, "No matter how I do it, it's wrong." The plot required a mother who had lost her daughter to say a line. ChatGPT gave the result in ten seconds: Her eyes sparkled with sadness, but there was still a strong smile on her lips.
Chen Mo stared at the screen for ten minutes.
"I felt really disgusted at that time," he said. "It's not because the line was bad. It's because it was too good, too perfect, too correct. How could a mother who had just lost her daughter have a'strong smile on her lips'? That's not a human tone."
Chen Mo closed the window, washed his face, and when he came back, he wrote that line on his Steam page: All the content of this game is hand - crafted by humans, and no generative AI is used. Then he sold his graphics card and used the money to hire a newly - graduated art student to do the original paintings.
The remastered game took eight months. This two - person team hand - painted all the scenes, and Chen Mo wrote every line himself. "I wrote very slowly. Sometimes I only wrote three lines a day, but those three lines were what I really wanted to say."
After adding the "zero - AI" label to the game, the sales volume increased by 5 times, selling 2,000 copies a month. The atmosphere in the comment section changed. "You can feel that someone is putting their heart into it," a fan left a message.
Chen Mo doesn't think of himself as a hero.
"I admit that 'zero - AI' is a marketing strategy," he said. He even has some unflattering comments about his own game: "The gameplay design is very ordinary, with no innovation. It's the most old - fashioned side - scrolling platformer type." But regarding the reason for the increase in sales, he doesn't think it's entirely due to marketing: "You can market a label, but you can't market what's in the core. Players can sense the human touch, and that might be the real reason."
When it comes to "anti - AI", Chen Mo has a lot to say. But his thoughts and indignation make his desire to talk seem too strong: "I feel really bad. Efficiency is the religion of AI, but my religion is 'existence' - having existed, having touched with hands, having drawn with a pen. AI doesn't understand these things."
But when asked if he's afraid of being left behind by the times, he looks a bit worried: "The word I'm most afraid of is 'falling behind'. I've experienced it three times. For a person of my age, the opposite of not falling behind should be standing firm, not leading. I'm quite satisfied with how things are now."
Believers
Chen Mo's "opposite" is Lin Yuan. He has a mug with the chess record of AlphaGo's match against Lee Sedol printed on it. It was that man - machine battle that changed his life.
That year, he was still a junior in college, majoring in game design. On the day of the final, he watched the entire live - broadcast in the school convenience store. When Lee Sedol made that "divine move", he was so excited that he dropped his Coke on the ground. But five days later, AlphaGo still won 4:1. At that time, he firmly believed that one day AI would also take over the game industry.
Nine years later, he became the producer of a medium - sized game studio in Beijing and has been living up to that belief ever since.
"In 2018, I printed out the paper 'World Models' by DeepMind and pasted it on my workstation. When my boss passed by and saw it, he told me not to focus on such useless things and to adjust the numerical values correctly first." For a long time, he seemed a bit extreme in the team, but he always enjoyed it.
In 2020, when GPT - 3 was released, he applied for the API right away. "I used it to generate the copywriting for side quests, and in ten seconds, three complete quest descriptions appeared - they were at a level that could be used directly, not just passable, but of a quality that could be directly put into the game."
In 2022, when ChatGPT was released, the whole company started using AI, and Lin Yuan was far ahead this time. The company asked him to lead an experimental project: using AI to generate a side - quest network for an open - world game. "What used to take five planners two months to do can now produce the first version in three days." This efficiency shocked the management, and Lin Yuan was quickly promoted and started to be in charge of projects independently.
Now his studio has 40 people, 12 of whom are "AI trainers" - a newly - established position in 2024, specifically responsible for debugging and optimizing AI - generated content. He said that the number of people in this position increased last year.
But this path is not all "roses". At least in Lin Yuan's mind, it's becoming increasingly difficult for him to be completely self - consistent.
"Although I believe that technology can change the world, to be honest, I'm really envious of the teams behind games like 'Blade & Soul Zero' and 'Black Myth: Wukong'. In April, Liang Qiwei (the producer of 'Blade & Soul Zero') published a long article. The 'authenticity' he proved - 3D scanning of real - life actors' face models, actual weapon - forging by swordsmiths to feel the weight, motion - capture of more than twenty kung - fu actors, and map - drawing by a graduate student in Chinese painting using a brush and rice paper - is actually a reminder to the industry: when AI makes efficiency the only standard, 'clumsiness' becomes a luxury."
The opposite of a luxury is naturally a "cheap item". Lin Yuan doesn't think he's making a cheap item. He's just making another choice: "Just as players have the right to choose, not everyone likes games like 'Blade & Soul Zero'. Whether a game is fun is the most important thing. Whether AI is used or not is just a choice for people."
Boundaries
Lin Yuan and Chen Mo seem to represent two extremes in the industry, just like the deepest rift in the industry exposed by "Light and Shadow: Expedition 33".
After the trophy was absurdly taken back, the overseas social platforms were in an uproar. On the Reddit comment section, there was a highly - upvoted message from someone claiming to be an industry insider: "This is not a dispute about a single game. It's a battle over the standards of the entire evaluation system - what exactly are we applauding for?"
The players' backlash is becoming more and more intense. The relevant discussion on Reddit has received 23,000 upvotes and 1,700 comments. "I don't want to have to check the information to confirm whether a game is made by AI before I play it" - this is their most common demand.
The frequency of game - related disasters is also increasing. In the AI - generated pictures of NetEase's "Beyond the World", the characters had three - section arms; in the loading screen of Activision Blizzard's "Call of Duty", there was a "six - fingered" Christmas zombie; the most ironic thing is that the cover of the game "Little Droid" was completely created by humans, but it was wrongly accused by players of using AI and received a large number of negative reviews. The developers had to prove their innocence.
The six - fingered zombie in the Blizzard series game "Call of Duty". Source: Screenshot of the "Call of Duty" game
"Now it's no longer a question of 'whether to use AI', but 'whether it looks like AI'," Chen Mo said. "Is this a kind of over - correction?"
The boundaries are blurring, and the opposition is intensifying.
During the GDC in 2025, some game industry professionals established a union. One of the core demands was employment protection to resist layoffs and the threat of AI. More than 400 practitioners signed up within a few days. The initiator of the union said in a speech: We can't let technology be an excuse for exploitation.
This division is seeping into every part of the industrial chain. In 2025, some game media and review institutions began to include "whether AI is used" in the scoring criteria. Although the weight is small, it marks a quiet shift in the evaluation system. Developers are no longer just making a technical judgment of "whether to use AI", but a strategic choice of "whether to disclose it" - publicly admitting the use of AI may lead to boycotts, while hiding it may be exposed by players.
"Using AI as an auxiliary and using AI to replace creation are two different things," Chen Mo said. There is not a single line of AI - generated code in his game, but the Unity engine he uses has built - in machine - learning tools, which are essentially a large - scale model. "Tools are neutral. The question is whether it's helping you or trying to replace you."
Lin Yuan also agrees that there are "boundaries" - the core plot is still carefully crafted by the planning team, while side quests and background materials are generated by AI. "We're not letting AI think for us. We're letting it do the work for us."
This is an abstract concept. No one can clearly define where the boundary between "work" and "thinking" lies. But costs have already started to reshape this ecosystem. Thanks to AI, the number of games on Steam is still increasing at a rate of tens of thousands per year, not to mention the small games that don't need to be on the platform.
The responses of different platforms are also inconsistent: On the Steam community, the "anti - AI" label is a search keyword for players; on short - video platforms, tutorials showing "using AI to assist in making games" have received millions of views. Both demands are real, and both supplies are growing independently.
Lin Yuan has a "game passing - line" theory - a game that is simply fun and addictive can get a passing score of 60 points, which is the comfort zone for AI. But if you want to get a full score of 100, it's beyond the reach of current AI. "It doesn't understand what a good game is. Only when people clearly define what's good and what can be learned will it react. But we humans are different. We can tell the good from the bad at a glance." However, he is also very honest. He only wants to focus on the AI comfort zone. "My ultimate goal is to raise the passing score to 80 points."
Chen Mo only wants a full score of 100. "Sometimes it doesn't have to be too complicated. 'Super Mario' is a 100 - point game, but it's very simple. The full score lies in creation, and AI won't be able to learn this in the next 100 years."
The reality is that there are more and more 60 - point games, but the number of 100 - point games hasn't increased. Even the teams that could originally achieve higher scores are no longer willing to make progress after seeing the passing line easily filled by AI.
This is the most hidden cost of the "passing line" - it doesn't eliminate the highest scores, but those who are "almost there". When efficiency becomes the creed, will "creation" be the next forgotten concept?