Games Done Quick, the biannual charity speedrunning event currently going on right now, not only helps organizations like the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders — it helps indie games get noticed, too. Indie game developers face an incredible uphill battle not only getting their projects funded, completed, and launched, but discovered as well. Events like GDQ can be a boon to developers, exposing tens of thousands of viewers to little-known games like Bat to the Heavens, Small Saga, and more.

“It was extremely exciting,” said Ceroro, developer of Bat to the Heavens, a platformer in which the character must ascend to the heavens using a bat because she cannot jump. Bat to the Heavens is Ceroro’s first official game and was released in 2024. It was featured during Awesome Games Done Quick 2026 and late last year at RTA in Japan. Ceroro said that while her game has been generally successful, getting on GDQ gave it a big boost. “Right after the AGDQ run, there was a large burst in sales and wishlists I haven’t seen since I initially released the game!” she said.

Solo developer Darya Noghani said Small Saga, her turn-based RPG about a mouse who wants to kill god, got a nice uptick in attention after being featured at GDQ as well. “A number of streamers played the game on Twitch, several commenters recommended the game on platforms like Bluesky, and there was a nice uptick in sales,” they said.

But the attention of getting your game run at a GDQ event can come with a price. “You’re in a state of apprehension,” said Noghani. Speedrunners extensively exploit glitches and develop techniques to skip large chunks of gameplay, which might show viewers a less-than-ideal version of the game. “Runners are pushing the game to break in particular ways, and you know this is adjacent to the game just crashing and ruining the run.”

But Noghani also said that the Small Saga run was relatively glitch-free: “I’ll take that as a win.”

Sometimes a runner breaking a game is what the developer had in mind. “Exploits and glitches are something that taps into the nature of game design,” Ceroro said. While the Bat to the Heavens run also didn’t make extensive use of glitches, “A lot of the extreme movement and techniques used in the run are pretty much within bounds of the intended design,” she said.

Ceroro’s also not worried that watching a speedrun of Bat to the Heavens will spoil the game for potential new players. “The speedrun for Bat to the Heavens went by too fast to actually get a good understanding of everything or how the game actually feels, so it’ll be a shock to new players,” she said.

Thanks to GDQ, new players are coming. But while all the developers I spoke to were pleased with the newfound attention and increased sales, they also said the personal achievement of getting their game run at GDQ was just as important. 

“It’s been exciting,” said Noghani. “Because GDQ is genuinely well-loved by both players and developers, not just for its charitable causes, but because of the efforts they’ve taken to cultivate an uplifting community.”

GDQ is much beloved in the online gaming community. Over the years, event runners have implemented a top-down approach to diversity and inclusion, hosting several smaller events focused on highlighting streamers from marginalized backgrounds. GDQ has also fostered a community where saying “trans rights” elicits the same kind of enthusiastic response that an OSU alum would get shouting “O-H” in a crowded Columbus bar.

“In the development community, it’s a giant moment,” said Xalavier Nelson Jr., creative director at Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator developer Strange Scaffold, which has had its games featured in GDQ events. “I got about as many congratulations for appearing on Games Done Quick as I have for getting married. It’s that much of a touchstone — and that positive of an overall event and community.”

Following some controversy, the developers at Baldur’s Gate 3 creator Larian Studios have further clarified their use of generative AI. CEO Swen Vincke and other Larian developers held an AMA on Reddit where they answered users’ questions about the team’s next title, Divinity. They also fielded questions related to reports that the studio was using generative AI in its development process. 

“So first off – there is not going to be any GenAI art in Divinity,” Vincke wrote in response to a question on Reddit. Last month, in an interview with Bloomberg, Vincke stated that while they weren’t using AI-generated assets in Divinity, the team was experimenting with AI tools “to explore ideas, flesh out PowerPoint presentations, develop concept art and write placeholder text.”

His comments were immediately and fiercely criticized online by gamers, developers, and former Larian employees. In response, Vincke issued a statement clarifying that they were not using the tool to generate concept art, but as something artists could use to iterate on ideas faster. 

Now, in the Reddit AMA, he says they won’t use it for concept art at all. “We’ve decided to refrain from using genAI tools during concept art development,” he wrote. “That way there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.” But Vincke did leave room for the possible use of gen AI assets in the future.

“If we use a GenAI model to create in-game assets, then it’ll be trained on data we own,” he wrote.

In addition to art, Larian also clarified gen AI usage with text. “We don’t have any text generation touching our dialogues, journal entries or other writing in Divinity,” wrote writing director Adam Smith. He said text generation was only for research, not development purposes, and that the results were too low-quality when compared to a human writer and Larian’s own standards.

“We had a limited group experimenting with tools to generate text, but the results hit a 3/10 at best,” Smith wrote. “Even my worst first drafts … are at least a 4/10 … and the amount of iteration required to get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous.”

While these comments might reassure players that at least gen AI assets won’t be in the final product, Vincke reaffirmed that gen AI would still play some role at Larian. 

“Our hope is that it can aid us to refine ideas faster, leading to a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately, a higher-quality game.”

2025 was the year generative AI made its presence felt in the video game industry. Its use has been discovered in some of the most popular games of the year, and CEOs from some of the largest game studios claim it’s being implemented everywhere in the industry including in their own development processes. Meanwhile, rank-and-file developers, especially in the indie games space, are pushing back against its encroachment, coming up with ways to signal their games are gen-AI free.

Generative AI has largely replaced NFTs as the buzzy trend publishers are chasing. Its proponents claim that the technology will be a great democratization force in video game development, as gen AI’s ability to amalgamate images, text, audio, and video could shorten development times and shrink budgets — ameliorating two major problems plaguing the industry right now. In service to that idea, numerous video game studios have announced partnerships with gen-AI companies. 

Ubisoft has technology that can generate short snippets of dialogue called barks and has gen-AI powered NPCs that players can have conversations with. EA has partnered with Stability AI, Microsoft is using AI to analyze and generate gameplay. Outside of official partnerships, major game companies like Nexon, Krafton, and Square Enix are vocally embracing gen AI. 

As a result, gen AI is starting to show up in games in a big way. Up until this point, gen AI in gaming had been mostly relegated to fringe cases — either prototypes or small, low-quality games that generally get lost in the tens of thousands of titles released on Steam each year. But now, gen AI is cropping up in the year’s biggest releases. ARC Raiders, one of the breakout multiplayer shooter hits of the year, used gen AI for character dialogue. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 used gen-AI images. Even 2025’s TGA Game of the Year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, featured gen-AI images before they were quietly removed. 

Reaction to this encroachment from both players and developers has been mixed. It seems like generally, players don’t like gen AI showing up in games. When gen-AI assets were discovered in Anno 117: Pax Romana, the game’s developer Ubisoft claimed the assets “slipped through” review and they were subsequently replaced. When gen-AI assets were found in Black Ops 7, however, Activision acknowledged the issue, but kept the images in the game. Critical response has also been lopsided. ARC Raiders was awarded low scores with reviewers specifically citing the use of gen AI as the reason. Clair Obscur, though, was nigh universally praised and its use of gen AI, however temporary, has barely been mentioned. 

It seems like developers are sensitive to the public’s distaste for gen AI but are unwilling to commit to not using it. After gen-AI assets were discovered in Black Ops 7, Activision said it uses the tech to “empower” its developers, not replace them. When asked about gen AI showing up in Battlefield 6, EA VP Rebecka Coutaz called the technology seductive but affirmed it wouldn’t appear in the final product. Swen Vincke, CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian, said gen AI is being used for the studio’s next game Divinity but only for generating concepts and ideas. Everything in the finished game, he claimed, would be made by humans. He also hinted at why game makers insist on using the tech despite the backlash developers usually receive whenever it’s found.

“This is a tech-driven industry, so you try stuff,” he told Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier in an interview. “You can’t afford not to try things because if somebody finds the golden egg and you’re not using it, you’re dead.”

Comments from other CEOs reinforce Vincke’s point. Junghun Lee, the CEO of ARC Raiders’ parent company Nexon, said in an interview that, “It’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI.”

The problem is, though, gen AI doesn’t yet seem to be the golden egg its supporters want people to believe it is. Last year, Keywords Studios, a game development services company, published a report on creating a 2D video game using only gen-AI tools. The company claimed that gen-AI tools can streamline some development processes but ultimately cannot replace the work of human talent. Discovering gen AI in Call of Duty and Pax Romana was possible precisely because of the low-quality of the images that were found. With Ubisoft’s interactive gen-AI NPCs, the dialogue they spout sounds unnatural and stilted. Players in the 2025 Chinese martial arts MMORPG Where Winds Meet are manipulating its AI chatbot NPCs to break the game, just like Fortnite players were able to make AI-powered Darth Vader swear.

For all the promises of gen AI, its current results do not live up to expectations. So why is it everywhere?

One reason is the competitive edge AI might but currently can’t provide that Swen Vincke alluded to in his interview with Bloomberg. Another reason is also the simplest: it’s the economy, stupid. Despite inflation, flagging consumer confidence and spending, and rising unemployment, the stock market is still booming, propped up by the billions and billions of dollars being poured into AI tech. Game makers in search of capital to keep business and profits going want in on that. Announcing AI initiatives and touting the use of AI tools — even if those tools have a relatively minor impact on the final product —  can be a way to signal to AI-eager investors that a game company is worth their money. 

That might explain why the majority of gen-AI’s supporters in gaming come from the C-suite of AAA studios and not smaller indie outfits who almost universally revile the tech. Indies face the same economic pressure as bigger studios but have far fewer resources to navigate those pressures. Ostensibly, indie developers are the ones who stand to benefit the most from the tech but, so far, are its biggest opponents. They are pushing back against the assertion that gen AI is everywhere, being used by everybody, with some marking their games with anti-AI logos proclaiming their games were made wholly by humans.

For some indie developers, using gen AI defeats the purpose of game making entirely. The challenge of coming up with ideas and solutions to development problems — the things gen AI is supposed to automate — is a big part of game making’s appeal to them. There are also moral and environmental implications indie developers seem especially sensitive to. Gen-AI outputs are cobbled from existing bodies of work that were often used without consent or compensation. AI data centers are notorious for consumptive energy usage and polluting their surrounding areas, which are increasingly focused in low-income and minority communities. 
With its unrealized promises and so-far shoddy outputs, it’s easy to think of gen AI as gaming’s next flash in the pan the way NFTs were. But with gaming’s biggest companies increasingly reporting their use, gen AI will remain a lightning rod in game development  — until the tech improves, or, like with NFTs, the bubble pops.

One day, video game critics and journalists will put together a comprehensive study on the impact Balatro had on the industry — of how so many games that came after tried to capture its essence by adding complex systems to otherwise simple, easily understood games. Until then, I’m gonna play Dogpile.

Dogpile is a deckbuilding match-3 roguelike that builds on the style of merge games like Suika Game by adding a Balatro-like twist. The result is a cute, cozy (in both genre and vibe) game that appeals to both the numbers-go-up and the dog-loving sicko in me. Drop matching dogs on top of each other to create bigger dogs that reward you with points to unlock higher levels. The smallest unit of dog is a Chihuahua, two Chihuahuas merge to form a Pomeranian (at least that’s what I think it is), and so forth. The dogs pile up the playing field kinda like Tetris, and also like Tetris, if the dogs spill over the top of the field, it’s game over. 

Merging dogs is the simplest part of the game. It’s where the player has the least control — everything is subject to the whims of gravity, physics, and trajectory — but also where Dogpile is the most thrilling. The dogs themselves are cute, contorted into fun, confounding shapes that sometimes show off a butthole or two. Introducing modifiers like making the dogs bouncy or magnetic adds an interesting physical component to the game — Dogpile is match-3 Tetris, yes, but built with a physics engine. It feels so silly, so “baby distracted by jangling keys” to say that a pug glomming onto another pug to make a dachshund is gameplay action worth highlighting in the year of our gaming lord 2025. But the little guy does so with a satisfying “pop” accompanied by a cute little “arf” that like Benoit Blanc, I’m compelled. 

Though the game has nothing to do with poker, you can see the DNA of Balatro running throughout. Like Balatro, each round you’re dealt a hand from a deck of cards that have dogs as the different suits. Also like Balatro, you get money to spend on modifying your deck with more cards and tags that work similar to Balatro’s jokers. For $15 (of in-game money, there are no microtransactions), you can either buy a chow chow card or a tag that makes certain dogs spin in place to agitate the dog pile for more merging opportunities. When you win a round, you also visit the grooming salon where you modify your dog cards directly. You can give a dog positive traits like “friendly,” making them magnetically attracted to their matches. Or you can wash away negative traits like fleas, which negate any positive traits a card might have. 

Building your dog deck full of synergies to increase your points is where Dogpile is the most like Balatro and where the bulk of your strategic thinking comes into play. I like to give my dogs the barking trait that makes them disturb the pile with a bark when they’re dropped. That combined with the tag that awards points every time a dog barks makes for a brain-pleasing display of meters filling up and cash register noises going off that really drives home the fact that a lot of these well-intentioned, celebrated Balatro-likes tap into the psychology of gambling addition to make them stick.

Dogpile doesn’t feel very deep. There are no boss challenges. Failing to meet the point threshold doesn’t end a run, but instead makes you pick from a stock of negative events or traits that are either easily ignored or so detrimental that you lose the game immediately. Unlike Balatro, Dogpile doesn’t inspire the same feeling of endless possibility of the kinds of decks you can build.

Dogpile isn’t the first game to complexify the humble match-3 genre, and I don’t know if its similarities to Balatro are intentional or not. But I like seeing how games can push Balatro’s formula beyond poker — especially if a dog is involved. 

And yes, you can pet them. 

_{Dogpile is out now on Steam.}