House House has disclosed that Big Walk used LLMs in the final stretch of development, and the admission has already spilled beyond the studio into the kind of awards debate developers dread. The company said the AI use was limited to difficult technical challenges and bugs, but the revelation was enough to push Big Walk into a public fight over whether even narrow generative AI use belongs in an acclaimed game.
That argument sharpened because Big Walk is not just any release. It is one of the best video games of the year in the eyes of many players, and it surfaced in the middle of a wider backlash over AI in videogames. Luke Plunkett, a co-founder of Aftermath, was among the people framing the disclosure as news that mattered now, not later, because it landed right as the IGF jurors were taking a hard line on AI-developed games.
House House said the LLM use was extremely small in scope. The studio estimated that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with it, and said generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game. In other words, the disputed material was not the backbone of the project. It was a narrow tool, applied late, to deal with specific technical problems that had to be solved before release.
Even so, the disclosure became one of the biggest contributors to the intense disagreement across the judge and jury pools. The IGF jurors did not name games in particular when they outlined their opposition to AI-developed video games, which left the issue broad enough to sweep Big Walk into the discussion without a direct accusation aimed at the title. That gap between a limited technical use and a much louder public reaction is what gave the story its force.
House House also said it had not made any disclosure on Steam because the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage, and it posted the information only after the topic had become a matter of public interest. The studio added that Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, which it called a failure, and said it will work toward a more comprehensive policy going forward.
The company also apologized that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet the standards of people opposed to generative AI. That leaves the central question less about whether the studio used AI at all, and more about what counts as acceptable use in an industry where even a tiny amount of LLM assistance can still become a test case.
