A while back, Panic made a big announcement that they were banning games that used generative ai art, music, text or story elements. This was nice to hear since so many other stores for digital games allowed it. However, they were fine with it for code as long as you disclosed it, which is bizarre situation since it doesn’t magically use less energy for code and isn’t built more ethically. I had once asked them why they had a different policy and their response was essentially “Well, you can still filter those games out,” which didn’t answer my question.

I considered this a huge disappointment since the Playdate store positioned itself so strongly on caring about craft. Fast forward to today and now the Playdate Catalog announcement threads on Mastodon and Bluesky consist of games that use genAI. In the most recent thread, 3 out of 4 new games used genAI. In the thread before that, all 3 games used genAI. Frankly it has killed my interest in the Playdate platform and I assume this is the case for others because I very rarely hear about others talking about the Playdate. It’s a huge shame because folks were so excited about the Playdate when it was first released, but now it’s just another platform with endless amounts of slop.