As a studio, we have been enthusiastic about AI artwork as it opens doors to creating content that would otherwise take a lot longer, or cost too much for our modest budget. For many years our team members have wanted to create story-based games. So we decided to work on Imaginal Voyages while using AI art to create the backgrounds. By using AI artwork for the backgrounds -- generally one of the most expensive aspects of a Visual Novel -- it would ensure that we could afford to complete the full production.
While the sprites for the first episode were made using AI, we already had an artist working on custom sprites starting from Episode 2 onwards. Episodes 1-3 are already written, and we were close to finishing the CGs for Episode 2. However, on July 3rd, TechCrunch and other news websites shared information that Steam is no longer allowing work from mass-trained AI artists such as Stable Diffusion (DreamStudio) and Dall-E2.
While we did contact Valve on July 3rd for clarification, it has now been nearly a month and we have gotten no response. Some websites have claimed that Valve provided an official response on the matter, but Valve has not responded to our direct inquiry.
Being that our small studio does not have widespread marketing at our disposal, over 90% of our visibility comes from organic traffic on the Steam marketplace. Similar to how Hi-Fi Rush launched unannounced to critical acclaim, Steam's organic traffic comes as a major benefit to studios who do not have a large fanbase or months of marketing for their productions.
Given the circumstances and the quickly changing rules regarding AI art, as a studio we have decided to await more concrete decisions such as an official policy update regarding AI assets. It is likely that other platforms will soon make similar decisions regarding AI art. For this matter, we will explore transitioning to human-made artwork sooner than anticipated (we wanted to release the full season and then work on changing the AI art, but it seems our original plan will not be possible given the evolving landscape).
We apologize for any inconvenience to those who enjoyed the first episode of Imaginal Voyages and wanted to see more. We will leave the episode available for the time being.