The Animal Crossing-like cozy life sim Heartopia is without doubt one of the greatest new video games on Steam this month. It’s additionally made with AI-generated content material in accordance with a brand new disclosure by the builders.
Heartopia is developer and writer XD Worldwide’s reply to the query “What if Animal Crossing was a chibi anime?” It dropped on January 17 following a wave of closed betas in each November and December 2025. Concurrent gamers peaked at over 35,000.
Critiques have been blended, although. It at the moment sits at solely a 66 p.c constructive score on Steam. And most of the unfavourable responses from gamers on Valve’s platform are taking problem with the developer not disclosing their use of AI-generated art work in Heartopia.
“This recreation accommodates Generative AI (used to generate the puzzles), which they didn’t disclose till the accusations of it surfaced,” writes consumer parupa206. The usage of AI wasn’t made public till GAMINGbible’s Richard Breslin emailed Heartopia’s UK PR group earlier this week. A press release from the developer appeared on Discord not that lengthy after.
“Monetization Content material in Heartopia doesn’t embody AI-generated supplies,” learn a part of the message to followers. “Ought to any AI-assisted content material be used within the recreation sooner or later, will probably be introduced prematurely. Advertising supplies produced exterior the sport, together with these created in collaboration with third-party suppliers, are usually not coated by the scope of this disclosure.”
Since then, Heartopia’s Steam web page has been up to date to incorporate a newly added “AI Generated Content material Disclosure part, which states that “AI is used within the puzzle gameplay to reinterpret and redraw in-game snapshot photographs” and that AI can also be “utilized in in-game chat to assist gamers perceive completely different languages.”
The devs have seemingly not apologized for not disclosing their use of AI-generated belongings on Steam in any of the official Heartopia channels that I may discover, and, given how blatantly obvious its utilization seems to be in its puzzle minigame, I’m undecided how they ever thought they’d get away with not disclosing this within the first place.
