Party Animals hit with Steam review bombing as AI slop

Party Animals developer Recreate Games has apologised after a $75,000 AI video contest drove the game's Steam reviews from Very Positive to Mostly Negative - currently at Mixed at the time of publication - in under 24 hours. 

The contest, dubbed the Golden Paw Awards, was announced on May 13 and required all entries to use generative AI as "the core creative tool." Players were asked to submit short films using AI-generated images, video, music, voiceovers, and 3D assets. The backlash was immediate.

Party Animals is a physics-based co-op brawler from Chinese studio Recreate Games that launched in September 2023 simultaneously on PC via Steam and Xbox, with day-one availability on Xbox Game Pass. It later expanded to PlayStation and has built a loyal following across all three platforms. Reviews on Steam had been Very Positive for years. Within a day of the Golden Paw Awards announcement, they dropped to Mostly Negative. 

"Giving $75K to people who just press a button to generate AI slop is an affront to creating games," wrote one reviewer with over 370 hours in the game. The rules of the contest made the reaction worse: while stating all entries must be "original works," the rules simultaneously required AIGC as the core tool, a direct contradiction that players were quick to highlight.

The apology

Recreate Games stated, "We're sorry for upsetting players with this event. We're also sorry that we didn't communicate with everyone clearly enough before the event started," the post reads. "Our original goal was to lower the barrier to creation." The studio described AI as "just another tool" and said it was "not trying to dismiss handmade work or disrespect creators." The community has not accepted that framing cleanly.

Rather than making a unilateral decision, Recreate put three options to a community vote: cancel the contest entirely, change it to a non-AI competition, or keep an AI category and add a separate handmade category alongside it. The vote is still running. No outcome has been announced.

Part of a wider pattern

Party Animals is not the first game this month to face AI-related community backlash. Notebookcheck covered the controversy surrounding Neverness to Everness earlier in May, when players identified suspected AI-generated assets in the game and VTuber Ironmouse publicly cut ties with the developer over the claims.