The strong feedback from them is that elements of the game are very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.

These are not the words of a company who didnt know about the ai use. They hired them because they were gonna use ai so it would be cheap to produce, fans were rightfully upset to be fed slop, publisher backpedals so hard they close the studio.

You think if they didnt use ai here they’d do all that? Or would they instead say “we are sorry the quality doesn’t appeal and we will work on it” not this