Panic will no longer allow developers to list game works that use generative AI tools to create art, audio, music, text or dialogue content in its Playdate platform store Catalog. The company also confirmed in a post on the Bluesky platform that Playdate Season 3 - a collection of premium games that will be rolled out on a weekly basis - will not include any titles that use generative AI in any form.
Prior to this, the game "Wheelsprung", which used two generative AI tools, Github Copilot and ChatGPT, to assist in code writing and copywriting creation, was included in "Playdate Season 2".
Panic stated that the reason why "Wheelsprung" was able to bypass the review was because the company did not expect that the developers of the second season would use large language models (LLM). "In retrospect, this idea was naive - we take full responsibility." Panic co-founder Kabeer Sasse said at the time.
Today, Panic has issued an official AI disclosure announcement, confirming that most forms of generative AI will be banned in the Playdate store, except for game works that use generative AI code tools.
The announcement read: "Starting from April 2026, Catalog will no longer accept works that use 'generative AI' to create art, audio, music, text or dialogue content. There are many creators in the world who are full of enthusiasm and expectations and want to create moving music, exquisite art content and high-quality copywriting for your Playdate works."
"... All works that have been reviewed or listed in the Catalog and have used 'generative AI' can still be obtained normally on the platform. At the same time, the corresponding identification will be added and the specific use of AI will be explained."
"Currently, we will allow works that have used AI-assisted tools in the coding process to be put on the Catalog, but all related works will be added with corresponding identification and clearly marked with the scope of AI use (such as 'Lua code debugging'), so that consumers can decide whether to provide support for them. All the above rules are under continuous discussion and may be adjusted at any time. We will update the content of this page synchronously when subsequent rules change."
Panic also explained its definition of generative AI, which covers: large language models such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Google Gemini; AI image generation models such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E; and AI audio generation models such as MuseNet, Suno, and Udio.
Custom-written functions used to determine in-game behavior are outside the scope of this definition.