Jake Ritz

Jake Ritz is a software engineer who runs Ritz Studios, a small, fully remote independent game studio developing Derby Creek. By day a frontend developer, he leads a team of roughly a dozen people building the game without any generative-AI assistance — a policy he has made central to how the studio works and how it talks about itself.

A ban with teeth

In a 2026 essay, Ritz described telling his team from day one that there would be no AI on the project, and enforcing it: he has let go of developers he caught using generative tools anyway. His reasoning is about craft and ownership. A game’s feel, rhythm, and handmade quality, he argues, are intangibles that cannot be generated from a prompt, and building without that safety net is what makes the work feel real. He wants every decision in the game to have come from a person.

Ritz is a smaller voice than the industry veterans in this debate, but he represents a growing cohort of indie studios treating a no-AI pledge as both a creative discipline and an identity. His stance echoes that of publishers like Tim Bender who have written AI bans into their business, betting that human authorship is a feature players value.