11 Bit Studios’ latest title, The Alters, has been out for nearly a month at the time of this writing, and in that time, the game has surpassed 280,000 copies sold across all platforms, the studio announced.

On the game’s Steam page, the studio added, “It’s hard to express just how much this means to us. Creating The Alters was a deeply personal journey, and seeing so many of you step into Jan’s world, experiencing his choices, reflecting on his struggles, and connecting with his story, has been incredibly moving. Your support, curiosity, and passion make all the difference. Whether you’ve finished the game or are just beginning, thank you for being part of this adventure.“

The team also ended off on a note that sounds like a tease for more content to come in the future, saying “If you already finished the game, you can be sure that this is only the beginning. Stay tuned and thank you for being with us.”

While The Alters launched to critical and consumer praise, a significant portion of the goodwill 11 Bit Studios established with the game vanished when it was uncovered that the team had used generative AI tools to fill in certain elements of the game, and seemingly intended to patch them out of the game without saying anything.

Players first noted what appeared to be AI-generated text as part of the background in certain scenes, and then non-English-speaking players noticed that the translations for some of the films the game’s protagonist Jan is able to watch on the ship were quite poor and also appeared to be AI-generated.

A few days after players began to notice these aspects, 11 Bit Studios admitted to using generative AI tools as part of its process. In the first instance, where AI-generated text appeared in the background of a scene in the game, it was first put there just as a placeholder, and was never supposed to make it into the final version of the game.

Regarding the film translations, however, 11 Bit Studios made the choice to use AI-generated translations in order to include them in the game for launch. “Due to extreme time constraints,” the studio said in its statement, “we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game.”

Even as the studio couches its use of generative AI by stating how little of the game’s text was localized in this way, it still admits, “In hindsight, we acknowledge this was the wrong call. Even more so, no matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know.”