Monte Cook Games pulled its own promotional video this week after fans caught it using AI-generated footage, an unusually pointed embarrassment for a company that has built its entire public identity around opposing exactly that.
The video, titled “The Joy of RPGs,” went up on MCG’s YouTube and social channels celebrating what the studio called the transformational fun of tabletop gaming. Viewers quickly spotted several b-roll clips that looked AI-generated, including a shot of a child holding a character sheet covered in nonsense text, the kind of garbled lettering that’s become a dead giveaway for generative image tools. After social media pushback, MCG pulled the video and replaced it with a version scrubbed of the offending footage.
The Standard They Set For Themselves
Monte Cook Games’ official “Core Values” page includes a direct statement on the subject: “Generating imagery or text through a trained algorithm (’AI’ or machine learning-derived art or writing) is the exact opposite of inspiration, vision, and passion. If a game or other product doesn’t express something that comes from the mind and heart of a creative human, it’s not the kind of thing we want to publish. In fact, it’s a betrayal of the values expressed here.”
That’s pretty harsh language. “Betrayal” is a strong word for a company to put on its own website, and it’s the word that made this week’s controversy land as hard as it did.
MCG’s response leaned on distance rather than direct fault: the studio said the footage originally came from a segment it contributed to a PBS documentary series, All Access with Andy Garcia, and that an outside production company built the promotional video around that footage without MCG fully vetting what went into it. That’s a plausible explanation for how it happened, and it goes to show that most people don’t see AI content when it’s produced, it’s just another part of the content out there. The impact is the same, however, that MCG’s own name and values page were attached to a video containing the exact content those values explicitly call a betrayal, and it took public backlash rather than internal review to catch it.
A Company Defined By Its Stated Values
Monte Cook Games has spent over a decade building its brand around values commitments, not just on AI but broadly. Co-founder Shanna Germain has described the company’s mission in interviews as putting “diversity, inclusivity and truth at the forefront” of everything from product design to hiring, telling one outlet that “our games give players tools to encourage individuality without shame” and that the company deliberately writes gay, gender-neutral, and non-white characters into its fiction as standard practice, not exception. The company’s public credo states it welcomes people “from all walks of life, all genders and orientations, all religions and cultures, and all ethnicities” in its products, its events, and the spaces it builds. This is a studio that has consistently positioned its values statements as core to its identity and its marketing, not incidental footnotes.
That’s why this particular slip matters more than it would for a studio that never made the pledge in the first place. A company that treats moral positioning as a central brand pillar, and uses words like “betrayal” to describe the thing it now has to explain away, sets a much higher bar for itself to clear. When a studio spends years telling its audience it’s different, better, more principled than the industry around it, the audience remembers that framing the moment the studio’s own product doesn’t live up to it.
What Happened Here
Once the AI content was flagged, the company moved fast: pulled the video, swapped it for a cleaner cut, and posted a public explanation rather than staying silent or deleting the controversy quietly. That’s a better response than plenty of companies manage. But “we didn’t fully check what an outside vendor put in our own promotional video” is still an admission that the values page didn’t function as an actual filter before publication, only as a talking point after the fact.
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