Type in “Slay the Spire official merch” and Google will flood the page with shirts of any size, cut, or color, with just as many designs to match. In fact, if you do just that right now, the first result is an entire website dedicated to Slay the Spire merchandise.
A fan of the game bought a shirt from this site and posted a brief review on the Slay the Spire subreddit. “I got a couple of shirts from the official store and was a bit disappointed,” they wrote. “There’s a white border around every graphic. I think I’ll probably end up Goodwill-ing them.”
It’s not that MegaCrit, the developers of Slay the Spire, or their apparel partners cheaped out on the merchandise. MegaCrit had no hand in this at all. A closer read of the site’s copy would have alerted a more wary consumer to the fact that genAI slop was afoot and the merchandise might be suspect as a result. But it’s hard to ignore the word “official” showing up more than once in big black letters.
“I was fooled,” the user wrote. “This is not the official site.”
Consumers are spoiled for choice when it comes to video game apparel. But amidst all this quantity, finding quality clothing is getting harder. With genAI making it easy to spin up a website fast and even easier to generate designs to sell, it’s really tricky to find video game apparel that truly has the developer’s official seal of approval. And while companies like Nintendo are famously litigious when it comes to protecting their copyrights from modders and pirates, bootleg video game merchandise makers are far less policed, able to drown out the signal from legit sellers with so much noise, which Google’s algorithms are more than happy to boost.
So what are the official apparel makers doing about this? How are they able to stay afloat competing against cheaper, quicker competitors who are often using genAI to make their “own” designs if they’re not ripping them off directly from other artists? Can they do anything at all? Kotaku spoke to two t-shirt companies known for their official partnerships with developers including MegaCrit, Team Cherry, Sega, and more, and to a professional apparel designer and freelance artist, about why they kinda can’t do anything about this state of affairs, and more specifically, why they don’t have to do anything at all.
To understand the explosion of shitty video game apparel, you have to know how t-shirts have traditionally been made, and how they’re being made now. Glenn O’Neill is the co-founder of The Yetee, a t-shirt and video game merch company that’s been in business for 15 years and is known for its partnership with the Games Done Quick charity speedrunning event.
“We screen print our t-shirts,” he said. “We’ve been doing so since the start, and it is still the highest quality way to print t-shirts.”
In a nutshell, screen printing involves pressing paint through tiny holes in stencils in successive layers to create a finished, full-color image. It’s a long process and involves a lot of equipment and chemicals, increasing the price of the finished product. It also requires space. While you can screen print at home, making t-shirts at scale means you’re gonna need room.
While screen-printing has been the traditional way to make graphic t-shirts, O’Neill said the transformation of internet commerce and digital technology improvements with drop shipping, print-on-demand services, and direct-to-garment printing have democratized the t-shirt making business, for better and worse.
“Direct-to-garment” or DTG printing means exactly what it sounds like. “It’s like an inkjet printer for apparel,” said Drew Wise, a freelance artist who is also the creative consumer products lead at Mob Entertainment, the studio behind Poppy Playtime. DTG printing is much quicker and cheaper than screen-printing, and can more easily be done at home. But the quality varies wildly.
“You can get an unlimited amount of colors,” Wise said. “But the colors end up coming out really muted because it’s having to mix the inks in the printer.”
The graphics also don’t last. Jeremy Greco got this Persona 5 and Trails In The Sky shirt from TeePublic, which uses DTG printing. “When I got these shirts,” he told Kotaku, “they seemed a bit cheaper than normal and after like 10 washes the graphics were so faded you can barely tell what they look like anymore.”
Print-on-demand services and drop-shipping commercialize that DTG technology. Small businesses don’t even have to do their own shirt printing anymore, not when companies like Redbubble or Teepublic will do it for them.
Remember on X, back in the days it was still Twitter, when you saw a cool piece of art and tweeted “shirt” anywhere near it, within seconds your mentions would be flooded with links to buy that exact art on a shirt? That’s the whole process at work.
“That’s been one of the more challenging bits,” O’Neill said. “Adapting and changing around that.”
And with genAI, what’s been a challenging situation is only getting worse. Because artists are not only getting outcompeted on price, but on time as well. Reed Young is the CEO of Fangamer, another video game t-shirt and merchandise website that is also a Games Done Quick collaborator. Fangamer has been making licensed video game products for years, and Young said a lot of time goes into not only securing those licenses but making the products that licensors find acceptable.
Reed said that creating a shirt or any product is a collaborative multi-step effort involving soliciting feedback from rank-and-file employees, and numerous rounds of approval from the license holders.
“What definitely gets lost in the slop mills or, like, the print-on-demand stuff is that in order to do it right and to get a license for a game and to make merchandise that’s approved, it’s generally almost impossible to knock anything out in less than like six months,” he said.
In today’s hyper-fast attention economy, consumers want their products while their brains are still sizzling from the dopamine hit. GenAI products are tuned to feed that “right now” appetite in ways traditional companies and artists, by necessity, are not.
“Jimothy the raccoon is extremely popular online and […] I did a Jimothy drawing, but I didn’t make a shirt of it,” said Drew Wise. “Because I’m like, ‘You know what? By the time I get this set up and it ships, maybe he won’t be cool anymore and there’s already 1000 [AI Jimothys] out there.”
There are. And while there seems to be no evidence that Wise’s adorable Jimothy drawing has been made into a shirt without his knowledge, other artworks of his have been subjected to that kind of theft. “I’ve been dealing with it for nine years,” he said. “I gave up because it was so stressful.”
Everyone I’ve spoken to expressed similar sentiments. Using their official Silksong merchandise as a test case, I even found Yetee and Fangamer artwork on Redbubble and Teepublic.
“it is a multi-headed hydra,” Reed said. “You just slice one off, but in that time, three more have grown.” Reed said that there are options to try to stop their protected artwork from showing up elsewhere, but that interferes with the consumer getting a good look at what Fangamer is trying to sell. “Because we don’t post super low res or try to protect the images, they do get stolen,” he said. “And that’s just kind of a cost of doing business.”
When the theft is on a much bigger scale, Reed said they do try to step in but it’s a matter of chance and always a massive headache. “If you do succeed in getting something taken down, which involves lawyers and a bunch of emails back and forth, and often a lot of investigative work, they’ll say like, ‘yeah, I’ll take it down,’ and then it just pops up on a different site,” he said. “It’s just a question of ‘Is it worth the hassle?’”
Glenn O’Neill doesn’t think so. “What I tell myself,” said O’Neill, “Is that you are better off spending your time creating things with your energy than you are trying to take things down […] your soul is kind of eroded by the process of trying to fight the hydra.”
For as corroded as the video game apparel economy seems to be, and while everyone I spoke to expressed the same exasperation with t-shirt bots, drop-shippers, and genAI stealing their artwork, all of them are optimistic.
“I’m not worried about [genAI] for Fangamer existentially at all,” Reed said. “I think what it will end up doing is helping people understand and appreciate the kind of thing that we’ve done, that a lot of our competitors do as well, which is to pay people to make something really cool that you can hold in your hands.”
“Most younger generations want non-AI art,” said Wise. “People actually want to support artists.”
