THE CRUNCH
A growing number of indie developers are pulling public demos and playtests, worried that generative AI tools let copycats clone their unreleased games before they can launch them. Alliance Arts delayed a planned public demo of Drunken Goddess Reflex, its demon-themed Russian Roulette drinking game, that was due to coincide with the launch of Steam Next Fest. The team said it was concerned the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate the game's presentation and gameplay, with imitations released before its own launch. Instead, the demo will be shown only in closed sessions to people who agree to rules about posting and streaming gameplay. (Eurogamer has described the demo as outright cancelled and the game as Drunken Goddess Reflux; the primary reporting calls it a delay and gives the title as Reflex.)
Digital Sun, the studio behind Moonlighter, has made a similar call for its vampiric "Tower Defensevania" ReVamp. A Steam playtest planned for late October has been scaled back, with the studio citing "news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out" and calling a build shared with tens of thousands of players months before launch too big a risk. Access will instead roll out in waves on Discord from 29 October, with a public playtest hoped for around January. ReVamp launches in full on 25 March 2027.
The fear is not hypothetical. In March, developer Freya Holmér shared a prototype of a Tetris-style game played on a rotating central pivot, and within days vibe-coded copies had made the basic concept widely playable before her own version existed. Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope said on an April podcast that he no longer feels comfortable discussing work in progress because it might get "slurped up by AI" or copied. Sos Sosowski, creator of McPixel, has documented many similar complaints and framed the bind bluntly: don't share your game and get no sales, share it and get it stolen.
Not everyone sees the clones as an existential threat. Howltide Games' Ivan Lago argued that a game copyable overnight was never more than a single-mechanic cash grab, and Holmér herself has noted that engagement with the early clones of her prototype faded, leaving her free to take her time and build the version she actually wants to make.
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