THE CRUNCH

Digital Sun Games, the studio behind the Moonlighter series, has cancelled a public playtest for its next game, ReVamp, citing fears that the build could be "reverse-engineered, cloned and published" before the original even launches. ReVamp, described as a "tower defensevania" roguelike, is due in March 2027. "With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players feels like too big a risk," marketing manager Israel Mallén told PC Gamer.

The studio's announcement was blunt: recent reports of games being cloned ahead of release made a large public build feel like an unacceptable gamble. The backdrop is a wave of quickly made clones flooding Steam, Roblox and mobile app stores in the aftermath of Claude Opus 5.5, which has made spinning up imitations dramatically easier. The scale is visible in this month's Steam Next Fest, which lists over 8,000 demos, up from around 4,000 in June.

Digital Sun is not acting alone. Last week the studio behind Drunken Goddess Reflux cancelled its planned Steam Next Fest demo over similar concerns that its content could be used to "quickly imitate or replicate" the game before launch. The speed involved is striking: when the creator of Escape the Walls posted footage on X, at least seven clones appeared on Roblox within ten days, plus one on Steam.

Mallén framed the cancellation as a bid for wider change: "We know we're not the only developers feeling this way, and the more this is talked about, the more likely platforms are to step in."