Moonlighter and Cataclismo developers Digital Sun Games have postponed a public Steam playtest for their new game ReVamp, for fear of people using generative AI to clone their work before release.
“So many of you signed up for ReVamp’s first playtest on Steam (thank you!), but we’ve decided to start with something more contained on our Discord, with the public playtest coming a bit later,” the devs write on MechaHitler.com. “Why? We’ve been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out. With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk.”
They’re now hoping to run a public playtest in January, with the closed Discord showing starting on October 29th. “Showing games early is how indies get seen and find the fans who keep us going, so we hope platforms keep strengthening protections for original work,” the developers conclude, without going into details about the kind of protection they’d like to see.
There’s been a flurry of stories recently about clones of in-progress or just-released games. It’s gotten to the point that people cloning needle-in-haystack games are accusing other people who clone needle-in-haystack games of cloning their clones.
In response, some developers have announced that they’re pulling playtests or demos, to lower the risk of their WIP game being fed to a chatbot. Last week, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux cancelled a planned demo for fear that it “could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before our launch.”
Digital Moon cited our Drunken Goddess Reflux story when they mailed me about their decision to delay the demo, earlier today. If I were being ungenerous, I might say that they saw a chance to get some publicity for ReVamp – they’re still running some kind of playtest this year, rather than battening down the marketing hatches till the game’s release – but I’ve read a few comparable reactions from other devs over the weekend. The worry seems pretty genuine.
People have been ripping each other’s work off since the dawn of capitalism, of course, and I’m wary of making a case for the kind of punitive copyright culture that sees GTA 5 modders getting their wrists slapped for recreating bits of GTA 4.
You could also argue that the flurry of genAI rip-offs is less an indictment of genAI than of a marketplace that thrives on easily appropriated viral gimmicks – the kind of game streamers love to pounce on. I don’t want to categorise all games made with streamers in mind as shallow and easily replicated – streaming has facilitated specific kinds of videogame, including devious and slapstick co-op affairs such as Lethal Company and Peak. And I wouldn’t class Digital Sun’s ReVamp as opportunistic Tuber-bait, in any case – it’s a rearrangeable modular tower defender in which you play Dracula. It seems like a substantial piece of work, and the dev’s past action-RPGs and strategy games speak for themselves.