Moonlighter developer delays public playtest of next game over concerns of AI cloning
By A recent surge of generative AI-driven game replication is compelling established gaming studios to modify their development approaches—and in one significant indie studio’s scenario, it entails reducing a previously-scheduled public playtest due to concerns over being outpaced by vibe-coding imitators.
The indie studio in question is Digital Sun Games, widely recognized for Moonlighter and Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault. The firm is currently developing an upcoming “Tower Defensevania” title named ReVamp and had announced earlier this month intentions to conduct a public playtest to gather player insights, collect data, and enhance the forthcoming game.
However, those intentions are now on hold. In a message posted on Steam and Bluesky, the studio communicated to players that the team is “worried by recent reports of games being reverse-engineered, reproduced, and released prior to the original’s launch.” (via Kotaku.)
“With the release still months away, a substantial public version of ReVamp seemed like too significant a risk,” the company stated. They will conduct a “more limited” playtest through their Discord server, commencing on October 29.
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Digital Sun isn’t alone in aborting promotional strategies due to apprehensions about AI cloning. Just yesterday, Alliance Arts and Who’s You scrapped the Steam Next Fest demonstration for their upcoming title Drunken Goddess Reflux.
Rapidly replicated video game clones aren’t a novel occurrence. Seasoned industry professionals will remember how Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing and Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend, and BigGiantCircles’ Threes! were swiftly emulated on mobile platforms as early as 2013. However, indie creators on forums on platforms like Reddit have recently recounted how unscrupulous developers have fed demos, trailers, and images of their games into generative AI systems and promptly reconstructed their core features from the ground up.
This has all been facilitated by long-standing limited copyright protections for video game mechanics and advancements in particular LLMs like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
