AI Is Cloning Games Before They Launch — and Open Playtests Are the First Casualty

Imagine spending three years building your dream game. Late nights, empty coffee cups, questionable life choices. The whole tortured-artist package. Finally, you decide to let people play it early. You open the gates, invite the world in, and give players a taste of what you've been building.

A week later, someone has a knockoff running in a browser. Your game isn't even out yet.

Welcome to the future of indie development. It looks suspiciously like someone nicking your lunch before you've finished making it.

This isn't a hypothetical nightmare cooked up for a dramatic opening. It happened this month. Twice.

Digital Sun, the studio behind Moonlighter and Moonlighter 2, was preparing a public Steam playtest for ReVamp, its upcoming "tower defensevania" built around Dracula. The game isn't due until March 2027, so there was still plenty of time before launch. The public playtest, however, is no longer happening as planned.

Instead, Digital Sun announced that a small, contained playtest would run through its Discord starting October 29. A public playtest might follow around January.

Might. Around. January. Three words that should make anyone who enjoys trying games early slightly nervous.

The studio explained that it was "concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned, and published before the original is even out." With launch still months away, it concluded that "a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk."

And Digital Sun isn't the only studio slamming the brakes. Just yesterday, Alliance Arts and Who's You cancelled the Steam Next Fest demo for their upcoming game Drunken Goddess Reflux for the same reason.

Two studios, two public demos pulled, and one increasingly uncomfortable question: what happens when letting people try your game becomes an invitation to steal it?

According to Kotaku's reporting, the latest generation of AI models can decompile a game's code and recompile it into something extremely playable. Work that once took determined cloners months or years can apparently be accomplished much faster.

Meanwhile, indie developers on Reddit have spent the last month describing how bad actors have been feeding their demos, trailers and even screenshots into generative AI tools, then rebuilding basic features from scratch.

Fast.

And that little word is the entire problem.

Game cloning isn't new. Anyone who was around in 2013 remembers the vultures circling Ridiculous Fishing and Threes! as soon as they became popular on mobile. The games industry has always had people watching a successful release, rubbing their hands together and asking how quickly they can produce something similar.

But there's a difference between an opportunist spending months building a knockoff and someone apparently doing the job in days with a prompt.

The old barrier to entry wasn't exactly Fort Knox, but it existed. You needed time, technical ability and enough determination to turn someone else's idea into a functioning product. Now, that barrier hasn't merely been lowered. It's been kicked down, set on fire and apparently handed over to the nearest chatbot.

And here's the part that deserves far more attention: this doesn't just hurt developers. It hurts you, too.

Remember public demos? Open betas? Those glorious little windows where you could play something months before release, discover what worked, find the bugs and tell developers what needed fixing?

They were one of gaming's best deals.

Studios received feedback from actual players. You got early access to games for free, and your opinions could genuinely help shape the finished product. You weren't just watching a trailer and hoping the final release delivered. You were part of the process.

Digital Sun summed it up beautifully in its announcement: "Showing games early is how indies get seen and find the fans who keep us going."

That last part matters. Independent studios don't have the same visibility as giant publishers. A public demo can be the difference between a game disappearing into the digital void and finding the players who will support it.

But what happens when that same demo becomes raw material for a clone?

Every public build is another opportunity for someone to feed a game into the machine. So, from a studio's perspective, the sensible response is to stop handing out access. Keep the build private. Invite fewer people. Delay the public demo until the risk feels manageable.

That's precisely the kind of decision Digital Sun has now made.

And suddenly, the cost isn't just another developer dealing with a knockoff. It's fewer open betas, fewer Steam Next Fest demos and fewer opportunities to discover something special before everyone else does.

The thing you love becomes collateral damage. And the people threatening it aren't necessarily the developers making the decisions. They're the cloners giving those developers a reason to shut the doors.

There's a particularly nasty irony here.

Everyone, myself included, has been complaining about AI slop flooding game stores with disposable rubbish. Fair enough. Nobody needs another hundred barely functional clones cluttering up a storefront while genuinely interesting games struggle to get noticed.

But there's a darker side to that problem. AI isn't just helping people make bad games. It's threatening to eat good ones before they even launch.

And the people taking the hit aren't always giant corporations with legal departments, armies of lawyers and enough money to make a lawsuit someone's full-time hobby. Sometimes they're small independent teams. The twenty-person studio behind Moonlighter, for instance, is the kind of developer that deserves a chance to show people what it's building.

Instead, studios are being pushed towards a miserable choice: protect unfinished work by keeping it hidden, or show it to potential fans and risk seeing a copy appear before the original ships.

Neither option is particularly appealing. One risks the work itself; the other risks the audience that work needs.

So what fixes this mess?

Digital Sun has a clear request for the platforms: "We hope platforms keep strengthening protections for original work."

I agree.

Steam helped build a culture around showing games early. Next Fest, open playtests and demo days all work on the assumption that letting people experience a game before release is a good thing. Developers gain exposure, players discover new favourites, and everyone gets a better idea of what deserves their time.

If that arrangement is no longer safe, the platforms that benefited from it need to help protect it. Otherwise, the open era could gradually disappear, one cancelled demo at a time.

That means stronger policies, faster takedowns of obvious clones and some actual friction for the copy-paste merchants. Whatever the precise solution looks like, telling developers to keep their games secret can't be the entire strategy.

Players, meanwhile, are split.

One camp believes the precautions are completely justified, pointing to the long history of demos being decompiled and cloned. If a public build can expose your work to someone who wants to reproduce it, why take the risk?

The other camp thinks studios are overreacting. No game is original enough to justify this level of fear, they argue, and piracy existed long before AI arrived to make everything more convenient.

Honestly? Both camps have a point. Games borrow ideas, cloning has existed for decades, and not every similar-looking title is evidence of theft.

But there's a difference between debating originality from the safety of your gaming chair and watching three years of your work get cloned in a week. It's easy to dismiss the risk when you're not the one who has to decide whether the next public build is worth releasing.

Here's what I'm watching now: whether ReVamp's public playtest actually happens around January.

If it does, perhaps this was a scare, and the industry finds a way to adapt without sacrificing the open demos players love. If it quietly never happens, we may look back at this week as the moment the open beta started dying.

And we'll feel it the next time Steam Next Fest rolls around, looking for something new to play and finding fewer demos waiting for us.

The worst part is that nobody needs to announce the end of public playtests for them to disappear. Developers can simply decide that showing their work isn't worth the risk. One cancellation becomes two, then another studio makes the same calculation.

Eventually, players stop asking why there are fewer demos. They just get used to it.

That's the future worth worrying about. Not just a storefront full of cheap imitations, but an industry where the people making original games are too frightened to let anyone play them early.

The clones aren't coming. They're already here, and they got here first.