Digital Sun shelves ReVamp public playtest over AI cloning fears

Digital Sun Games has cancelled the public playtest of ReVamp, its upcoming "Tower Defensevania," citing fears that generative AI tools could clone the game before it ships.

The Moonlighter developer announced the reversal on Steam and Bluesky, writing that the team is "concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned, and published before the original is even out." The studio had announced the public playtest earlier this month, intending to gather player feedback and metrics ahead of launch.

"With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk," the company said.

What changes for ReVamp's testing plan?

Instead of the open playtest, Digital Sun will run a "more contained" test through its Discord server, starting October 29. The trade-off is blunt: fewer testers, fewer metrics, less visibility—but a smaller surface for anyone planning to feed a build into an AI tooling pipeline and rebuild it from scratch.

Digital Sun isn't acting alone. Alliance Arts and Who's You cancelled the Steam Next Fest demo for their game Drunken Goddess Reflux just one day before the announcement, for the same reason.

Why is AI cloning disrupting indie marketing now?

Fast-follow clones are an old story. Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing and the Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend and BigGiantCircles title Threes! were both rapidly copied on mobile as far back as 2013. What's changed is the speed and the input material.

Over the past month, indie developers on Reddit have described competitors ingesting demos, trailers and screenshots into generative AI tools and reconstructing core features quickly. The practice sits in a legal gap: game mechanics have long enjoyed limited copyright protection, while LLMs such as Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT have made rapid reproduction technically trivial. The same tools have also been used to decompile older games, fueling a new wave of vibe-coded mods.

The consequence for small studios is operational, not abstract. Demos, festival appearances and early builds are the standard channels indies use to build audiences pre-launch. If publishing a build months before release hands copycats a head start, those channels close.

"Showing games early is how indies get seen and find the fans who keep us going," Digital Sun wrote. "We hope platforms keep strengthening protections for original work."

That last sentence puts the ball with storefront operators. Steam and other platform owners currently face no settled policy framework for disincentivizing AI-assisted clones that legally distinct mechanics don't cover.

ReVamp still has a release window months out. Whether Valve responds to the pressure from studios pulling demos and playtests is the signal worth watching.