Moonlighter developer delays public playtest of next game over concerns of AI

Bryant Francis,Senior Editor,GameDeveloper.com

October 19, 2026

schedule2 Min ReadImage via Digital Sun

A recent burst of generative AI-enabled game cloning is forcing established game studios to adjust their development strategies—and in one notable indie studio's case, it means scaling back a previously-planned public playtest for fear of being beat to market by vibe-coding copycats.

Said indie studio is Digital Sun Games, best known for Moonlighter and Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault. The company is working on an upcoming "Tower Defensevania" game called ReVamp, and had announced plans earlier this month to host a public playtest to solicit player feedback, gather metrics, and improve the upcoming game.

Now however, those plans are on ice. In a post on Steam and Bluesky, the studio informed players that the team is "concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned, and published before the original is even out." (via Kotaku.)

"With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk," the company said. It will run a "more contained" playtest through its Discord server starting on October 29.

Digital Sun isn't the only studio to cancel promotional plans for fear of AI cloning. Just yesterday, Alliance Arts and Who's You canceled the Steam Next Fest demo for the upcoming game Drunken Goddess Reflux.

Fast-follow video game clones aren't a new phenomenon. Veteran game industry professionals will recall how Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing and Asher Vollmer, Greg Wohlwend, and BigGiantCircles' Threes! were rapidly copied on mobile platforms as early as 2013. But indie developers on watering holes on platforms like Reddit have spent the last month describing how scurrilous developers have fed demos, trailers, and images of their games into generative AI tools and quickly rebuilt their basic features from the ground up.

This has all been made possible by longstanding limited copyright protections for video game mechanics and advancements in certain LLMs like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Said tools have also been recently deployed to decompile older games, driving a new burst of vibe-coded mods.

Digital Sun Studios' announcement highlights how these predatory cloning practices risk harming the market potential for smaller studios looking to break out and build an audience—and how it may require platform owners like Steam to set new policies that disincentivize this behavior. "Showing games early is how indies get seen and find the fans who keep us going," the company wrote. "We hope platforms keep strengthening protections for original work."

Top StoriesGenerative AI, Machine Learning, & LLMs

About the Author

Bryant Francis

Senior Editor, GameDeveloper.com

Bryant Francis is a writer, journalist, and narrative designer based in Boston, MA. He currently writes for Game Developer, a leading B2B publication for the video game industry. His credits include Proxy Studios' 4X strategy game Zephon, Iron Anchor Studios' Down With The Ship, and Amplitude Studio's 2017 game Endless Space 2.

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