Entertainmentupdated 1h ago3 min read
Digital Sun Delays ReVamp Public Playtest Over Generative AI Cloning Concerns
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Digital Sun limits ReVamp playtest to Discord, postponing Steam demo due to AI cloning fears. Indie studios broadly cancel or delay public demos as generative AI cloning rises.
Indies pull demos
Digital Sun Games delayed a public playtest for its upcoming “Tower Defensevania” game ReVamp, narrowing early testing to its Discord community after concerns about generative AI-enabled cloning. Digital Sun Games told players, “With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk,” and it said the company would run a “more contained” playtest starting on October 29. Alliance Arts also delayed a planned public demo for its demon-themed Russian Roulette drinking game Drunken Goddess Reflex, after the studio said it was “concerned that the demo’s content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools.”
Lucas Pope, the Papers, Please developer, said on an April podcast that “you don’t really talk about stuff when you’re working on it because I don’t know it’s going to get slurped up by AI or people are going to copy it or something else like that…”. Freya Holmér’s prototype of a Tetris-style game played on a central rotating pivot point drew “vibe-coded copies” that made the basic concept widely playable before Holmér could release her own version.
Discord instead of Steam
Digital Sun Games posted that it would start with something more contained on Discord, with the public playtest coming “a bit later,” and it told Steam signups that “we’ve decided to start with something more contained on our Discord, with the public playtest coming a bit later.”
Steam Next Fest was set to begin Monday, Oct. 19, and end Oct. 26, as Alliance Arts and Who You held closed test sessions for select players.
Alliance Arts cancelled its Steam Next Fest demo for Drunken Goddess Reflux, and the studio said it could not move forward because it believed providing a demo would enable others to quickly produce clones using generative AI.
Rock Paper Shotgun reported that Digital Sun Games hoped to run a public playtest in January while it began the closed Discord showing on October 29.
Digital Sun Games also framed the shift as a need to protect original work, writing, “We hope platforms keep strengthening protections for original work.”
Platforms face pressure
Digital Sun Games pointed to a “recent spate of games being reverse-engineered and cloned” and said it was acting because it feared games could be “reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out.” Claude Opus 5.5’s ability to decompile a game’s code and then recompile it back again enabled a rush of games being reverse-engineered and uploaded to be extremely playable on browsers. Alliance Arts delayed its Drunken Goddess Reflex demo planned to go live with today’s launch of Steam Next Fest, and it said the studio would share the demo only in “closed sessions” with those who agree to rules regarding posting and streaming gameplay.
Rock Paper Shotgun said the worry was that playtests and demos could be fed to a chatbot, and it noted that some developers announced they were pulling playtests or demos to lower the risk of their WIP game being copied. Drunken Goddess Reflux devs cancelled a public demo out of fear of AI copycats, and they quoted Alliance Arts saying, “We’re concerned that the demo’s content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools.”