Moonlighter

I found this one interesting.

Moonlighter Studio won't host a public playtest of its next game due to rampant AI-led cloning.

We know we're not the only developers feeling this way.

So basically, yeah, the studio behind the series has announced... that they fear that the code will be reverse engineered code and published like another sort of we've seen an influx of rapidly vibe coded clones of roblox and mobile app etc i mean i guess this is a genuine fear but again you can't get around this now right i mean just when the game gets released don't happen then right

And I saw a report earlier this week that basically said that Steam Next Fest has been infested with them.

Steam Next Fest is normally a quite curated range of games, and this year there's like, I don't know, 80% more, and they're all just... fucking trash because of it and that is a sad thing for the industry and this is where i say that whole ai thing is just bullshit and horrible because that's where people are using it incorrectly using it to try and cheat the game try and cheat people out of money or even worse create something that delivers a i don't know fucking ransomware or uh some sort of way to take your money illegitimately more illegally I think it's appalling.

And those guys over at the studio, I can't remember the studio's name, but the guys did Moonlighter.

They do some brilliant stuff.

They were doing a tower defense game called Revamp that people were excited about.

The Digital Sun made Moonlighter and Moonlighter 2.

They just said, we're canceling our public playtest for Revamp.

Other developers said, we're not putting games into Steam Next Fest this year because of AI cloning.

We'll talk about it, I guess.

Another developer, Digital Sun, they're the developers of Moonlighter.

They have an upcoming tower defense Metroidvania allegedly called Revamp.

They also decided that they were not going to put a demo out in Steam Next Fest, and instead they were going to do a closed demo thing, I guess, in their Discord server.

So that's nice of them.

The problem is serious enough that Moonlighter developer Digital Sun Games has scaled back a planned public playtest for its upcoming game, Revamp, opting to test it with members of its Discord community instead.

And that's out of concern that AI-assisted developers could actually clone the game before its release.

So they haven't released it yet.

Alliance Arts and WhoU have cancelled an upcoming demo for their game Drunken Goddess Reflux ahead of Steam Neckfest due to fears of Gen AI copycat games.

Similarly, Digital Sun, the team behind Moonlighter and Cataclysm, will be scaling back public playtesting for their new game, Revamp, due to similar concerns.

They issued a statement to their Discord community that said, "...we've been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned, and published before the original is even out," said the studio.

With launch still months away, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players felt like too big a risk for revamp.