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'If you can’t show your game to the world without fearing it’ll be cloned, something’s broken' says Moonlighter studio on its canceled demo

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'If you can’t show your game to the world without fearing it’ll be cloned, something’s broken' says Moonlighter studio on its canceled demo

Moonlighter and Cataclismo studio Digital Sun Games announced yesterday that it had canceled plans to release a wide public playtest of its forthcoming "tower defensevania" roguelike ReVamp. The reason? The rollout of a more powerful AI model in Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 has led to a surge in hastily turned around clones and decompiles, resulting in thousands of cheap and nasty products flooding Steam and Roblox.

The studio doesn't want people to decompile and steal ReVamp's code. It also wants to prevent opportunists rapidly vibe coding a clone that would hit the market well in advance of ReVamp's March 2027 release date.

While clones have obviously existed forever, for a studio to worry that its concept—and its code —may be pilfered and turned around within days is unprecedented. Digital Sun Games is not the only studio to cancel a demo due to these anxieties.

Digital Sun Games' marketing manager, Israel Mallén, reached out earlier this week to alert me to the demo's cancellation. I shot back a few more questions to get a sense of what the current situation is for a small but experienced dev team.

Scaling a "large playtest" down to a smaller, even more private one must come with marketing / exposure setbacks, right?

Yes, it affects us a lot, mostly in terms of how many people we can actually reach. We had tens of thousands of people signed up for the original Steam playtest. Moving it to Discord means we're looking at a playtest of a few hundred people at best, since we're granting access manually.


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