Fear of AI clones: Moonlighter studio cancels public Steam playtest of ReVamp
Valencia-based Digital Sun fears a freely available test build could be rebuilt with AI and sold before the original. Testing will now be limited to a smaller group.
Symbolic image · Photo: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
Spanish studio Digital Sun, known for Moonlighter, has cancelled the planned public Steam playtest of its next game, ReVamp. The studio said it was concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out. "With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk," the Valencia-based developer said on Steam and Bluesky.
Instead, a more contained playtest via the studio's Discord server starts on 29 October; Digital Sun hopes to open the public Steam playtest around January. "Showing games early is how indies get seen," the studio stressed, adding that it hopes platforms keep strengthening protections for original work.
Digital Sun is not alone: according to Game Developer, the makers of Drunken Goddess Reflux pulled their Steam Next Fest demo the day before. Developers increasingly report generative AI tools being used to rebuild games from demos, trailers and images, while game mechanics enjoy little copyright protection.