Defanged.
Digital Sun - the indie studio behind moreish roguelike Moonlighter and moody RTS Cataclismo - has delayed a planned Steam playtest for its next game, ReVamp, citing concerns over "games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out."
The developer was planning to let folks into its vampiric "Tower Defensevania" ReVamp near the end of this spooky month, but a new trend of gen-AI copycats cloning both old and unreleased games left the studio worried.
"So many of you signed up for ReVamp's first playtest here on Steam (thank you!), but we've decided to start with something more contained on our Discord, with the public playtest coming a bit later," the developer wrote in a recent Steam blog post.
Digital Sun pointed the finger at "news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out," and worried that "sharing a build with tens of thousands of players" months prior to its full launch is "too big a risk."
From here, Digital Sun will grant access to ReVamp's first playtest in waves starting from the 29th of October, via Discord. "Even if you don't get in right away, we'd love for you to join the conversation around ReVamp as we let more players in. We hope to open the public playtest around January. To everyone who requested access here on Steam: we're sorry for the change of plans, and thank you for your patience," the studio added.
ReVamp launches in full on 25th March, 2027. Here's hoping the move can successfully shoo away any would-be clones.
Digital Sun isn't the only developer having to work around the gen-AI boom. Xbox recently announced an entire department that sounds like it's focused on gen-AI game-making, as just one example.
Meanwhile, Alliance Arts outright cancelled a Steam Next Fest demo for its anime-inspired Russian Roulette game, Drunken Goddess Reflux, because of similar issues. "We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game's presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game's launch," the company said last week.
Steam Next Fest 2026 should be a great occasion to discover new and exciting games that were previously nowhere near your radar. However, as we reported earlier today, the shadow of generative AI looms over the entire event and could dampen an otherwise great Steam tradition.
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