Endless pile of Needle In Haystack games begins to emerge, as viral hit imitator's devs claim their code was nicked by a genAI-using clone

In a metaphor far too on the nose to turn into any form of fiction, at least without the writer getting mercilessly cyberbullied, a game about finding a needle in a haystack has now become the genuine needle at the heart of a pile of imitators. A pile so large, in fact, one copycat game stands accused of ripping code from another.

NoGlyph, developers of Needle In A Haystack, have claimed that their code's been nicked by A Game About Needle In A Haystack devs Little Field Studios. The former game was released on September 29th this year. The latter came out on October 16th. Both offer players a chance to go hunting for metal implements in piles of horse food, and both appear to have been inspired by the as-yet unreleased Needle In A Haystack Simulator, which gained notoriety after serving as the basis of a viral tweet in August.

These are just three of the needle-in-haystack games which've massed on Steam since that clip got a bunch of eyeballs, as various people look to fill the world's apparent desire to hunt stiching implements on a farm.

"Yesterday, on October 16th a game called 'A Game About Needle In A Haystack' by Little Field Studios came out on Steam," a Needle In A Haystack dev called Jahvin wrote in a Steam post over the weekend. "It contains code copied from our game. To be clear, this is about our actual code, not a similar idea or similar mechanics.

"The haystack in our game, meaning how it's drawn, how you dig into it and how gold, lapis and diamond hay work, is something that took a long time to get working properly. When we looked through their game's files, we found 13 of our classes inside it with the exact same names. More than half of the functions in that part match ours exactly. Some of our own error messages are still in there word for word, including one that points to a shader from our project that doesn't exist in their game.

"The copied code matches the versions of our free demo we put out on September 20 and 21, a few weeks before their release. From what we can tell, the rest of their game (the art, the sounds, the other systems) is their own work. Our problem is the hay code."

So, not an apparent copycat calling out another apparent copycat solely for its premise, but an accusation that things have evolved to the point of a studio directly ripping specific code and assets. The Needle In A Haystack devs added that they've filed a copyright notice with Valve and saved off a copy of their findings as proof.

A Game About Needle In A Haystack, the accused, boasts a genAI disclosure in its Steam description, but this only makes clear that the tech was used to produce the game's logo. If the hay code situation is as Jahvin described, that could suggest the potential for AI-assisted decompilation to have been at play in the alleged copying, but there doesn't seem to be any definite confirmation of that as of writing.

Dev concerns about AI being used to easily replicate games have been on the rise, following the recent boom in genAI-assisted decompilation. Just last week, the makers of a game called Drunken Goddess Reflux announced they'd cancelled plans for a public demo in favour of limited-access playtesting sessions, citing concern that "the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools, and that such works could be released before our launch".

Honestly, I'm just terrified that the ever-growing mound of needle-in-haystack variants will eventually grow to the point of causing Steam's vast barn of games to burst, sending horse-shaped westerns, pitchfork-shaped fantasy RPGs, and water trough-shaped games aimed at thirsty horndogs flying across the plains of the net.