AI Coding Tools Lower the Barrier to Game Cloning, Indie Developers Shift to Closed Playtests
AI coding tools have significantly lowered the barrier to cloning games, making indie developers cautious about publicly sharing their work in progress.
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The developer of McPixel, Sos Sosowski, frames the current predicament for indie game developers as a dilemma: do not show your game and you cannot sell it; publish it and your ideas get stolen. This is not an abstract concern. Last weekend, the studio Alliance Arts announced it was postponing the public demo release of Drunken Goddess Reflux, a demon-themed Russian-roulette drinking game that had been scheduled to go live during the Steam Next Fest. The studio's stated reason was fear that demo assets would be quickly imitated and replicated by others using AI or other tools, with clones potentially launching before the official release. The developers now plan to distribute the demo only through closed playtest sessions, requiring participants to comply with agreements regarding recording and livestreaming.
This caution is not unfounded. In March of this year, developer Freya Holmér shared a prototype video of a Tetris-like game built around a central rotating pivot, which quickly went viral on social platforms. Within days, she discovered a flood of AI-generated clones—before her own version was even live, the basic mechanic had been turned into playable copies circulating widely. Holmér wrote: "Everywhere you look there are these sloppy plagiarists, whether by AI or by hand, and it makes me not want to share development progress." Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers, Please, expressed a similar concern in an April podcast episode: during development he does not casually discuss projects externally because he is unsure whether the content might be scraped by AI or copied by others.
The developer who published the AI clone of Holmér's rotating Tetris game earlier this year does not consider his own behavior problematic. In an interview with 404 Media, Charlie Greenman said: "I think this counts as entirely new creation. At this level, how do you even define plagiarism? Does one song plagiarize another? Does one game plagiarize another?" Ivan Lago of Howltide Games offered a counter-standard: if AI can replicate your game overnight, then it was never a truly complete game to begin with—merely a product that quickly monetizes a single mechanic, without substance or creative vision.