Digital Sun, the studio behind Moonlighter, has scaled back the first playtest for its next game, ReVamp. The test was planned as a public build on Steam. It will now start as a smaller playtest run through the studio’s Discord, and Digital Sun says the reason is concern about games being cloned before they launch.
“So many of you signed up for ReVamp’s first playtest on Steam (thank you!),” the studio wrote in an update on its X account, quoted by Kotaku, “but we’ve decided to start with something more contained on our Discord, with the public playtest coming a bit later.” Digital Sun said it has “been concerned by the recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out.”
Game Developer quotes the studio as saying that “with launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk.” Digital Sun calls ReVamp a “tower defensevania,” a Dracula-themed base-builder. Kotaku reports the game is due in March 2027.
What happens to the Steam sign-ups
“To everyone who requested access on Steam: we’re sorry for the change of plans,” the studio wrote. “We hope to open the public playtest around January.” According to Kotaku, players can still sign up for the Discord playtest ahead of October 29. Game Developer says that smaller test starts on October 29.
The statement closes with a request aimed at storefronts: “Showing games early is how indies get seen and find the fans who keep us going, so we hope platforms keep strengthening protections for original work.”
The cloning worry
Digital Sun’s statement does not name a tool or point at any specific cloned game. The link to AI comes from the outlets covering the decision. Kotaku ties the move to a recent wave of games it says were reverse-engineered and rebuilt with Anthropic’s Claude Opus model, and it describes some of those rebuilds being put up to play in browsers. Game Developer says indie developers on Reddit have spent the past month describing people feeding demos, trailers and images into generative AI tools to rebuild the basic features of games. It points to limited copyright protection for game mechanics as part of the problem.
ReVamp is not the first game to pull back this month. Alliance Arts canceled a Steam Next Fest demo for Drunken Goddess Reflux over the same fear. Kotaku notes that Next Fest opened Monday with more than 8,000 demos, about double March’s event.
