Showing people your game early used to be how indie developers built an audience. Now a growing number of them say it’s how they lose the game before it ships.
Alliance Arts is the latest example. The studio planned to put out a public demo of Drunken Goddess Reflex, its demon-themed Russian Roulette drinking game, alongside the start of Steam Next Fest. Over the weekend it pulled the demo.
Part of the reason was streaming restrictions, which the studio said were hard to manage. The other part was clones. “We’re concerned 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,” the Alliance Arts team said in a social media post Friday evening.
So the public demo is off. Alliance Arts now plans to show it only in “closed sessions” to players who agree to rules about posting and streaming gameplay.
Cloning is old. The speed is new
Games have been copying other games for as long as there’s been an industry. How original those copies are has always varied, and so has how hard platforms crack down on them.
AI coding tools have changed the timeline. A clone used to take weeks or months of someone’s work. Now it can turn up within days of a prototype going viral, and that’s enough to make plenty of developers think twice about sharing early builds.
That includes big names. Lucas Pope, who made Papers, Please, said on an April podcast that, in general, “you don’t really talk about stuff when you’re working on it because I don’t know it’s going to get slurped up by AI or people are going to copy it or something else like that… I just didn’t feel as comfortable talking about the stuff I was working on again.”
What happened to Freya Holmér’s prototype
For some indie developers, getting “slurped by AI” has already happened. In March, developer Freya Holmér posted a video of a prototype Tetris-style game in which pieces are played around a central rotating pivot point. The clip went viral.
Within days, Holmér was looking at a number of vibe-coded copies. They made the basic idea widely playable before she’d released her own version.
“Y’know it kinda disincentivizes me from sharing progress when there are slop ghouls around every corner, AI or otherwise,” Holmér said in a post responding to the copies. “Luckily these people are incapable of original thought and don’t know how to elevate this concept beyond what they’ve already seen.”
The person behind one of those clones doesn’t think he did anything wrong. Charlie Greenman, who posted an AI-built version of Holmér’s rotational Tetris game earlier this year, defended it in an interview. “I feel like I had this brand new creation,” Greenman said. “When it gets to that point, is one song copying another? Is one game copying another? Whoever created Blox, Jenga, is that a copy of Tetris?”
The trap indie developers are stuck in
Sos Sosowski, the developer of McPixel, has been collecting examples of indie developers complaining that AI-generated clones copied their work wholesale. He said the problem leaves small studios with no good way to promote what they’re making.
“Don’t share your game—no sales. Share your game—gets stolen,” Sosowski said. “How do you even survive as an indie in the current landscape? This is insane.”
Not everyone agrees the threat is that serious. Howltide Games’ Ivan Lago said on social media that complexity and originality are the protection that works. “If AI can copy your game overnight, it wasn’t a real game. It was just a quick cash grab built on a single mechanic, with no soul or vision,” Lago said. “AI isn’t cloning actual games. It’s just making cheap knockoffs of stuff that was already an asset flip to begin with.”
That’s easy to say if your game isn’t the one being copied. Holmér’s own experience points to a gentler version of the same argument: a clone can take the early buzz and still leave room for the developer to make the full game.
“In the very beginning, that first week, just every day there was a new AI clone [of the rotational Tetris prototype]. I was like, OK, well fuck me, I guess,” Holmér said in an interview this summer. “But there’s way less engagement [now], and I feel more in the clear to take my time to actually make something right, something good I can be proud of, and not just get it out there as soon as possible.”
