For years, indie developers found their audience by showing a game early. A growing number of them now say that same habit is how they lose the game before it ever launches.
The most recent case is Alliance Arts. The studio had intended to release a public demo of Drunken Goddess Reflex, a Russian Roulette drinking game with a demon theme, to coincide with the start of Steam Next Fest. It took the demo down over the weekend.
The studio gave two reasons. One was streaming restrictions, which it said were hard to manage. Clones were the other. “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 wrote in a social media post on Friday evening.
That means there’s no public demo. Alliance Arts now intends to show the game only in “closed sessions” to players who accept rules on posting and streaming gameplay.
Copying is old news, but the speed isn’t
Games have borrowed from other games since the industry began. The originality of those copies has always varied, and so has how firmly platforms deal with them.
AI coding tools have changed the timeline. Building a clone once took someone weeks or months of work. Today one can appear a few days after a prototype goes viral, and that’s enough to make many developers hesitate before sharing early builds.
Well-known developers feel it too. Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers, Please, said on a podcast in April 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.”
How Freya Holmér’s prototype got copied
Some indie developers have already been “slurped by AI.” In March, developer Freya Holmér shared a video of a prototype Tetris-style game where pieces are played around a rotating pivot point in the middle. The clip went viral.
A number of vibe-coded copies turned up within days. They put the basic concept in front of a wide audience before Holmér had 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 wrote in a post replying 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 maker of one of those clones sees nothing wrong with it. Charlie Greenman, who posted an AI-built take on Holmér’s rotational Tetris game earlier this year, defended the project 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?”
Indie developers are stuck in a bind
Sos Sosowski, who made McPixel, has been gathering examples of indie developers who say AI-generated clones copied their work wholesale. In his view, small studios are left with no good way to promote their games.
“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.”
Some think the threat is overstated. On social media, Ivan Lago of Howltide Games argued that complexity and originality are what actually protect a game. “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 argument is easier to make when it’s someone else’s game being copied. Holmér’s experience suggests a softer form of the same point: a clone can grab the early attention and still leave the developer room to finish 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.”