Key information
Digital Sun Games, the developer behind Moonlighter and Cataclismo, has canceled its planned public playtest for the upcoming roguelike ReVamp. The studio cited concerns regarding the rapid emergence of AI-driven cloning tools, specifically noting that the release of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 has facilitated a surge in products that decompile and replicate original game code.
The studio fears that opportunists could use these AI models to create and release clones before ReVamp's scheduled March 2027 launch. Marketing manager Israel Mallén stated that while the team has a decade of experience, this specific anxiety regarding the theft of concepts and code is unprecedented in their history.
To mitigate these risks, the studio is moving its playtesting to a private Discord server where they can manually vet participants and require non-disclosure agreements. This shift significantly reduces the reach of the playtest from tens of thousands of potential Steam users to only a few hundred individuals, which the studio acknowledges will negatively impact their visibility and ability to gather feedback at scale.
Digital Sun Games suggests that storefronts like Steam should implement better tools for vetting users, such as checking account age or review history. They argue that without improved protections for original work, developers may increasingly avoid public playtests until closer to a game's release, potentially stifling community-driven development.
