Moonlighter developer delays Steam playtest for its ReVamp ‘Tower Defensevania’ over concerns AI copycats might clone it before launch

Digital Sun – the indie studio behind the roguelike Moonlighter and the brooding RTS Cataclismo – has delayed a planned Steam playtest for its next game, ReVamp, citing concerns about “games being reverse engineered, cloned and released before the original was even released.”

The developer planned to let people access its vampiric ReVamp “Tower Defensevania” near the end of this spooky month, but a new trend of Gen AI copycats cloning old and unreleased games has the studio worried.

Watch on YouTube

“Many of you signed up for the first test of ReVamp here on Steam (thanks!), but we decided to start with something more content on our Discord, with the public test coming a little later,” the developer wrote in a recent Steam blog post.

Digital Sun pointed to “reports of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and released before the original was even released”, and worried that “sharing a version with tens of thousands of players” months before its full launch was “too big a risk”.

From there, Digital Sun will provide access to ReVamp’s first playtest in waves starting October 29, via Discord. “Even if you don’t enter right away, we’d love for you to join the conversation around ReVamp as we let more players in. We hope to open public playtesting around January. To everyone who has requested access here on Steam: we’re sorry for the change of plans and thank you for your patience,” the studio added.

ReVamp will launch in full on March 25, 2027. We hope that this move can successfully eliminate all potential clones.

Digital Sun isn’t the only developer having to navigate the AI ​​generation boom. Xbox recently announced an entire department that appears to focus on creating gen-AI games, as one example.

Meanwhile, Alliance Arts has outright canceled a Steam Next Fest demo for its anime-inspired Russian roulette game, Drunken Goddess Reflux, due to similar issues. “We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating the presentation and gameplay of this game may be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released before the game launches,” the company said last week.

Steam Next Fest 2026 should be a great opportunity to discover exciting new games that were previously off your radar. However, as we reported earlier today, the shadow of generative AI looms over the entire event and could dampen an otherwise great Steam tradition.