By Kotaku | Created at 2026-10-19 15:31:45 | Updated at 2026-10-19 16:22:10
51 minutes ago
Moonlighter developer Digital Sun has announced a change of plans over a public beta for its forthcoming “tower defensevania” ReVamp, based on the recent spate of games being reverse-engineered and cloned using the latest version of Anthropic’s LLM, Claude Opus. What was once supposed to be a widely accessible playtest build via Steam is now going to be limited to a far smaller number of players through the company’s Discord.
“So many of you signed up for ReVamp‘s first playtest on Steam (thank you!),” begins Digital Sun’s update posted to its X account, “but we’ve decided to start with something more contained on our Discord, with the public playtest coming a bit later.” Why? “We’ve been concerned by the recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out.”
The issue is Claude Opus 5.5’s ability to decompile a game’s code and then recompile it back again in a way that would previously have taken determined coders months to years to achieve. And concerningly, it does a very good job of it, leading to the current rush of games being reverse-engineered and uploaded to be extremely playable on browsers. This is something Digital Sun is obviously keen to avoid for its Dracula-based base-builder that’s not due out until March of 2027, and just handing over a playable build to the public has—out of nowhere—become an extremely high-risk move.
We’re keeping ReVamp’s first playtest small for now.
Here’s why. pic.twitter.com/VVBm5hoBeF
— Digital Sun ✨ Wishlist ReVamp! (@DigitalSunGames) October 19, 2026
“To everyone who requested access on Steam: we’re sorry for the change of plans,” says Digital Sun. “We hope to open the public playtest around January.” It adds that you can still sign up for the Discord playtest ahead of October 29.
The statement concludes,
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.
This captures a very chilling thought, and will no doubt raise questions for hundreds of other studios in similar positions. Last week, Drunken Goddess Reflux developer Alliance Arts said it has cancelled plans for a Next Fest demo as a result of the same tech, and while Steam’s Next Fest (starting later today) is not short on entrants (the number of demos has doubled from March’s event to over 8,000), it does seem like something people are going to have to consider.
A demo is a far smaller slice, of course; larger playtests would appear to be a much more risky prospect. Once they could be made available for a limited period and then pulled. All of a sudden, it’s now a realistic prospect that they could be cloned and made available in some form long before they’re intended to be released.
