Earlier this year, an independent game reviewer shared a video lasting no more than 50 seconds, showcasing an innovative game idea that had been on her mind for years: What if we played Tetris, but with the board rotating every time you added a block? It was a brilliant idea that quickly spread like wildfire across all social media. But just a few days after posting the clip, "Freya Holmer" discovered that someone had completely cloned her idea using AI programming tools (Vibe-coding)! And the tragedy didn’t stop there; similar clones of the game started appearing in app stores one after another.
This is the new and bitter reality faced by independent game developers; a reality that could cost them a lot of money and make them more cautious and fearful of sharing their creative ideas with the world.
According to a report by 404 Media and journalist "Nicole Carpenter", some developers are suffering from their games being cloned at lightning speed through "AI spontaneous coding" tools, even before their games officially hit the market! This complicates the difficulty of achieving success and making a name amidst a flood of thousands of games that inundate the stores each year. With the help of AI tools like Claude, a single person can now assemble - in a matter of days or even hours - a playable game that mimics someone else’s idea and then upload this “automated clone” to home console, PC, or mobile stores.
"Charlie Greenman" spoke to the site, explaining that he saw "Holmer's" idea on social platforms, and after inputting a few smart commands and spending nearly a day of work, he put out his own version of the “rotating Tetris” and named it Rotris. Naturally, Greenman doesn't feel any ethical remorse about what he's done!
"I don’t care much about the game itself, and no one cared about it before. I felt as if I had invented something entirely new! When we reach this point, do we consider that one song has copied another? Is there a game that has imitated a previous game? Did the creator of games like Blox or Jenga imitate Tetris?"
Despite the fact that “game cloning” has been an age-old phenomenon in the gaming world (with companies like Zynga facing accusations from major publishers like EA of stealing ideas and gameplay mechanics), AI has given solo developers the ability to copy and ship at the blink of an eye. And often, these copies do not come with the same artistic quality or magic that the original carries, but for a player looking for quick entertainment, that might not matter at all, especially if the cloned game is free or sold for a nominal price.
According to the 404 Media report, it seems that major studios and production companies worth millions of dollars have begun to delve into cloning via AI. The report cited a former employee at Midnight Works - a company that has been accused by many of flooding stores with cloned games based on copied or stolen elements - that the company's plan in Moldova had long been based on recreating famous games over a few months, naming them similar names, and then selling them for a few dollars!
"The whole point was to mislead buyers into purchasing our inferior and copied version instead of the original game."
It was also confirmed that generative AI was used at "every step" to accelerate the cloning process, from designing interfaces and logos to screenshots and 3D models.
This widespread and industrial use of AI poses a significant barrier for small developers to achieve success and makes publishing initial game clips a risky endeavor.
"This frustrates me and robs me of the desire to share any details about my work. You get panic every time you want to share an idea, fearing that someone else will come and finish it for you, then profit from it and steal the entire concept! In the past, stealing ideas required effort, expertise, and meticulous execution, but now...