Image credit: Digital Sun

Digital Sun - the indie studio behind moreish roguelike Moonlighter and moody RTS Cataclismo - has delayed a planned Steam playtest for its next game, ReVamp, citing concerns over "games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out."

The developer was planning to let folks into its vampiric "Tower Defensevania" ReVamp near the end of this spooky month, but a new trend of gen-AI copycats cloning both old and unreleased games left the studio worried.

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"So many of you signed up for ReVamp's first playtest here on Steam (thank you!), but we've decided to start with something more contained on our Discord, with the public playtest coming a bit later," the developer wrote in a recent Steam blog post .

Digital Sun pointed the finger at "news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out," and worried that "sharing a build with tens of thousands of players" months prior to its full launch is…