Earlier this year, an indie developer posted a 50-second clip of a cool game idea they had been thinking about for a long time. What if Tetris, but the board rotated as you added blocks? It was a neat idea that went viral on social media. But within a few days of posting the video, Freya Holmér discovered someone had created a clone of her idea using AI-coding tools. And then another vibe-coded clone appeared in app stores. And then more. This is the new reality for indie devs, one which might cost them a lot of money and could lead to people being less open with their ideas.
As recently reported by 404 Media and Nicole Carpenter, some devs are claiming that people are vibe-coding clones of their games, sometimes even before the games have launched, and making it harder for these smaller devs to find success among a sea of thousands of games that flood stores every year. By using AI tools like Claude, a single person can quickly, in a matter of days or faster, put together playable games that emulate other games and then publish these AI-generated clones on console and PC storefronts as well as mobile stores.
Charlie Greenman, who spoke to the outlet, said he saw Holmér’s idea on social media and, after a few AI prompts and about a day of work, had his own version of her Tetris-like idea. His is called Rotris. And no, Greenman doesn’t have any ethical concerns about what he did.
“I really can care less about the game,” he said. “No one was interested. I feel like I had this brand new creation,” Greenman told 404 Media. “When it gets to that point, is one song copying another? Is one game copying another? Whoever created Blox, Jenga, is that a copy of Tetris?”
While clones have long been a part of the game industry, with Zygna famously being accused by publishers like EA of stealing ideas and mechanics, with AI, solo devs can quickly copy and ship their own versions of games. Often these versions aren’t as well-made or lack the charm of the original, but for many players looking for a game to play, that might not matter, especially if the clone is free or priced very cheaply.
And as 404 Media reports, it seems some larger, multi-million-dollar game studios and publishers are getting into the AI cloning business. One former employee of Midnight Works, a company accused by many of flooding stores with cloned games filled with allegedly stolen or ripped-off assets, told the outlet that the Moldova-based company’s “long-established” blueprint was to recreate popular games in a few months, give the clone a similar name, and start selling it for a few bucks.
“All of this was done in the hope of confusing buyers so that they would purchase our awful knockoff instead of the original,” the former employee told 404 Media. They also confirmed that genAI was used at “every step” to speed up cloning. Apparently, AI was used to create “banners and screenshots to UI and 3D models,” said the former staffer. This sort of industrial-scale use of AI to clone games is only going to make it even harder for smaller devs to find success. It also means posting early footage of a game might be a risky move.
“It disincentives me from [posting about my work],” said Holmér. “You get this anxiety any time you post anything, someone is going to come in to finish it for you and then monetize it and steal the whole concept. It used to be the case that this stuff took a look of effort [to steal], because it requires skill and skillful execution and effort and knowledge. But now with AI, there’s a general devaluing of skill and knowledge.”
Read the full report on 404 Media for more information on how cloned games end up on consoles, how Midnight Works might have stolen someone’s home videos from their own Backrooms-inspired game, and how other devs are dealing with AI clones.
