In August, a clip of the then-unnamed game Needle in a Haystack Simulator blew up for being exactly what it sounds like: a tedious incremental sim that tasks players with finding a needle in a haystack. But despite that clip gaining over 50 million views on Twitter, search for “needle in a haystack” on Steam and you’ll have to scroll past quite a few clones to find the original.
In just days after the original’s viral reveal in late August, at least eight similarly named clones popped up on Steam’s store, as pointed out by Reddit user Final_Narwhal_2557. Most of them have similar titles like A Needle in a Haystack, CO-OP Needle Hunt: A Needle in a Haystack Challenge, and Story of The Needle in a Haystack (not to mention the extremely painstaking-sounding Needle in a Million Haystacks). I’ve also been able to find a few more with slightly different titles like Hay! One Billion! and Find the Needle, bringing the clone total to over 10 for a game that isn’t even out yet. Some are even slated to be released before the original game, which won’t be out until Q4 2026.
A quick glance at each game’s Steam page reveals very few changes to the original’s formula. And, although most of these games don’t come with AI disclosures, I can’t help but feel like AI played a part in turning these clones around so quickly (especially since a few have logos that are just drenched in that ChatGPT sheen).
To put it bluntly, this is not good.
Needle in a Haystack Simulator isn’t the only game to fall victim to this weird proliferation of copycats, either. Surprise hit Meccha Chameleon is still spawning countless copies that are all the exact same thing (just with minor changes, like turning the player models into animals or…giving them boobs for some reason). And the cozy organization game Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, which was already mired in its own AI debate, caused Steam to be flooded with countless AI-assisted games that task players with organizing different locations.
I can’t help but feel bad for the developer of the original Needle in a Haystack Simulator, who had to add a big, unsightly red box to their game’s Steam key art to clarify that it’s the original, and whose Steam description is now bogged down by a mention that it’s “the one and only.” But allowing this many clones to take up space on Steam is also problematic for players, especially now that events like Steam Next Fest are flooded by AI slop and more games are being released than ever before. I can only hope that Steam introduces some kind of policy to prevent this from continuing; otherwise finding original games is going to become a lot more tedious (almost like finding some kind of sharp object in a big pile of hay…someone should make a game about that!).
