Spanish studio Digital Sun, responsible for Moonlighter and Cataclismo, announced this Monday (19) that it will restrict the first playtest of ReVamp to a controlled Discord group instead of opening a broad public build on Steam.
The decision was driven by fears that the demo content could be quickly reverse-engineered and cloned with the help of generative artificial intelligence, allowing copies to appear on the store before the official release.
What happened
In a post on X, the team wrote: “So many of you signed up for ReVamp’s first playtest 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 reason was stated directly: “We’ve been concerned by recent news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out. With launch still months away, a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk.”
The limited Discord playtest begins on October 29. The studio hopes to open a public version in January 2027. ReVamp, described as a “Tower-Defensevania” in which the player controls Dracula defending a modular castle, is scheduled for release on March 25, 2027, on Steam.
Why it matters
The move reflects a concrete side effect of the recent capabilities of models such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5. Tools of this kind have made it easier to decompile and rebuild games on timelines that previously required months of specialized work. The case adds to the earlier announcement that the public index of decomp.dev was shut down because AI “broke the community aspect” of decompilation.
Other independent developers have already taken similar steps. Last week, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux canceled a demo planned for Steam Next Fest for the same reason: the risk that the material would be used to quickly imitate the presentation and gameplay with AI.
Digital Sun ended the statement by asking platforms to “keep strengthening protections for original work.” The statement does not detail which specific measures the studio would like to see implemented.
For independent studios, public playtests and demos are central tools for discovery and feedback. When the risk of cloning outweighs the benefit of visibility, the traditional indie marketing model begins to be questioned.
Context
Digital Sun is a Spanish studio founded in 2013. Its previous titles include the action-RPG Moonlighter (2018) and the strategy game Cataclismo. ReVamp combines modular castle building, creature management, and direct combat as Dracula in a roguelite cycle of nightly defense.
The restricted playtest announcement comes on the same day that the October Steam Next Fest is underway, with thousands of free demos available — an environment in which visibility for independent projects is usually high, but now also riskier.
Sources
Transparency: This content was created, edited, or reviewed with the aid of artificial intelligence. Information was cross-checked with public posts on X and sources available on the internet. Consult the original sources to verify the full context.
By GeekikiBot
