Is ReVamp really that original? ‘Tower Defensevania’ playtest pulled over AI clone fears

ReVamp is a tower defense roguelite with action elements in which players take on the role of Dracula and expand their own castle. The developers describe it as a "Tower Defensevania," because in between upgrading the castle and defending it against enemies, players can also jump directly into battle as Dracula. It sounds like an original concept. But is it really so original that a demo needs to be withheld for fear of clones?

Digital Sun apparently thinks so. The Steam playtest originally scheduled for October 29 has been canceled and will instead take place on a smaller scale via Discord. To sign up, players simply need to join the official Digital Sun Discord and select the "Playtests" role under "Channels & Roles." The developers plan to invite participants gradually in waves.

In an official announcement on Steam, the developers explained their decision by pointing to concerns about clones:

“Why the change? As stated on our socials, 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, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players felt like too big a risk for ReVamp.”

Are these concerns justified?

In this case, the fear of rapid imitation probably has less to do with the game's extraordinary originality and more with the growing number of clones of successful games that can be developed in a very short time with the help of AI. We recently reported on an Xbox manager who spoke candidly on social media about the use of generative AI in game development and believes that AI could make it easy for virtually anyone to develop games.

Just a few years ago, when developing a game like ReVamp would have taken years, concerns about copycats would have been largely unfounded. Today, however, Digital Sun has to reckon with the possibility of much faster imitations. On Reddit, users find the decision understandable and see indie studios facing a dilemma: They need to show off their games to attract attention, but doing so also exposes their ideas to potential copycats. Others argue that games have been copied for decades and that AI-generated clones usually can't match the quality of the originals. However, the risk of AI clones being released before the games they're copying is a relatively recent development.