A gameplay screenshot from the upcoming indie game Spookitchen.
YNOT, the Korean indie studio developing the game, pulled its public demo on Oct. 20 over fears that it could be copied with AI.
Korean indie studio YNOT pulled the public demo of its upcoming game Spookitchen after being warned that someone planned to clone it with AI.
The studio canceled the game’s public demo on Oct. 16 over concerns that it could be copied with AI.
In September, Weasel Pit, the developer of the indie game Iron Pilgrim, made public a threatening email it had received.
A gameplay screenshot from the upcoming indie game Spookitchen. YNOT, the Korean indie studio developing the game, pulled its public demo on Oct. 20 over fears that it could be copied with AI. YNOT
Korean studio YNOT pulled its Spookitchen demo after receiving warnings that AI-made clones could beat the original to market.
Korean indie studio YNOT pulled the public demo of its upcoming game Spookitchen after being warned that someone planned to clone it with AI.
The studio took the demo of its restaurant management game, set in a spooky Halloween town, offline on Oct. 20. About a month before that, its two developers, who go by Sini Ming and Seori Ming, had received two emails announcing plans to copy it. Threatening in tone, the emails said the sender intended to “borrow the game’s mechanics and make it with AI” and told the developers, “There is no stopping the copying, so do not waste your time. Just tell us the release date and the price.”
Anyone who knows a game’s mechanics, the core of what makes it fun, can now build a similar one with a coding AI, even without any development experience.
“We are worried that a similar game made with AI could be accepted as the original simply because it came out first, and that the original could even be mistaken for plagiarism,” YNOT said of its decision to close the demo.
Sini Ming announced the closure in a thread on X on Oct. 20 and thanked the many users who had sent encouragement and advice.
“Closing the demo right away is only a temporary measure and not a fundamental solution,” Sini Ming wrote. “It is true that there is no way to stop it as individuals, but I thought that letting people know on social media might serve as a warning that Spookitchen is our game, that this many people are watching over it and that stealing even a small game that has not been released is not easy.”
A post on X by Sini Ming, one of the developers of the Korean indie game Spookitchen, announces on Oct. 20 that the game’s demo has been closed. SCREEN CAPTURE
“I feel I have done everything I can as an individual, so I will try my best not to be shaken and to focus on development as usual,” Sini Ming wrote.
Building a game by giving a coding AI instructions in plain language, known as vibe coding, is now so easy that Koreans call the results ttalkkak games, after the click of a mouse. Their rise is taking a growing toll on creators who have put time and effort into creating commercial games.
Copiers no longer need the original code. They can study the look and gameplay shown in a demo or trailer and have AI build a similar game, a form of reverse engineering that is now spreading. The practice is shaking the business structure of the game industry to its roots, industry watchers say.
The Steam store page for Drunken Goddess Reflux, a drinking game from Japanese indie studio Alliance Arts. The studio canceled the game’s public demo on Oct. 16 over concerns that it could be copied with AI. SCREEN CAPTURE
Clones of commercial games were already a problem on user-generated content platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite, where players make and share their own games. Now that frontier models that can code a game with little effort are publicly available, reverse engineering has moved beyond those platforms to the wider industry. OpenAI says its GPT-6 Astra, released in September, can “create, host, and share websites, web apps, and games directly from a prompt.”
Developers overseas have also called off public demos for fear of being copied. Japanese indie studio Alliance Arts canceled the public demo of Drunken Goddess Reflux, its upcoming Russian roulette-style drinking game, on Oct. 16. The demo had been due to go live three days later for Steam Next Fest, and the studio switched to closed play sessions for a limited number of participants. Alliance Arts cited concerns that a game imitating the demo’s look and gameplay could reach the market before the original.
In September, Weasel Pit, the developer of the indie game Iron Pilgrim, made public a threatening email it had received. The sender warned that a copy of the game would go on sale first unless the developer handed over $200 worth of Steam content within 24 hours.
The Steam store page for Iron Pilgrim, a train-themed survival game from indie developer Weasel Pit. In September, the developer made public an email threatening to release an AI-made copy of the game first unless it handed over $200 worth of Steam content within 24 hours. SCREEN CAPTURE
If games built over years keep losing out to AI-made copies, the industry’s foundations could start to crack, some in the industry warn. Original creators pour time into testing ideas and polishing their games, while copiers can pick whatever has drawn attention and simply recreate it.
An indie developer with five years in the business likened recreating hit games with AI to “a new kind of gold farming,” the practice of collecting in-game items and currency to sell for real money.
“To put it in extreme terms, it is possible to take a game demo that looks decent, or a game that has just come out and is catching on, change only its appearance slightly with AI and release it over and over,” the developer said. “Without doing any development, someone could earn a steady income just by repeating that.”
The Steam store page for Spookitchen, a restaurant management game from Korean indie studio YNOT. The studio pulled the game’s public demo on Oct. 20 after being warned that someone planned to clone it with AI. SCREEN CAPTURE
Others fear the game market could be reshaped around financial muscle.
“These days, game and app developers want to hide their ideas rather than share them with one another,” said Kim Jeong-tae, a professor in the Department of Game Studies at Dongyang University. “It is increasingly likely to turn into a battle of capital, in which only big games that AI cannot easily copy survive.”
Kim called for clear rules and a safety net for smaller studios.
“Clear guidelines on what must not be done need to be put in place, and a copyright safety net needs to be built for indie and small and midsize game companies,” Kim said.
BY KIM MIN-JEONG [[email protected]]
