Fewer strangers get to play games before they ship

The studio that made Moonlighter has decided not to show its next game to the public, and I think it is right. I also think everyone else just lost something.

Digital Sun, which is also behind Cataclismo, had planned a public Steam playtest of ReVamp, a roguelike it calls a "tower defensevania". The game is due on March 25, 2027 ^[2]. Instead the studio will run a smaller, more controlled test through its Discord server, admitting players in waves from October 29 ^[2]. It apologised to people who had already asked for access through Steam ^[2].

The reason is fear. Digital Sun said it was worried by reports of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before their originals, and that a big public build months before launch felt like too big a risk ^[1][2]. Marketing manager Israel Mallén told PC Gamer that handing a build to tens of thousands of players with launch still months away was more than the studio wanted to gamble ^[1].

My position is simple. The studio is making the sane call, and the call is bad for games.

The fear is not paranoia

It would be easy to sneer at a studio for hiding a game from the people it hopes will buy it. The record does not allow the sneer.

PC Gamer reports that the creator of an incremental punching game called Escape the Walls posted footage on X. Within 10 days, at least seven clones had appeared on Roblox and at least one on Steam ^[1]. That is the kind of speed that makes a build shown in October look like a gift to anyone watching.

Two limits belong here, once. The sources do not say how each of those clones was made, and they do not say anyone has copied ReVamp ^[1][2]. The theft Digital Sun fears has not happened to it.

But a studio does not need to be robbed to be afraid. It needs only to see the neighbour's house after the break-in. Digital Sun is also not alone. Alliance Arts canceled a planned public Steam Next Fest demo for Drunken Goddess Reflux, saying it worried that AI or other tools could be used to imitate the game's presentation and gameplay before launch ^[1][2]. Mallén said as much himself: "We know we're not the only developers feeling this way." ^[1]

What Digital Sun reached for was a smaller room, not a remedy. A studio with a March release date and a team to pay cannot wait for the world to sort out what counts as copying. I cannot fault it.

What a Discord server keeps

Here is the best case for the studio's choice, and it is a good one.

A Discord test is not no test. Players still get the build, the studio still hears from them, and the exchange survives in a reduced form.

Digital Sun hopes to open a public playtest around January ^[2]. If it does, this will have been a detour of a few weeks.

I would like to believe that. But January is a hope, not a promise, and the studio has not said otherwise.

And even in the good version, the room is narrower. Someone chooses who gets in. A public Steam playtest is a door anyone can walk through. A wave-by-wave Discord admission is a guest list, and every guest list is written by people who already know whom they want to hear from.

The people left outside are exactly those a studio cannot predict. The stranger who tells you that the thing you have stared at for two years makes no sense. The player who quits in the first 10 minutes and says why. You cannot invite them, because you do not know they exist. That is why open testing works. It is the only kind that surprises you.

Which loss stings more

The stolen game is a loss with a face. It has a date, screenshots, a side-by-side comparison and, in the better cases, a headline. Everyone can see what was taken.

The stolen conversation has none of that. No one files a report on the criticism that never arrived or the fix that never got made. A game that ships a little worse because a few thousand strangers never touched it early looks, from the outside, exactly like a game that was always going to be that way.

I write my first drafts by hand and show them to no one, so I understand the instinct to keep things close until they are ready. But a draft nobody reads cannot get better than its author's eyes allow. Games are drafts for longer than most things. The public playtest, along with the demo and the early build that is rough on purpose, is how players have been let into that stage.

It is a trade. The players get to see something unfinished and the studio gets to hear what it is missing. It also builds a bond, because someone who helped shape a game feels a stake in it when it ships.

The stolen work, painful as it is, can be named, argued over and, in principle, answered. The lost conversation just fades unnoticed. By that measure the quiet loss is the deeper one.

Every studio's sensible choice

This is not really about ReVamp. Each studio that closes a door is acting sensibly, and the sum of their sensible acts is a culture where showing unfinished work is for the reckless. Digital Sun and Alliance Arts reached the same conclusion about different games ^[1][2]. Mallén expects more will follow, and argued that more discussion could encourage platforms to act ^[1].

He is right about where the fix lies. Studios cannot solve this alone, and asking them to keep their doors open while clones appear within days is asking them to be brave with other people's rent money. If anyone is going to make openness safe again, it has to be the platforms where the builds are shown and the clones are sold. Nothing in the reporting says any of them has moved.

So watch two things. One is whether Digital Sun actually holds a public test in January, with a few months left before March 25, or quietly lets the plan lapse. The other is whether Steam or any other platform answers the developers who say they are afraid.

A game shown to no one cannot be copied. It cannot be corrected either.