---
title: "Indie developers post game demos to find an audience, and the AI cloners find them first"
description: "A rotating-Tetris prototype drew as many as four vibecoded copies within days, and now indie developers are wary of showing their work early"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-19T16:59:22Z
modified: 2026-10-20T03:00:00Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/indie-developers-post-game-demos-to-find-an-audience-and-the-547d28
language: en
tags: ["ai", "gaming", "indie-devs", "clones", "copyright", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Indie developers post game demos to find an audience, and the AI cloners find them first

*A rotating-Tetris prototype drew as many as four vibecoded copies within days, and now indie developers are wary of showing their work early*

By Nate Ledger · October 19, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/indie-developers-post-game-demos-to-find-an-audience-and-the-547d28

## In brief

- Freya Holmér posted a 50-second clip of a rotating-board Tetris prototype on Bluesky in mid-March
- She said she saw as many as four AI-built copies, one in mobile app stores; one maker said his took about a day
- Indie developers including Sos Sosowski say the clones make sharing work-in-progress risky
- 404 Media reported claims that Moldova’s Midnight Works clones games using AI; the company did not respond
- Holmér says interest in the clones has faded and she plans to take her time building the full game

Freya Holmér is a game developer and Unity tool maker. She had an idea: *Tetris*, except the whole board rotates. In mid-March she posted a 50-second clip of a prototype to Bluesky with the caption “is this anything”. That is a perfectly sensible thing to do. It is also, apparently, a much more expensive question than it used to be.

Within days somebody replied to her post with “This can be built into a game by tomorrow,” as [Nicole Carpenter reported at 404 Media](https://www.404media.co/ai-made-cloning-games-easier-than-ever/) in July. Holmér said she saw as many as four vibecoded versions of her prototype, and one turned up in mobile app stores. The man who wrote that reply, Charlie Greenman, built one called *Rotris*, and he told 404 Media it took several prompts and about a day. This week Kyle Orland at Ars Technica [returned to the episode](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/ai-game-clones-are-making-indie-developers-afraid-to-show-their-work/), rounding up indie developers who are now nervous about showing anything at all.

Here is the economics, as I understand it. If you are an indie developer you have no marketing budget, so your marketing is posting your progress. A clip of a weird mechanic is a cheap test of demand: you spend an afternoon, you post it, and the replies tell you whether to spend the next two years on it. “Is this anything” is a question you put to the market. The trouble is that the market answers in public, and everyone can read the answer, including people who can build the thing by tomorrow. So the original developer pays for the market research, and whoever has a chatbot and a free evening gets the results for nothing. Then he ships first.

![A hand places an orange puzzle piece into a photocopier while four orange puzzle pieces with legs run away against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/37d903791f7305c23b23644bd874b74864a6274b.webp)

For as long as people have made games they have copied each other, and the protection was never really legal. It was that copying took effort. You had to be able to make a game, which is hard, and by the time you had made it the original was out. Holmér put it this way to 404 Media: “now with AI, there’s a general devaluing of skill and knowledge.” If the cost of executing falls to roughly zero, the only scarce thing left is the idea, and the idea is the part you posted on Bluesky.

McPixel developer Sos Sosowski has been collecting cases of indie developers complaining about AI clones copying their work wholesale, and he describes the bind like this:

> Don’t share your game—no sales. Share your game—gets stolen. How do you even survive as an indie in the current landscape? This is insane.

Holmér, responding to the copies that showed up before any real game existed, was less diplomatic. “Y’know it kinda disincentivizes me from sharing progress when there are slop ghouls around every corner, AI or otherwise,” she wrote, before adding: “Luckily these people are incapable of original thought and don’t know how to elevate this concept beyond what they’ve already seen.”

![Three black robotic arms reach toward an orange flower with cream leaves in a black pot against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/e7a94751b3881ac8689d1fe3582f8f96866113ce.webp)

Greenman, for his part, told 404 Media he saw nothing wrong with what he did. “I feel like I had this brand new creation,” he said. “When it gets to that point, is one song copying another? Is one game copying another? Whoever created Blox, Jenga, is that a copy of Tetris?” This is the standard everything-is-a-remix defence, and it is not entirely wrong; most games are riffs on other games. But nobody objects to riffing as such. The objection is to riffing on a fifty-second clip, inside a day, in the replies to the clip. He also told 404 Media he “really can care less about the game,” which, whatever else you think, is a candid description of the business model.

## The industrial version

One guy and a weekend is the hobbyist end. 404 Media also looked at Midnight Works, a Moldovan company founded in 2015 that moved from apps into games in 2017. An archived version of its website claimed 300 employees and said 80% of the games it publishes pass $1 million in revenue. A former employee told the outlet that generative AI was used “at every step” of development. The YouTuber Luke Wild calls the company a “massive global scam,” and Steelkrill Studio says its game *The Backrooms 1998* was copied almost in its entirety, down to the developer’s family VHS tapes. Midnight Works did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and the headcount and AI claims rest on that single former employee and the archived website. Still, if even part of it is true, the gap between “a guy with a chatbot” and “a pipeline” is mostly a matter of headcount.

![An orange castle enters a hand-cranked black machine, which produces four smaller orange castles on a conveyor belt against a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/70695a6b85a825e58bae67f67628a17be371b445.webp)

Not everyone is alarmed. “If AI can copy your game overnight, it wasn’t a real game. It was just a quick cash grab built on a single mechanic, with no soul or vision,” Ivan Lago of Howltide Games wrote on social media. “AI isn’t cloning actual games. It’s just making cheap knockoffs of stuff that was already an asset flip to begin with.” Call it the efficient-markets view of game design: if one mechanic is all your moat amounts to, you had no moat. It is fair as far as it goes. The awkward part is that a prototype is, by definition, a single mechanic. Every real game was once a clip of one weird idea and a caption asking whether it was anything.

The most hopeful account comes from Holmér. “In the very beginning, that first week, just every day there was a new AI clone. I was like, OK, well fuck me, I guess,” she told 404 Media this summer. “But there’s way less engagement \[now\], and I feel more in the clear to take my time to actually make something right, something good I can be proud of, and not just get it out there as soon as possible.”

That makes a kind of sense. The cloner is in the business of harvesting a spike in attention, and spikes fade; once the replies stop coming, the clone has nothing left to offer and the original developer can go back to building the real thing slowly. In effect, the clones front-run the hype and leave the actual game alone. It just costs the developer the launch window she was probably counting on.

Big publishers have a different tool for this. When AI-built projects borrowed from *Fallout* and *Call of Duty*, [Activision and Bethesda shut them down](https://rews.cc/a/activision-and-bethesda-shut-down-ai-built-fallout-and-call--45eaca). Indie developers have a Bluesky account and a question. These days the honest answer to “is this anything” is: yes, and by tomorrow there will be four of it.