AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever
Freya Holmér's had this idea in her head for a long time—Tetris, but the whole board rotates. The game developer and Unity tool maker started making the idea real and built out a prototype. Holmér posted a 50-second clip of it to social media in mid-March and asked: "Is this anything?" It was, according to the people who responded. The posts got hundreds of replies from people desperate for a playable version.
"You can watch [the gameplay] happen and you understand the full extent of it, while still seeing the complexity and interesting parts of it," Holmér told 404 Media. "Most people know about Tetris, so you can shortcut all those concepts—it's a visually compelling concept—and you get the idea very quickly."
Freya Holmér (@freya.bsky.social)
been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype is this anything
Bluesky SocialFreya Holmér
It was a promising response for a commercial game developer that quickly turned unsettling. Within days, someone responded to her post with a vibecoded version of Holmér's prototype: "This can be built into a game by tomorrow." Another popped up in mobile app stores. Holmér said she saw up to four vibecoded versions of her prototype. Generative AI has made the work of plagiarizing an idea a lot simpler. A person vibecoding a game doesn't need any programming or design experience. They input ideas and instructions into a generative AI application and it writes the code and builds out the user interface. The vibecoder can tweak the game in conversation with the generative AI program until it suits their needs. As you might expect, the process doesn't necessarily produce elegant results.
The two vibecoded versions of Holmér's game, for instance, lack the finesse of her carefully crafted animations. There's a story behind every decision she made. That may not be true for the vibecoded versions of the game. Charlie Greenman, who told 404 Media he saw Holmer's idea on social media and wanted to do a spin on her prototype, said it took him several prompts and roughly a day to make his version, Rotris. Greenman said he doesn't think there are any ethical concerns with what he did. "I really can care less about the game," he said. "No one was interested."
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"I feel like I had this brand new creation," Greenman 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?"
404 Media reached out to the developer of another copycat, Blockfall, which also popped up within days of Holmér's post, but did not receive a response.
"It disincentives me from [posting about my work,]" Holmér said. "You get this anxiety anytime you post anything, someone is going to come in to finish it for you and then monetize it and steal the whole concept. It used to be the case that this stuff took a look of effort [to steal], because it requires skill and skillful execution and effort and knowledge. But now with AI, there's a general devaluing of skill and knowledge."
Papers, Please developer Lucas Pope expressed a similar sentiment on the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast in April—that he doesn’t feel comfortable sharing much about what he’s working on publicly, lest it gets “slurped by AI” and copied by someone else.
There's always been some risk of sharing ideas and concepts too early on social media; grifters looking to swipe ideas have always been around. Holmér's experience with generative AI clones of her game idea is just exacerbating a dupe industry that's pervasive on digital video game marketplaces. As video game companies both big and small compete for attention in a culture that's kept the same five games, like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto 5, on the most-played lists for years, some companies are forgoing original ideas entirely, opting instead to co-opt anything popular or trending to make a quick buck. These sorts of schemes are prolific on the App Store and Google Play Stores, but are behind much of the slop on console digital stores, too.
It's big business. Several companies have had huge success flooding the market with knockoffs designed to confuse players looking for games to play. One strategy for these clone developers is taking a popular console or PC game and publishing a clone on mobile app stores—often before a developer has been able to make a port themselves. It's been massively successful for studios like Voodoo, a French mobile game maker that's been accused several times of making copycat games. 404 Media reached out to Voodoo for comment, but did not hear back. In 2018, Voodoo received a reported $200 million from Goldman Sachs, and in 2020, Tencent became a minority stakeholder valuing the company at a whopping $1.4 billion. Voodoo both makes and publishes mobile games, often low effort free-to-play games that generate money through ads.
"The incentives and the infrastructure is built to encourage this kind of overproduction"
In 2018, game developer Ben Esposito accused the company of copying Donut County, which was unreleased at the time. Voodoo's version, Hole.io, reached the top of app store charts. It remains one of Voodoo's most popular games. Several other indie games have seemingly been cloned by Voodoo, too. Ironically, Voodoo doesn't want other game developers aping their clone games; it sued another mobile giant, Rollic Games, in a French court and won. The court found that Rollic Games' Wood Shop, in which players carve a spinning block of wood, copied Voodoo's Woodturning. The important piece of this story is, however, that Rollic Games was released before Voodoo's. Its copying accusations were related to an update Wood Shop made to their game.
Copycat and clone games have proliferated since, and generative AI is only making the problem worse.
"We shouldn't be surprised that people are using AI to do this kind of thing, because the incentives and the infrastructure is built to encourage this kind of overproduction," University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of media and cultural studies Jeremy Morris told 404 Media. "This is a problem that's existed for as long as these platforms existed, so I don't think AI creates something new here. It just amplifies the amount that people can do."
Moldova-based Midnight Works is one company flooding console and mobile digital storefronts with clone games that players quickly deem scams. Founded by Cătălin Țiței and Roman Gaina in 2015, according to an archived version of the Midnight Works website, Midnight Works created apps before entering the games market in 2017. Since then, Midnight Works has grown to employ 300 people, per an archived version of its website. (The website now only hosts a landing page with almost no information.) . "Midnight.Works is a visionary game development and publishing company that thrives on nurturing creativity and innovation within the gaming industry," the company said, according to an archived version of the website. "Our diverse and passionate team is dedicated to collaborating with both burgeoning and accomplished game creators to bring unique, engaging gaming experiences to players across the globe."
Midnight Works claimed that 80 percent of the games it publishes pass $1 million in revenue, while 15 percent make over $100,000. The remaining five percent, it said, "don't achieve significant milestones."
A Moldovan game developer close to the company, told 404 Media that Midnight Works is "one of the largest" game developers in Moldova. Its big success was acquiring Hashiriya Drifter, a popular mobile racing game, from an external game developer. "[It] became their flagship project and, from what I know, the main financial foundation that allowed the company to grow," the developer said. 404 Media granted this developer anonymity so they could speak freely about Midnight Works.
"I found out my game was suddenly being sold by someone else."
Luke Wild, a YouTube creator who investigated Midnight Works in a series on his channel, told 404 Media that he believes the company is a "massive global scam." Wild started looking into the company while playing through slop games on the Nintendo Switch eShop on YouTube. (Midnight Works retaliated against him, Wild said, by demanding employees to report his videos," he claimed.) He noticed that a lot of the games he was playing were coming from a small pool of developers that all seemed to stem from Midnight Works. He spent years documenting the connections between the slop factories. Each of these studios uploaded the same games, maybe with slightly different titles. If a game got removed from a digital storefront, it'd get uploaded later under a different developer or publisher. Most of the games, Wild said, are simulator games—because they're easy to create a template for—that copy whatever the algorithm is favoring. When TCG Card Shop Simulator, from OPNeon Games, was released into early access in 2024, for instance, Midnight Works released its own, Card Shop Game Store Simulator, months later. (The Nintendo Switch store page for this game is listed as being made/published by VRCForge Studios, but a game with the same name and key art is listed as being published byThe Midnight—with Midnight Works email addresses—on the Microsoft Store.)
"Midnight doesn't have the best reputation, and unfortunately that already affects how people perceive other studios from our country as well," he said.
Midnight Works has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Sometimes, Midnight Works' and studios in what Wild calls Midnight Works' "Web of Deceit" directly copy games, down to the source code and assets. One developer, who goes by the name Steelkrill Studio online, told 404 Media that his found footage horror game The Backrooms 1998 was stolen almost in its entirety. "I never imagined something like that would happen," Steelkrill Studio said. "The wildest part is that I only discovered it because someone commented on one of my videos accusing me of re-releasing the same game myself, which is how I found out my game was suddenly being sold by someone else."
The Backrooms 1998 is a found footage horror game published in 2025. It’s played through the lens of a camcorder’s viewfinder. One of the unique pieces of the game is the implementation of the player’s actual microphone—the monsters can hear breathing and other sounds. It’s Steelkrill Studio’s own take on the backrooms genre, which was born of creepy storytelling on forums like Reddit, like Kane Parsons’ 2026 film Backrooms. There are a lot of other backrooms-inspired games, the most popular of which is Escape the Backrooms.
Steelskrill Studio thinks Midnight Works used a decompiler to take the source code. Looking through the files, he found that most everything matched his game. "It even had my personal videos when I was younger and family VHS tapes that I had included in my game [that] were still present in their stolen version," he said.
The stolen version of The Backrooms 1998 was taken off the console storefronts, and that publisher, Cool Devs, has seemingly been banned. 404 Media has reached out to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft to confirm the reason for the removal and subsequent bans, but didn’t hear back.But its games now appear on the Nintendo Switch eShop and other storefronts once again, sometimes under different publisher names. The Bad Parents, an egregious copy of Bad Parenting, published originally by Cool Devs is now listed on the Nintendo store by TrueMotion Interactive—a studio that's published and is still selling near exact copies of Peak, Supermarket Simulator, and Bodycam.
A former Midnight Works employee, who asked for anonymity, told 404 Media that the studios' "long-established" scheme was to recreate a trending game and make a "stripped down clone" in a few months—just give it a similar name and style, sometimes using assets ripped from the original games. "All of this was done in the hope of confusing buyers so that they would purchase our awful knockoff instead of the original," the former employee said. The former employee said that generative AI was used "at every step" to speed up development: "Literally from banners and screenshots to UI and 3D models," they said.
Once a game is ready to be published on digital storefronts like the Nintendo eShop or PlayStation Store, the company blasts its game name and page with keywords in an attempt to beat the algorithm. "A lot of the optimization for game developers was similar to the way it was for early stages of music and podcasts, which is keyword stuffing," Morris said of general clone game tactics. "It's the basic kind of search engine optimization, at the discovery level." Another strategy, Morris said, is constant updates. It's one of those things that Morris called "algorithmic imaginaries," or myths about how these platform algorithms work. "One of the big ones is that the more frequently you update your app, the more often it would look like it was new and would get recommended more," he said. "One example I point to is the Bible app, and there's a Bible app that's updated every 12 days. I thought it was funny because it's a text that obviously is not changing."
Game sellers and app stores are incentivized to have a lot of content to sell; they get a cut of everything purchased there. Many have policies about copies and clones, but complicating that is determining what is a copy or clone. In the case of The Backrooms 1998, it's seemingly an easy decision to take the game off the store for violating copycat policies. Attorney Michael Wang, who researched Chinese copycat games, told 404 Media that developers and publishers can't copyright or patent ideas. If exact technology and assets are stolen, that's fairly cut and dry. But ideas that are similar—even really similar—are often fair game.
Where does inspiration stop and copying begin? Without PUBG Battlegrounds, there would be no Fortnite. And without the classic Japanese film Battle Royale, there would be no PUBG Battlegrounds. It's a question that's come up a lot in games. In 2014, a firestorm of controversy: Italian game developer Gabriele Cirulli was accused of copying indie game Threes! with his own game, 2048. Threes!, by game makers Asher Vollmer, Jimmy Hinson, and Greg Wohlwend, was released in 2014 and had success on the App Store. Then the clones came. One of those was 1024, which was also released on the App Store shortly after Threes! Cirulli's 2048, which he said was inspired by 1024, became the biggest of them all.
Cirulli, 19-years-old at the time, told 404 Media he saw a game called 2048 on a forum he posted to, based on another game called 1024. "I had no commercial intentions so I just started coding up my own version of the game," Cirulli said. He wanted to challenge himself to create an algorithm for a game like this. He struggled with it and almost gave up. He posted a finished version of the game, playable in a browser, to the forum. Someone saw it there and posted it to Hacker News, where it blew up. Thousands and thousands of people started playing it. Within days, a company called Ketchapp created a mobile version of 2048, called it 2028, and published it on the App Store. (That's the version that's generated millions of dollars in revenue per month, per reports. Ketchapp, like Voodoo, has been accused of egregiously copying other games. Ubisoft acquired the company in 2016. Cirulli said the only gripe he has with Ketchapp is that its version of 2048 has bugs that let you cheat. He's since released a commercial version of the game that's never quite reached Ketchapp's level of success.)
Then the accusations started. "I didn't publish 2048 with the intention of going virtual, nor did I expect that I would," Cirulli said. "At the time, I felt much more insecure with my place in the world and about myself as a professional. It was very difficult to deal with, and it affected me pretty deeply, even from an emotional perspective. It challenged my perspective of myself, meaning I was asking myself, Am I the bad guy in this scenario? Am I doing something unethical or bad?"
He's no longer interested in litigating the ethics of it all. But he would do something differently: "I think the only thing I would change is my mental health aspects, relating to the amount of stress it cost me," Cirulli said. "I think that was entirely optional."
He continued: "I still have that strong drive to build things that will affect people's lives in some small way, so that hasn't gone away. It gave me a lot of perspective and I feel very privileged to have had that opportunity."
Like Cirulli, software engineer Vittorio Romeo was inspired by a game he loved, Super Hexagon, to create his own version. He played Super Hexagon on his phone, "even during lessons at school," he said. Super Hexagon didn't have a PC version. So he tried to make one using the programming language he was learning, C++. "I did manage to replicate the game mechanics quite quickly and have a working version, obviously not as polished or well-crafted as the original, and it was doing the job," he told 404 Media. The mistake, he said, was releasing his free, open-source version of the game on PC before Super Hexagon developer Terry Cavanagh did.
"I never really wanted to compete with the original," he said. "I wanted it to be, like, we're fans of the original. We love the mechanics. We have played the original a lot, and we want more. I wanted to build a platform where people can iterate over the ideas the original had and build on top of it."
But unlike Cirulli's situation, Super Hexagon creator Cavanaghsaid he was "basically alright with [Open Hexagon,]" though a little upset it was released before Super Hexagon came to PC. As an open source game, Romeo didn't make money from Open Hexagon at the start, but he put it on Valve's Steam platform in 2021. It costs $4.99 to purchase, so Romeo does make a little bit of money from it. But more importantly, he said, is that the Steam Workshop lets players more easily create new levels. "That's been going on and people are still adding levels to this day," Romeo said. "There's a small community that is still developing content."
It's absolutely a different sort of clone than the likes of Midnight Works, which seems to be motivated not by admiration or learning but by profit. The end products, too, are certainly more high quality than the big budget slop machines that churn out more and more low quality clones.
At the platform level, companies like Nintendo are seemingly making changes to its digital store not necessary to moderate what shows up on the store, but to push down the slop games to the margins. Nintendo now forces the Best Sellers section to rank games by revenue and not total downloads. Ranking by downloads was a problem because these low effort games are often extremely cheap. People are willing to give something a try for $2 or less, so they sell a lot. Still, the cat-and-mouse game is on across every platform that sells games.
Holmér, whose Tetris-like is also an iteration, is still working on the game. She's got a lot of design decisions to make. What's the scoring system? Is there a failstate? Does she make it feel more like a toy? How do blocks clear? Does she share more about its development online?
"Most things right now have a pretty short life cycle when it comes to attention online," Holmér said. "The attention on that video I posted has tapered off to the point where I feel a lot more calm. 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. But there's way less engagement, 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."
Another developer might have gone into a rage. A bigger company might have issued a cease and desist. But the creator of Super Hexagon was more level-headed than you or I might have been at the theft of our hard work.
Ryan Rigney (WIRED)
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