My game was cloned with AI... what do I do?

Hey, it's Mark. So, like I'm sure many of you, I've been seeing these crazy headlines about how generative AI is affecting indie game development. Like how the October Steam Next Fest was buried under an avalanche of generative AI slop. I mean, it felt pretty crowded when my game was going up against 2,000 other video games. Imagine how it must feel to have your game struggling for attention in a sea of 7,000 games. Or there's the whole cloning thing, how people can feed a demo or a trailer of an upcoming game into an LLM and make a quickfire clone and beat the original game to market.

That's made developers like Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope stop talking about their games before release to stop pesky vibecoders from pilfering their idea. So I've been reading these stories with some amount of horror, but also some amount of relief. Relief that I got out of game dev while it was still fun. That's not to say I will never make another video game, but I'm very happy with what I achieved in my two games.

The puzzle platformer Mind Over Magnet and the spelling roguelike Word Play, and I haven't really had the itch to make a third game. I'm more than happy just being a YouTuber and also a dad, that takes up a lot of time. But last week I received an email that showed me how I am not immune to the craziness of being an indie game maker In 2026. Here's what the email said: Hi Mark, I'm *Woof* and with my friend *Baby*, we've built a word game that is honestly Word Play with a lot of extra stuff on top.

Ruh Ro. We love Word Play. Played it for hundreds of hours, been addicted to it since the demo released. To be honest, you should have led with that. In fact, that could have been the whole email. Hi, Mark. We love Word Play. Bye. But alas, there is more. Since we're hobby game devs, we've been collecting ideas in text files for about a year. We weren't sure if those would just stay in the drawer or will eventually make it to a playable prototype.

Eleven days ago, we started building it with Claude Code. There it is. And it got out of hand fast. It's our first vibecoded project. The game is called Words Upon Words at the moment. The core, making words from a tile grid, rounds with score targets, modifiers, follows Word Play very closely. On top of that, we added a bunch of new perks, special tiles and rounds, meta progression, multiplayer races and duels, Hungarian mode (where we're from), and UI/UX changes.

Right now it's online, but behind an access code, only shared with a few close friends and family members. As things escalated during development and as the game started to drift more apart from Word Play, we started talking about where we could go with this. Just a fun game for us to play? A free web game? Steam release? Mobile release? We've never released a game before. Before we do anything more with it, we wanted to ask you directly, how do you feel about this situation and what would you like us to do?

We won't do anything you dislike. If it doesn't sit right with you, we'll keep it private for ourselves and a few friends and family and won't pursue anything else with it. Best wishes *Woof* and *Baby*. Okay. Huh. So, how do I feel about the situation? I don't know how I feel about this situation. So many different thoughts and feelings and emotions were swirling around my head as I read that email. And then, after I asked the developers to give me the game and let me have a go even more thoughts and feelings and emotions were swirling around my head.

I just do not know what to think about this at all. But here's the thing. I often find that the best way for me to know what I think about a thing is to make a YouTube video about it. The process of researching and writing and presenting to an audience helps me to organise my thoughts in a way better than any other method I can think of. So this is that YouTube video. You're watching it right now. This is going to be a pretty scattershot random mess of thoughts and feelings as I try to work through what the hell is it like being an indie game developer in 2026.

Like, is this cool? Is it gross? Should I tell them to just release it? Should I tell them to bugger off? We're going to have to figure this out together. So, thought number one: this could lose me money. Yeah, let's start with the obvious. If this AI-generated clone is allowed onto the internet, then there will be a number of people who will choose to just play that over buying my real original version of the game. That will lose me money.

And I need money for goods and services. Now sure, Word Play made most of its money at launch in the summer of 2025. But it has been a very good earner since then, with small spikes every time there's a Steam sale or festival. In 2026 it's already made about $44,000, which is like $400 a month of pure passive income for something I made and finished more than a year ago, and so I would rather not turn off that tap, if it's all the same with you.

But then again, I think many people would still buy the original over the AI-generated clone, seeing as it has better UI, better sound design and better music. In that it has music. And also, Zach's soundtrack is just a complete bop. Thought number two: games are built on top of other games. Look, I never shy away from admitting that Word Play is heavily inspired by the excellent poker roguelike Balatro. But then again, Balatro was influenced by the game Luck Be a Landlord, which was inspired by Slay the Spire, which is built on the card game Dominion, and so on and so on.

Video games are built from the bones of other video games. That is just the honest truth. And look, I'm quite flattered that someone would choose my game, Word Play, to be the basis for them building their own game. That is something to be proud of. And of course the whole point of this whole GMTK empire is to inspire people to make their own games. And isn't that what's happening right in front of me in real time? But then again, Word Play is not just Balatro.

That's just one part of it. It's also Bookworm Adventures and Scrabble and Slay the Spire and Vampire Survivors. And for the music, I asked Zach to take inspiration from The Sims and also the Wii home screen menus. I thought that would be a good vibe. Word Play is all manner of influences and ideas and inspirations all filtered through our brains as the people who made it. But this game is literally just Word Play. It is, as the designers say in their email, Word Play with a lot of extra stuff on top.

And wait, doesn't that already exist? Isn't that called... mods? Yeah, like if you really love Skyrim, but think it would be greatly improved with the addition of guns, you can do that. Mods are cool, and developers like them. Bethesda says it is our belief that our games become something much more with the promise of making it your own. And of course it doesn't hurt that you have to buy the original game to install these mods, meaning even more money for the original developers.

Cha-ching. But this is not a mod for my game, it is an entirely new game, meaning you get the original Word Play and all of the new features without paying me a penny. Huh. I don't like that. Now, maybe this is my fault for not adding robust modding tools to Word Play outside of a janky-ass way to install foreign dictionaries and letterbags to the game. But then again, this is done through AI, and AI is pretty good at modding games.

I mean, if you can add skateboarding to Call of Duty and put Minecraft into Elden Ring, then it should be pretty easy to add some new modes to a game built in Unity, seeing as Unity games are notoriously pretty easy to decompile and mess around with. Thought number three: clones are inevitable. Look, if you watched my most recent video about the history of every video game genre, you'll have seen how Space Invaders basically created this cottage industry of clones, where every famous game developer from Konami to Sega to Nintendo to SNK were pumping out Space Invaders knockoffs.

The industry is built on video game clones. And in the mobile space, this is just par for the course. Like when Asher Vollmer and his collaborators made the fantastic puzzle game Threes, it took just a few weeks before developers made rip-offs, like the arguably much more famous 2048. There's a very good chance that you've played 2048 and you've never heard of Threes. Vollmer says "we want to celebrate iteration on our ideas.

2048 is a simpler, easier form of Threes that is worth investigation. But piling on top of us right when the majority of Threes players haven't had time to understand all we've done with our game system and why we took fourteen months to make it, well, that makes us sad." It sucks, right? But maybe it's just part of being a game developer, like piracy and extremely uncomfortable fan fiction about your characters. It's just something you have to live with.

But then again, AI has basically supercharged this process. It has made it almost effortless to copy someone else's game. Like, I asked the Hungarian developers behind this clone to share their chat logs with Claude, and Claude says, you know, I gather you want to build a word puzzle game inspired by Mark Brown's Word Play. It asked a few questions to get the design right, and then it went from "The spec is complete enough to build from" to "the playable core is ready" in uh...

is that twelve minutes? Twelve minutes. Ha ha, it took me seven months. Twelve minutes. And you know, if it takes you several weeks or several months to copy someone's idea, there's enough time there to ask some questions about what you're doing. Like, is this really legal, or am I going to get in trouble for this? Or hmm, perhaps I could take this in a completely different direction. Or, is this really what I want to be doing with my limited time here on planet Earth? Hmm.

But in 12 minutes? Not a lot of time for introspection. Thought number four: AI. Ew. Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of generative AI. That should hopefully be obvious based on the fact that it's completely banned in the GMTK Game Jam. It just has so many obvious negative effects from the environmental to the societal. There's misinformation, scams, worker replacement, IP theft. The list just goes on and on. And so, do I want my game to be associated with this stuff? Even in a roundabout way.

Would agreeing to let this clone go out be a tacit approval of AI-generated clones or just generative AI in general? But, if we're being totally honest here I'm a little jealous of this vibe coding stuff. Like, I had to build Word Play by myself. I spent months building all the basic code and the infrastructure to hold the modifiers and the perks, and do all the finicky little annoying things to make it work with a controller or play nicely on the touch screen for the iPad.

But these guys could just come up with an idea and then within a few minutes Claude had implemented it. I mean at one point in the logs they simply give Claude a list of twenty one different modifiers and it goes 'Okay, they're in the game now'. What the hell? Writing the code for those modifiers was like months of my life a few years ago. This sucks. I guess what I'm saying is perhaps it's worth, you know, burning the world and getting rid of all the usable drinking water if it means I don't have to write any more programming code.

I mean, I guess I could hire a programmer, but that sounds a bit expensive. Thought number five. Wait, is this game better than mine? Uh, in some ways Yes. The game has several interesting modes that Word Play is missing, like a fast-paced timer mode, a daily challenge, multiplayer modes. It's got a meta progression layer that my game lacks, and it's got some cool perks and modifiers that I kind of wish were in the original game.

Now I don't agree with everything in this AI clone. I'd always designed Word Play to be an accessible, breezy, casual game, and so some of the stuff in this one, like perks you can buff and a whole system around blowing past the score limit add just like a little bit too much complexity for my tastes. But I can't deny that in some ways this game is superior to my game. And that kind of hurts, I guess. That kind of feels bad.

Like I have emotions that I don't like, and I'm not happy. Now I'll cut myself some slack here. You see, all the time spent making Word Play just "work" from the programming code to getting the core loop right to the debugging to the playtesting. Well, all of that left very little time and energy for the actual fun design stuff of coming up with all the perks and the special rounds and you know all the other fun ideas.

Like, it's not that I didn't want to add all the features from this AI clone. I wanted to do a daily challenge and a speed-run mode, like there is some code for half-finished versions of both of those nestled deep in the Unity code. I was just utterly burnt out and exhausted and drowning in technical debt by the time the game was done, and I just kinda had to release as good of a game as I could have done with the time and energy and attention span that I have.

And then, once the game was out, the thought of doing updates and big patches just wasn't interesting to me. I was on to the next shiny object that I could chase. Probably talk to someone about that. But then these guys get to come along, take a really good video game that is done, and then just add cool, fun stuff on top. And they don't even have to code those things! They just tell a computer to do them. This is ridiculous.

But then again, none of these excuses are really valid for the actual consumer who bought Word Play, like oh boo hoo, I'm sorry your life is so hard being a video game developer. That sounds terrible. Where's your National Day of Remembrance? And so, if this game is better, perhaps it's only right that this clone exists for people to play instead of mine, as much as that hurts to say. I mean, putting aside the stinky vibecoded UI of it all.

It just looks bad. Thought number six: is my game too simple? So at a developer event in South Korea, Valve business bloke Tom Giardino gave some advice to developers who are worried about their game being cloned. He said that indie game makers should shy away from relying on a single mechanism that someone can easily copy. So maybe it's my own fault for making a game that's too easy to emulate. But then again, someone recently used AI to clone Adobe apps like Photoshop and Premiere, which I would not describe as simple.

I have a lot of words I've used to describe Premiere. Simple is not one of them. For some reason I'm thinking overpriced? And furthermore, I just think about all of the elegant and simple and beautiful games that we would miss out on if developers really did shy away from making games with just a single clever mechanic. Like Tetris and Vampire Survivors and Canabalt and Fruit Ninja, Super Hexagon, Wordle. I don't want to live in a world without those games.

I gotta do my daily Wordle. What if it's CRANE today? Thought number seven: maybe this is all over anyway. So between receiving this email and making this video, Claude creator Anthropic has basically told its own LLM to stop cloning other people's games. An Anthropic spokesperson said "We added two sentences to Claude Code's prompt on Opus 5.5 to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy."

And well, okay, good, I guess. Bit late for me! But also how long until someone finds a way to circumvent this prompt engineering thing. Or how long until another one of the LLMs catches up to Fable or Opus's power but without the squeamishness around IP. Like you think Grok is going to be worried about video game IP? You think MechaHitler has such morals around intellectual property? We'll see. But also, why do we have to live in a world where these AI companies just get to put out the most powerful and crazy AI models they can think of, and then just watch how people use them in the most nefarious and ugly ways possible, and then go, "oops, sorry, we'll patch that" after the damage has already been done.

Like Google stopping Gemini from making pictures of people after it pumped out photos of black Nazis. Meta stopping its chatbot from talking to teens about eating disorders and suicide after an investigation found that Meta AI had very lax guardrails when chatting to children and Apple suspending its AI generated news alerts when it was found to spit out false information. Why do we all have to be guinea pigs in an insane social experiment run by a few careless maniacs in California? Answer that, please.

Please answer that. So, hopefully, from all of this, you can see that I am pretty conflicted about this situation. Part of me wants to tell these geezers to shove their vibecoded AI slop up their butt and jog on. Another part of me sees this as just the cost of doing business. Another part is jealous of their experience and also of the game they made. On the one hand, I'm glad my game inspired someone else to have a fun game development experience.

On the other hand, I need to pay my mortgage. So it's all left me not really knowing what to do. For now, I've asked the developers to hold off from releasing this game in any form until I've had a chance to think about it and make this video. But seeing as I am still not really any closer to knowing what to do, I thought I would throw it to all of you. So please leave your thoughts in the comments down below. I'll also try and do a poll thing.

I think you can do that on YouTube. I'll have a mess around in the settings. And then I'll let you know what I do, and the outcome of it all in a community post in the future. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you soon with a real video that isn't about me having a breakdown. Goodbye!