I remember back in the day when movies did this. A big company would be making some blockbuster movie. A shitty knock off company would rush to create a movie with the same basic plot and release it for renting about the same time the movie is in theaters. I remember these shitty knock offs being available at Blockbuster. I assume the idea was to trick dumb people who heard of the hype but didn't remember exactly what the name of the movie was.
They still do it. The movie studio Asylum's whole business is based on this. Their movies are now full of AI special effects. They're still using human actors though, for now.
A lot ot animated movies got this treatment, notably ..and notoriously, Norm of the North, Ratatoing and The Little Panda Fighter. Even shows tried to capitalise on whatever the trending meta was at the time.
AFAIK, you can't regulate this if you want a healthy industry. Like it would be bad for both devs and gamers.
If the theme/flavor/visuals were copied, the dev's version of the game, then I believe that is already copyrighted. So it's already protected.
If it's just the fundamental mechanics, the idea of the game... If we want those to be protected then we want massive corporations to be allowed to patent things like platformer or first person shooter.
Regulate the AI. If someone wants to build your idea from scratch they have every right too. But its unfair that you cant release a demo because an ai will make your game but shit, and then no one will play your game when it launches because they "already played it". AI should be far more copyright strikable because its true that you didnt do the vast majority of the contents creation.
It’s Roblox. I highly doubt that a Roblox version of anything is going to actively take away from the real version of something. 90% of people who use Roblox are kids who weren’t going to pay for the full version anyways.
Not to say that only kids use Roblox, I’m aware that some adults do, but generally speaking that is the target audience and majority of the userbase.
I'm slightly confused. Are people using AI to copy/inspect the actual game files, or do they merely look at preview videos themselves and somehow remake the game from that?
Both. People have been modding games by decompiling games and producing copies that can then be embedded into other games.
But that's not what happened here. Someone just saw a video of a gameplay mechanic and then had AI make a game using it, which is not actually malicious or bad. This mechanic isn't new in the slightest.
It's existed for a long time, so nothing is being "stolen", the maker of the game has no right to the mechanic itself and it's perfectly acceptable for other people to utilize it. What they're upset about is that they don't use AI, and someone else saw their game, liked the mechanic, and so used AI to produce their own game with the same mechanic faster than the other developer could by hand, and now because they couldn't make their game as quickly as the machine could, they are upset despite the player who used AI having copied nothing from the original because they only used a video to take inspiration and design their own game from.
This will be standard as AI becomes more engrained in game development. If you don't use modern tools, you'll fall behind and be left in the dust.
With automated decomps multiple people have been pulling their steam demos since people have been reverse engineering them to crack open the entire game or make dupes.
AI can make a game from the video, i recently played around with rebuilding one from my childhood, and it took two playthroughs, one hour, and a 100$ subscription to GPT
Both. AI is getting very powerful so can just look at a video and reverse engineer. If there is an indie game that goes viral, it’s pretty easy to reverse engineer and clone.
If AI continues to get more and more powerful, this will only get easier to do and will affect all games (AAA included) and software in general (Adobe was recently reverse engineered).
I'm going to be honest here, this is a shit example as "incremental game where you punch increasingly hard walls" already has multiple Roblox games that predate this.
But to address the bigger question. Execution has always been the important thing. Stardew Valley didn't fail because there were other farming games out for example. And frankly, chances are the people playing a Roblox knockoff were never going to be your audience anyways.
the more “options” on Roblox are often buggy and horrible, and have no art style, no heart in them. and let’s not forget how horrible Roblox is a platform and community
People need to learn something can both be low quality AND oversaturate a market in a way that hurt higher quality product.
If your game takes five years to develop, it doesn't matter the clone is shittier, it'll get 5 years of enjoying profits off the game without having to worry about competing with you, because your game simply isn't out.
I think these low quality clones benefits neither consumer or the indie devs
In groups and out groups. Enemies that are both morally weak but also dangerously strong. From a certain angle the AI wars are very similar to right wing rhetoric
No, obviously. This obviously takes away one of the core aspects of independent game development, which was communicating with your public and gauging responses, living in a future where the output is all that matters only leads to oversaturated markets, good products being burried by mountains of garbage and a worse position for everyone to be in, the only person who gets anything out of it are the people actively being predatory.
I want a future where wall punching simulator doesn't take 2 years to develop. Id really like a future where new elder scrolls games aren't released human generations apart. The only way we get there is AI.
I mean, not necessarily. Even if you were doing it without AI, copying something is much easier than coming up with it. This was already a thing before too, copycat games always popped up after a popular release. But AI has made the volume overwhelming
Look I dislike IP for how it stifles the spread of ideas, but surely you see how this is bad? If we don't have IP protection and a UBI, people who have ideas need something to protect their ability to profit off of the idea. Otherwise, people will just stop sharing their ideas entirely out of fear it will simply be stolen and developed by an AI faster than they can do it, themselves. This is only going to make information spread more slowly, not more quickly.
Intellectual property is a thing. Yeah it'd be great if people could share ideas freely and still be compensated for it, but it would also be great if everybody got a unicorn and a blowjob. Failing the realization of these fantasies, we have to operate in the society we currently find ourselves in, and the trend showed by OP is very clearly detrimental to that society.
Boo hoo, hollywood has been doing this for decades. They'd literally rush to dump a shittier version ahead of the competitors release date.
Maybe don't come up with a game mechanic so unbelievably simple that anyone could rip it off like I dunno punching a wall to escape. Or digging a hole. Slop getting out slopped is not some great catastrophy and collapse of civilization.
Ideas are ideas and no one has rights to them. If you wanna bring a simple idea to market you need to hit hard and fast. Punching a wall doesn't need a demo and a 18 month marketing campaign to "grow awareness".
Someone got fucked for unthinkingly following generic reddit game dev advice for a Steam game launch.
Ask yourself, why Nintendo had a problem with Giana Sisters but was fine with Mega Man.
Anyone who is honest with themselves understands why. Taking inspiration at a more abstract level to work on something transformative versus being an opportunistic parasite creating derivative content at the expense of the original creation are two different things.
Genres are not clones. Metroidvania isn't even copying one thing, it's literally two different games (Metroid and Castlevania) with superficial similarities. This is like saying Good Fellas is a ripoff of The Godfather because they're both about gangsters; it is in no way similar to copying and marketing an entire product before it is even released.
Again, there is a difference between making a game which is functionally identical down to every last mechanic, and making a game which has some overlapping mechanics but also some which aren't shared. Metroidvanias are not blatant copies of each other like seen in the OP.
Ideally we could share and develop all ideas freely while compensating their originator, but there are a plethora of reasons why modern society can't gel with that. So instead the courts have established standards for when something constitutes infringement or theft. My problem is that AI is seemingly being used to skate around those barriers due to its many legal grey zones.
No it's a lack of taste. An attachment to lowest common denominator attention grabbing junk food that makes them enjoy the world less because they become reliant on the dopamine hit.
This is the future regardless. "Having a cool game concept" is not a way to earn money anymore, just like "being able to code" is not anymore.
There is no regulation in the world that would prevent this. The ability to build whatever you want is innate to Roblox. The ability to build whatever you want is innate to agentic AI. Game mechanics are not protected and never have been. Game cloning has been a thing since 1973.
Whoever said that, was completely deranged. Ideas are useless, plentiful and cheap. Execution is king. That's why developers posted progress vlogs: they were ahead of the race of making that game.
What AI did was to change the rules of execution. It may be the end of progress vlogs. Maybe not.
this isn't even an ia or not issue, look at 3d printing and people selling models from free repositories and other things. depending on the level of the dev someone without ai could copy what they had up till that point. people suck, it has nothing to do with ai, someone would find a way to steal if its there or not.
Future? Haven't we already been doing this for decades? AI just makes it potentially faster, but anything you make can be copied and redistributed by a company with larger amounts of resources.
What regulation would you want? Some sort of copyright that covers ideas? To prohibit people from creating a game that's like another game that's already in development?
I think you'd find this would lead us to a far more dystopian and miserable existence than the current situation.
I mean I mostly agree with you. What I'm questioning is if they are going to change their argument now.
A lot of artist / writing subreddits I searched around here say the same thing, 'ideas are cheap, execution is everything', plus other subreddits for anti-ai arguments.
Is there really a reason to change the argument? Obviously if you imagine two exact same stores the execution doesn't matter as much, but that still seems to be an execution thing since they're doing the exact same thing, it's always going to fall back on "who do you want to give your money to?" which is a more personal question where the idea or even the existence of a perfect copy factors in. I'm trying to think of how this really takes us much further from the celebrity culture we already have for the most part. I'm trying to think of how the execution matters less than the idea here. I know earlier I said variation is cheap, which is my personal view, but if you aren't the only person selling your idea then the way it's presented is always going to be the deciding factor.
A lot of art becomes public once it's released, sure. But if releasing the art is the point, if it's good, someone is always going to be wanting to make the exact same thing but with their name on it. It just seems to be the way of the world to me. Nothing will be interesting so things might take longer to develop, I guess.
So no game previews, no demo, absolutely nothing until release. Nevermind the fact that once it releases, clones will then appear that will bury the original game among the slop.
If you take a demo someone made feed it to claude and say "Make it into full roblox" you didnt just steal an idea you stole the whole fucking demo of the game to then generate your slop ahead of the actual creator.
you can't patent you getting stronger after you kill an enemy but you can patent an enemy getting stronger after they kill you or someone else... nemesis
Ai is very capable people using it to directly steal using it should be regulated in some form.
Copycats reverse engineering and recompiling games to flood copies day one is gonna be an issue to the point people don't want to show anything about a game anymore which makes Marketing even harder. Risking showing anything is a death sentence now because by the time you want to release from a viral clip it will get drowned out by 700 fully automated copycats
Yep. If the ripoff is actually better, then it deserves to win. If it isn't, then the original game can still retain some market share, right? Who should we blame if nobody wants to play the original?
Would you prefer it if niche sub-sub-genres like "games where you punch walls incrementally to escape" were actually protected by copyright?
No one is making that argument to patent game design mechanics.
It just sucks for the guy that worked 2 years on a game, thinking and iterating on a great core gameplay loop just for some guy to steal it and take it to market before them. It's just coldhearted to tell that person "thats just business".
If the ripoff comes out AFTER the initial game, that's fine. Great games came from being ripoffs. I feel like you guys are ignoring blatant scummy business practices in order to keep your original position.
And no im not talking aobut shitty roblox clones, im talking abuot things like the 2nd slide, where a effortful game is no longer having a demo in fear of someone copying the game before it comes out to market.
It would be fine if the world didn't require endless profit, so the person ripping off someone else wouldn't have an incentive to copy them and the person being copied would have nothing to be sad over.
It feels like the end goal has replaced the effort. I get why: from the player's side, the only thing that ever mattered was how the game plays. The question is whether anything gets lost when the work behind it disappears.
Copyright law exists to protect people, and copyright law will always be contentious because there is no right answer.
Too much freedom no one produces because there is no money to be made, not enough freedom no one produces because everyone copyrights everything and nothing can be made.
Can a game idea be copyrighted? I don't think so. Should it be able to be? Who knows? Maybe with limited exceptions or something.
But if you post your idea all over the internet and then someone else does it first. Like.. what did you expect would happen?
I can answer these questions in paragraph three for you:
Usually no, but if a specific mechanic is useful but not core it can sometimes be copyrighted. For example, Nanco has a patent on loading screen mini games that I believe is still active and is why you don’t see them very often. So your last sentence is the current state of the legal landscape of copyright for video games, also not the comprehensive look of the landscape, also also cannot stress that it is heavily on the “usually not” side).
I think a blind spot for a lot of the ai people is that you genuinely couldn’t reverse engineer things like this before ai and that was a built in security feature for a lot of programming. That security is now gone and that’s a wayyyyyy bigger problem than the video games industry. The law has not caught up to this new reality and will not for some time
We're talking about reimplementing ideas or concepts. It should be OK, the best implementation should win. Except egregious patents exist, the system is broken. You're supporting stupid claims like these.
Again - yes you can copy a concept. But in These days, you See a good concept a Guy putted 100 hours in and make a similar Name and Release 20 different Copys and steal all his customers - you even Take the Screenshots from His Game and put it into the slop machine
No offense but I'm not gonna make a Roblox account to play a game about punching a wall. I'll wait for the guy to release his actual game. This is not an AI position. This is a Roblox position.
"I've got a living to make" ok why didn't you make it last year? why did you take a whole game conept, and recreated every part of it, in roblox? that is not a idea, that is stealing what a game is.
why don't they make GTA6 in roblox then? are they that lazy?
Robblox copycats are not really the strong argument you thing it is... those has been a plage long before AI.
I am more concerned by the Drunken Goddess Reflux case, though.
BUT, and this is a big one, if the demo does not have all the resources for the art it would be almost impossible to make a good copy of it. AI is extremely bad at art direction, you need to put a lot of effort to produce a cohesive set of art resources that look good and that often involves manual corrections.
Will there be copycats? For sure, specially if the game is not that complex. Will they be any good? Not at all. Will they be better than the original? I certainly hope not. Will they take sales away? No, they will look like crap. Will it make more difficult to discover the game? For sure, they would need extra marketing to make the game visible.
just imagine it an AI swarm perfectly capable of replicating any software open source everything. its beautiful I personally can't wait to literally pirate a car.
Yes. Like actually. Free flow of ideas is AWESOME. But the people abusing it for profit suck. The people stealing others ideas and making an AI version is imbecilic behaviour. But the freedom in creating things for your average joe is amazing.
Moving forward, we'll probably see a shift where studios build a community before they even build the game.
The relationship between devs and their community is going to be the key to a game's success. Taking feedback seriously, staying responsive, clearly communicating the reasoning behind design decisions, and making players feel like they're growing alongside the game. That’s going to become the new norm.
That kind of relationship will not be possible to replace with a vibe code game/app.
Probably for the best. Too many people making careers off developing their game instead of actually finishing and publishing them. Even when they do publish them they're forever early access and/or cave to the internet hivemind of bad opinions and make a worse product.
Hmm since ai isn't going anywhere should we blame AI if the public chooses the clone over the original? Or should we rely on the average gamer to care about ethics and choose to pay the original creator?
It's not an ai issue, its a human issue. Majority of humans don't give a f
If I'm interpeting OC correctly, the original comment was not phrased too well but I'm assuming it means if the idea can be copied by AI in a day, the idea was shallow anyway which if correct, would mean your argument is a different one entirely.
So many game "previews" of ai stuff and none of them have any meaningful gameplay or polish. They dish out games in 1-2 days. Even with the help of ai my game is still months away from being done. The playtesting and iterations is something the ais can't yet do and is the real time sink.
I thought I heard antis yapping that ideas are cheap and it's the execution that matters (when they deride pros as "idea guys"). So antis should be very happy to be proven right.
That will kill any desire to create anything original or anything at all, on a bright side - it will starve AI, since it can't create anything on it's own, just like people who using it
The problem is, a lot of Early Access is used to promote, market, and raise funds for the game when in early stages of development. You can argue if that is or isn't a good practice, but it's often one of the only available options for small studios.
Yes, but the game is unfinished, and the funds used from buying early access are used toward development costs. If the early access game is cloned, it's going to affect that as a business model. Because either A) people won't back the full game, or B) like we see in the above examples, game studios won't release early versions or demos in fear of having their work stolen.
It sure as hell isn't, but that's also why I think AI really needs to catch up with automating drudgery and such so people can stop worrying about FUCKING EARNINGS and monetizing literally everything. I despise it.
there is a copyright system the people who made the game before the roblox clone can copyright it and clones have always existed its not a new 'AI' thing
Roblox is acting in gray areas and they get away with it. The big issue here is, that they encourage people with money, to steal game ideas. Pretty sick if you think about it. But there's nothing you can do about it as you can't patent game ideas, unless you're Nintendo.
yeah, i mean, since 2020 i wanted AI to come to a point where anyone in the world can just ask the AI "Hey AI, please make a game with these specifications: blablabla" and the game is fully playable. Same with movies like, "AI make a movie about blablabla and it ends like blabla" and the AI makes a full film about it.
Anything created with genuine passion cannot be fully copied. They might copy the art, the style, hell even the whole story line but they will never be able to duplicate the experience you are trying to share if you put in the effort. If the fear of someone copying your work is what's stopping you from creating, you're robbing yourself of your potential.
This happens now already, the only differences is the dev time is longer. Sides eye the PubG Fortnite Debacle and the following 8 years of everybody and their mama making BR Royale games. Turns head to the Battleborn Overwatch situation, CoD apeing them and the following Hero Stooter boom. Stares at Splatoon and many, many games that just blatantly said "we not going to attempt to dress up the fact we ripping off Nintendo" and Sony commissioning Square Enix to making their own knock off just to kill it off not even a year.
This is a taste of what’s coming . Anything that shows signs of being viral in any way will be swarmed by ai agent builders auto coding it as fast as possible testing it with other agents then deployed after final human checks.
Yup. Been talking about how AI will kill the video game industry, especially indies. If Aai gets even better and producing these games even cheaper, why buy a game when you can just vibe code it.
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u/silentlurkers 8h ago
i saw a tweet saying "incoming roblox clone that will outperform your game in 3..2..1"
didn't think it would actually be that quick! at this point devs should only show the game once it's finished to give them a chance to sell some game!