🅰️ Buy Word Play on Steam! – 🅱️
Turns out: no one is immune to AI-generated clone games.
=== Sources ===
[1] How sloppy is the October 2026 Steam Next Fest – How To Market A Game
[2] Who ‘won’ October 2026’s Steam Next Fest?
[3] The Proliferation Of Copycats On Steam Makes Discovering Original Games Like Finding A Needle In A Haystack
[4] Papers, Please Dev Lucas Pope Isn’t Talking About New Game Due to AI Concerns
[5] Balatro was largely inspired by slot machine roguelike Luck Be a Landlord
[6] Game Developer Delays Patch Because He Can’t Get His Prescription Medicine
[7] How Slay the Spire Defined a New Genre
[8] Skyrim SE AE – Modern Weapons Polished V26
[9] Why we’re trying paid Skyrim mods on Steam
[10] Call of Duty Modders Add Skateboarding and Minecraft to Modern Warfare 2
[11] Tobyn Jacobs post
[12] How to Reverse Engineer a Unity Game
[13] The Rip-offs & Making Our Original Game
[14] The energy and environmental impact of AI and how it undermines democracy
[15] Artificial intelligence: Impact on human relationships and society
[16] AI-driven disinformation running rampant on social media before US midterms, experts warn
[17] Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Fraud and Scams
[18] Goldman says AI layoffs are starting to leave a ‘long-lasting’ scar, just like the last 40 years of history
[19] Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
[20] Developers Fear AI Slop and Clones — Valve Answers Directly
[21] PhotoCraft is an open-source, AI-built clone of Photoshop
[22] Anthropic tells Claude to stop remaking video games
[23] Gemini image generation got it wrong. We’ll do better.
[24] Google pauses AI-generated images of people after ethnicity criticism
[25] Meta updates chatbot rules to avoid inappropriate topics with teen users
[26] Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info
[27] Apple suspends error-strewn AI generated news alerts
[28] BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline
=== Credits ===
Music provided by Epidemic Sound – (Referral Link)
Music from Word Play OST, by Zach Jones
source
I've put a poll in this community post – https://youtube.com/post/UgkxlFfxm4i0JMFaJV1hNGoNZ-vALe9QhLUi?si=hM_nND6hPhIh_pHk
Plus! If you'd like to check out the REAL Word Play, it's currently on a 60% off sale on Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3586660/Word_Play/
Take the ideas they implemented in their game that you like and implement them in your game using Claude to vibe code it for you. Release it as a game update on steam. Then yours will be the definitively superior product.
Maybe have them help you implement the features in your game instead of them releasing their own copy of the game. For the features they added that you don't like, they can be created as mods. That way you are both working towards producing the same product instead of competing products. You might need to pay them a small portion of sales money for their assistance with the game design.
It was very polite of them to contact you in this way, most people would have just released it on steam and monetised it without giving a crap what you think.
Maybe let them add their features as a mod to your game
For what it's worth it, I think the answer I would give them: it's too similar to my game in the state it's currently in, if you want to release it then keep working on it until it becomes its own thing.
They didn' t had a fun game development experience. You had it, over months. This is just plagiarism. Sadly they will be the first and last one asking. All others won' t, cause people suck. It is so depressing.
Wawa
Got a Grok bit ad, immediately after the Mech a Hitler comment.
Art or anything meaningful stems from creativity and hard work. Period. The demand for that will grow the further we plunge into the AI rabbit hole. Regardless how 'better' of 'fun' their game is, it is still an offspring of your game, of your creative endeavour. While this all is pretty unprecedented, I say stand by your creation and don't let anyone mess with it. Let others use vibe-coding to create something truly original.
The spark and authenticity is invaluable man, if it's not worth fighting for, then what is?
I think you already made a good point about how games take inspiration from and build on each other. I’d be fine with them releasing their version, BUT ONLY IF THEY TAKE IT FAR ENOUGH IN THEIR OWN DIRECTION that it feels like its own game. If it still feels like Word Play with extra modes, I’d ask them not to release it. To me, that would be plagiarism. I’d be curious to see what they come up with if they build a game around their own ideas.
I'm sorry Mark, the genie is out of the bottle, there is nothing you or other devs can do. They can do whatever they want with their (well, your) game.
Not until the data centers are destroyed and sam altmans of the world locked up forever is this getting fixed
my game was just flat our copied on Roblox, and whilst they flopped because its just AI slop, its still terrify..
It's cute they had the morals to ask you but not the morals and introspection when using the plagiarism machine.
No one can stop this situation, not even the AI owner companies like Anthropic.
There are a lot of tricks people using to get around those restriction rules and make anything they want. Their LLMs can't block all of them because They're always 5 steps behind the real master mind that we have, our brain!
So my suggestion is to feel totally relaxed and continue working on your hobby or series projects. As Mark said, cloning is not a new trend, so who cares!
Clone games have existed ever since games have existed. There's also always tools coming out to make development easier. Even without AI, writing code today is way easier than 30 years ago, with modern IDEs. AI is just another tool in the toolbox, and it gives more people access to unlocking their creativity than ever before
Possible compromise option: ask for a cut of their sales? plus credit?
Some things I can think about:
1. The actual problem is that a person can do this with almost 0 investment
2. Another problem is that even if they do not release this to the public, somebody else can do the same and release it
3. If everybody can add things on top of your game, so can you. Is there a business model there?
I think the track is going to be to walk the line between using AI to clone games and to manually craft an original game. Something like using AI to create truly original things and then expand them beyond what you could do without these tools.
Got a Grok bit ad, immediately after the Mech a Hitler comment.
I've got a lot of friends who are artists who sell their art at conventions, and it is bewildering how many times I've heard of somebody come up to them and say "I love your art, so I used AI to make pictures in your style", and think that the artist will somehow feel flattered and appreciated by that
Especially given that, while it's not really about the money, they probably also aren't going to be buying the art itself
The Thing about mod support kinda stuck with me. I'mean he just said, that mod Support is a fair way of giving people freedom back regarding stuff they own in someway while still keeping him in the loop in terms of revenue.
Maybe we just are at the point where the idea of selling digital licenses with unclear implications on ownership comes to an end which is natural or to be expected?
One point still: I think it's sad that you dont give them credits for actually reaching out to you and letting you participate in their decision process. That's some kind of noble behavior you totally missed to recognize.
If you're relying on work you did several years ago to pay your rent today, I think you need a bit of perspective. Most of us have to work everyday, and anything you create is going to be successful because you have an audience. The main reason a game like yours was seen in the first place is because of your YouTube channel. If you didn't say anything, the clone would have likely died in obscurity. It won't be stealing your income, and even if it did, that shouldn't bother you at this point.
17:46 – Never thought I'd hear "hitler" come out of your mouth.
I’m in your shoes bro. I don’t know either. At the end of the day someone else has probably already ripped your game using AI and not even asking you about it.
I respect that they reached out to you though!
replace "video game" with "board game" or "card game", and you get a glimpse of what I think the future holds, for better or for worse.
This is inevitable. I appreciate these guys for approaching you in such an honest and respectful way, but there are thousands if not millions others who would not care about these values. I even imagine AI bots scanning for popular games (also other software, books, music and eventually also movies and TV shows) and trying to copy them without giving any credentials to creators of the products they just remade.
On one hand it is a bit depressing that some sort of creativity will not result in a chance to earn a living off of it, but on the other hand the average Joe will be able to watch a movie he wants just by providing a specific prompt.
A game I made got cloned by a very well known big game before AI is a thing. It feels weird because morally you don't want to feel being taken advantage of, but also I kind of don't care too much about what others are doing. What inspired me about being creative is understanding the world and myself, it's a process matters to me, the byproduct is the creation.
Well it took them 11 Days to build it? Why don't you let them create an official Mod Package to YOUR game? It will take them another 11 days and I think everyone would profit from that. Just an Idea!
There's plagiarism, there's building on what came before it, and then there's a muddy grey area in between. But these AI clones are not creative pursuits, they just plagiarize existing human efforts for a quick buck. Plus their backbone is built on a whole other massive theft of IP to begin with.
You have no obligation to give them your blessing, and have every right to be displeased about this. (Though in the same time, as much as I dislike their approach myself, they have no obligation to honour your preference, but at least they did send the email, for whatever that's worth.)
My issue is Not that a product is remaked or copied… My issue is with how it is copied. Recreated by an machine without efford at all
What are the thoughts on Vibe coding but for original ideas? Genuinely curious. I did a game course at university but found I was not good at coding at all no matter how hard I tried. But I have all these ideas floating around in my head and a way to execute them more easily would be amazing
I'm gonna be honest: I find it pretty icky that you're asking your YouTube audience what to do here. It feels disingenuous, like you're more interested in crowd-pleasing than in following your own principles. I'm sure that's not why you're asking, and you just want more feedback, but dude, this isn't my decision, nor anyone else's but your own.
There are good versions of what you did with WordPlay. OMG Words and Beyond Words are both worthy Word based Balatro variants that focus on a Scrabble board style. Badly coded AI slop, regardless of whether or not it has features yours doesn't, is not one of these. Point 4 about Ew AI is the only reasonable response, and I look forward towards this type of garbage being unprofitable to continue as the infrastructure shuts down.
We must take a stand against AI and the slop it makes.
We should always remember that those people didn't make anything. Its just AI. So they have no rights to do anything with what AI produced.
Firstly, hats off to the people asking your opinion first, and for permission. Many greedy and purely evil people publish 1-1 copies of games without any concern for the original developer or game. The biggest statement that spoke to me in their message was "11 days ago". They spent 11 days vibe coding a project, and considered that amount of effort worthy of already publishing the copy-game for sale, making profit off of somebody else's work. 11 days is not the amount of time in which you can learn a skill, have different ideas, iterate over them, polish your work, begin to hate it, question your decisions, and arise with something you can be proud of. Anybody that has worked on a big project knows how its development is NOTHING but streamlined.
Even if the guys didn't mean anything bad with this, I think their actions and thought processes are more harmful to the game making community than they realize. As the video mentioned, I think a true expression of enjoying the game and wanting to see it expand would have been creating mods, starting some community discussion and moving towards Steam Workshop integration. But wanting to profit from somebody else's game you didn't spend even 2 weeks ripping of is a huge, selfish red flag in my eyes.
No best game was made in a couple of prompts. Not because it takes more time to write the code, but because a good idea can't be shaped in an instant. Masterpieces could never be a one-shot prompt. Participating in this already rising issue takes away from the possibility of newer, original games being discovered; and destroys the motivation of any future game-developers, who might give up on their dreams out of fear of being cloned or scammed.
If the developers truly enjoy this game, I recommend they ask for ways they can help that are selfless, and that actually contribute to the original project. If they truly enjoy game design, I recommend they explore their own ideas, even if they are not good at the beginning, and see where it takes them. If none of these are true, then the lone motivator for this vibe-coded project was the appeal of money they could earn from publishing something they could NEVER make without AI, and that is a huge problem.
This pushed me to finally buy Word Play.
Don't let them release it, scorched earth on cloned games
I will never feel jealous over "vibe coding" producing quick results because thays all they are after… results… a final product…
There's no appreciation for the creative process, learning from failure, creative choices from pivots, growing your understanding for the next project. Id rather learn from a thousand hours of failure than shortcut to the end product.
There's a saying that comes to mind. Bad artists copy, good artists steal. The bad art will mindlessly follow what the original did without consideration, good art will tear it down and take all they can from understanding it. Balatro and Luck be a landlord are very different, but you can see what parts were worth stealing. They didn't just make the same game over, but used the parts they enjoyed to flesh out their own ideas.
I have a question, though. Would it be ethical for you to use AI to help you code a specific mechanic? Let's say you are struggling with a specific mechanic. After trying it yourself, you think, "Okay, hey Claude or Gemini or whatever, could you help me with the code for this mechanic?"
For me, that's okay. That's just technological assistance and using a tool, unless you are against AI altogether. In that case, I think we differ a little.
I think, if coding AIs didn't have horrible environmental and human costs, and were actually tools, and not services in the hands of insane tech maniacs (who are currently in the client acquisition phase, waiting to get the entire world hooked on their AIs before they start extorting every company and individual that's now fully reliant on them…) They would be wonderful tools. Painless, instant prototyping and iteration as a game designer? What a siren's song. I refuse to use it on ethical grounds, but… As you said, it frees up so much time and space to focus on the design, the UX, the content, the balancing, the game feel, the wider picture, right? I wonder how making games would feel like if we could have perfect AI coding agents without burning down the environment. A programmer-genie in a bottle, and I could get to just focus on all the parts of game-making that I enjoy and that I'm really good at..?
But right now my main worry is we'll get to find out what the world is like with a planet on fire, and no backup space rock.