Freya Holmér showed a prototype in March: a Tetris-like game where the board itself rotates. The Unity tool maker and game developer posted a short clip on Bluesky and asked whether the idea had legs. The answer from players was yes. The answer from copycats arrived almost as fast.
Within days, Holmér told 404 Media, she had seen as many as four AI-assisted versions of the concept. One developer, Charlie Greenman, replied with a version called Rotris and told 404 Media it took several prompts and about a day to make. Another clone, Blockfall, appeared in mobile stores, according to 404 Media, whose request for comment to its developer went unanswered.
Generative AI did not invent game cloning. It lowered the amount of skill and time needed to do it. A “vibecoded” game can be assembled by describing mechanics and interface changes to an AI coding tool, then iterating through prompts until the software runs. The result may be rough, but rough is enough when the business model is speed, search ranking and confusion.
Holmér said the episode made her less willing to show unfinished work in public. She told 404 Media that posting work now comes with the fear that someone will finish a crude version first, monetize it and take the concept before the original developer can make the game properly. Lucas Pope, the developer of Papers, Please, made a similar point on the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast in April, saying he had become more cautious about discussing projects publicly because they could be copied or absorbed by AI systems.
A faster version of an old racket
The clone economy was already established across mobile and console storefronts. 404 Media points to Voodoo, the French mobile publisher accused several times of copying indie games, as one example. Voodoo did not respond to 404 Media. In 2018, Goldman Sachs reportedly invested $200 million in the company. In 2020, Tencent took a minority stake at a reported $1.4 billion valuation. Voodoo’s Hole.io, which game developer Ben Esposito accused of copying his then-unreleased Donut County, became one of the publisher’s best-known games.
Jeremy Morris, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies media and culture, told 404 Media that AI amplifies a system already built for overproduction. Storefronts reward volume, keywords, low prices and frequent updates. Developers and publishers then chase whatever mechanics or titles appear to be working.
404 Media also examined Moldova-based Midnight Works, founded by Cătălin Țiței and Roman Gaina in 2015, and a set of related studios that YouTube creator Luke Wild has tracked for years. Wild told 404 Media he believes the operation is a large-scale scam built around near-duplicate games, repeated uploads and publisher-name changes. Midnight Works did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A former Midnight Works employee told 404 Media the company’s pattern was to recreate trending games as stripped-down copies, sometimes with assets taken from originals, and to use AI throughout production, including store images, interfaces and 3D models.
One developer, who publishes as Steelkrill Studio, told 404 Media that his horror game The Backrooms 1998 was copied so closely that personal videos and family VHS footage included in his own project appeared in the stolen version. He believes the copier used a decompiler to extract the game’s files. That version was removed from console storefronts, according to 404 Media.
Platforms still have to decide what counts as copying
Attorney Michael Wang, who has researched Chinese copycat games, told 404 Media that game ideas generally cannot be copyrighted or patented. Stolen code and assets are a cleaner case. Similar mechanics, themes or presentation can be harder to police.
That ambiguity leaves developers stuck between sharing early enough to build an audience and staying quiet long enough to avoid being cloned. Nintendo has changed its Best Sellers section to rank by revenue rather than downloads, according to 404 Media, a move that can reduce the advantage of very cheap shovelware. The copycat business, though, still has plenty of storefronts to work with.
Holmér is still building her rotating-board puzzle game. She told 404 Media the initial wave of attention has faded, making it easier to slow down and make something she is proud of instead of racing AI clones to market.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
