TheRetroArcade
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Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending October 18.
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We are drowning in shit. Steam Next Fest, which kicks off tomorrow, currently has 8,011 matches on its press preview landing page. That's roughly double the amount of demos featured in Steam's June 2026 Next Fest. In June 2022, Next Fest boasted just over a thousand demos.
The vast majority of these demos will be meritless slop. And I daresay many of them—though I have no way to confirm—didn't exist as concepts before October.
If you use social media, especially X, you've probably noticed an explosion of terrible clones and vibe coded mash-ups this month. You can largely thank Anthropic's new 5.5 update to its Claude Opus model for that, which offers massive efficiency gains for vibe coders. It's also been widely used to decompile commercial games and, maybe most famously, jailbreak the PS5.
It definitely feels like we've crossed a threshold this month. On October 10, the creator of Escape the Walls, an incremental punching game which itself uses AI to "increase the speed of creating the game", posted in-progress footage from the game on X.
Prophetically, a user replied: "You have exactly 7 hours before someone makes this on Roblox and gets 20x your revenue".
Right now, on October 19, there are at least seven Roblox clones of Escape the Walls. A competing studio had the audacity to tweet their own clone to the original game's creator. "Our Steam page is live too!" they posted. "Nothing wrong with friendly competition!"
Leaving aside the fact that Escape the Walls is itself pretty crappy looking, the situation highlights the perils of marketing independent games in an age where a clone can be turned around in hours. To wit: as Rick Lane has already reported, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux, a "Russian roulette drinking survival" game, has announced it will no longer publish its demo on Steam as planned.
From the creators of Edge: A free weekly videogame industry newsletter, featuring in-depth news, expert analysis and exclusive interviews
"We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game's presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game's launch," a spokesperson for studio Alliance Arts Inc. wrote. The studio will instead hold closed environment play sessions for people who read and agree to a series of "participation requirements".
Elsewhere NoGlyph, the creator of Needle In A Haystack, which is itself a rapid clone of Needle In A Haystack Simulator (see: haystack slop), has accused yet another studio of copying their code in their own clone. "Yesterday, on October 16 a game called A Game About Needle In A Haystack by Little Field Studios came out on Steam," NoGlyph wrote. "It contains code copied from our game. To be clear, this is about our actual code, not a similar idea or similar mechanics."
NoGlyph moves on to offer further proof that the offending studio pulled code directly from their game. "The haystack in our game, meaning how it's drawn, how you dig into it and how gold, lapis and diamond hay work, is something that took a long time to get working properly. When we looked through their game's files, we found 13 of our classes inside it with the exact same names. More than half of the functions in that part match ours exactly. Some of our own error messages are still in there word for word, including one that points to a shader from our project that doesn't exist in their game."
NoGlyph has filed a copyright notice with Valve.
Damn, it sure would be a shame if independent studios stopped releasing demos, or were prevented from marketing their games, because talentless bottom feeders were quickly flipping their ideas into monetizable slop!
Many have made the argument that AI is "good" because it democratises specialised skills...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
We are drowning in shit. Steam Next Fest, which kicks off tomorrow, currently has 8,011 matches on its press preview landing page. That's roughly double the amount of demos featured in Steam's June 2026 Next Fest. In June 2022, Next Fest boasted just over a thousand demos.
The vast majority of these demos will be meritless slop. And I daresay many of them—though I have no way to confirm—didn't exist as concepts before October.
If you use social media, especially X, you've probably noticed an explosion of terrible clones and vibe coded mash-ups this month. You can largely thank Anthropic's new 5.5 update to its Claude Opus model for that, which offers massive efficiency gains for vibe coders. It's also been widely used to decompile commercial games and, maybe most famously, jailbreak the PS5.
It definitely feels like we've crossed a threshold this month. On October 10, the creator of Escape the Walls, an incremental punching game which itself uses AI to "increase the speed of creating the game", posted in-progress footage from the game on X.
Prophetically, a user replied: "You have exactly 7 hours before someone makes this on Roblox and gets 20x your revenue".
Right now, on October 19, there are at least seven Roblox clones of Escape the Walls. A competing studio had the audacity to tweet their own clone to the original game's creator. "Our Steam page is live too!" they posted. "Nothing wrong with friendly competition!"
Leaving aside the fact that Escape the Walls is itself pretty crappy looking, the situation highlights the perils of marketing independent games in an age where a clone can be turned around in hours. To wit: as Rick Lane has already reported, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux, a "Russian roulette drinking survival" game, has announced it will no longer publish its demo on Steam as planned.
From the creators of Edge: A free weekly videogame industry newsletter, featuring in-depth news, expert analysis and exclusive interviews
"We are concerned that, based on the content of the demo, works imitating or replicating this game's presentation and gameplay could be quickly produced using AI or other tools and released ahead of the game's launch," a spokesperson for studio Alliance Arts Inc. wrote. The studio will instead hold closed environment play sessions for people who read and agree to a series of "participation requirements".
Elsewhere NoGlyph, the creator of Needle In A Haystack, which is itself a rapid clone of Needle In A Haystack Simulator (see: haystack slop), has accused yet another studio of copying their code in their own clone. "Yesterday, on October 16 a game called A Game About Needle In A Haystack by Little Field Studios came out on Steam," NoGlyph wrote. "It contains code copied from our game. To be clear, this is about our actual code, not a similar idea or similar mechanics."
NoGlyph moves on to offer further proof that the offending studio pulled code directly from their game. "The haystack in our game, meaning how it's drawn, how you dig into it and how gold, lapis and diamond hay work, is something that took a long time to get working properly. When we looked through their game's files, we found 13 of our classes inside it with the exact same names. More than half of the functions in that part match ours exactly. Some of our own error messages are still in there word for word, including one that points to a shader from our project that doesn't exist in their game."
NoGlyph has filed a copyright notice with Valve.
Damn, it sure would be a shame if independent studios stopped releasing demos, or were prevented from marketing their games, because talentless bottom feeders were quickly flipping their ideas into monetizable slop!
Many have made the argument that AI is "good" because it democratises specialised skills...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?