BODY: Ten days before it was due to open the doors, Digital Sun decided the risk wasn't worth it. On October 19, the Valencia-based studio behind Moonlighter announced that the public playtest for its next game, ReVamp, would no longer be public at all.
The test still begins October 29, but access is now being handed out gradually to members of the studio's Discord server rather than offered to anyone who clicks a button on Steam. The reason Digital Sun gave is blunt: the team is worried about the recent run of news stories in which games are reverse-engineered and shipped by someone else before the original developer can release them. With roughly five months to go before launch, putting the near-finished game in front of an unlimited audience meant handing a complete blueprint to whoever wanted one.
ReVamp is a tower-defense roguelike in which players defend Dracula's castle, arranging units across configurable rooms and stepping into the fight personally when a wave threatens to break through. It has already passed 100,000 Steam wishlists and is due out on PC on March 26. Digital Sun says a broader playtest is still planned for January, presumably once the window for a pre-launch knockoff has narrowed.
The studio also pointed to the wider pattern: mods that mash famous games together, jam entries cloned almost the moment a competition ends, and extortion emails demanding roughly ¥30,000 to stop a clone from going live. Its closing request was aimed at the platforms — strengthen protections for original work.
The insider take
From Tokyo, the ¥30,000 figure is the detail that lands hardest. That is pocket change — about the price of two new Switch games — and it tells you the economics of cloning have collapsed to the point where shakedowns are worth sending at volume. Japanese indie developers have been circling this problem on X for months, and it cuts especially deep here because the domestic scene is built on demos: BitSummit in Kyoto, the indie halls at Tokyo Game Show, Steam Next Fest. Playable visibility is the marketing budget for a small Japanese studio. If showing your game early now means losing it, the country's indie pipeline loses the one tool it can actually afford.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).