The world of video games is undergoing a revolution due to AI. Many big studios use it, with extreme exponents like Epic Games that Vibecoded the store, but what big production companies see as a tool, in the independent world it’s seen as a bombshell. The show is the latest Steam Demo Festival, where the idea was to present demos of future games that users add to their wishlist on their radar, helping these developers a lot.
In the last version, the amount of content created with AI dwarfed the releases created by humans, but the worst thing is not: the worst thing is developers who do not want to upload such demos for fear that someone with AI will copy all their work before the legitimate game is sold. Anthropology is going to take over, but the problem is that it’s hard for it to serve any purpose.
In short. Via The Verge, we see that Anthropic Cloud has updated the code system so that the internal instructions that guide the model before each conversation are not allowed to recreate existing video games. It was a Twitter user who pointed out the change in circumstances around October 27, identifying the tool’s new rules under the identifier “tengu_heron_brook”.
line of code
This rule allows the user to create original games, games within a genre, and games based on both their own designs and resources. What it doesn’t allow is reconstructing a particular game, even if the name is changed or presented as something original. This user said that this is a rule that cannot be disabled and Anthropic itself confirmed the change.
What if he is wrong? Also on Twitter, Addy Osmani, who is a member of Anthropic’s technical team, explained that they added two sentences to Code Claude’s Opus 5.5 prompt to prevent him from recreating someone else’s specific game. This is something that goes against its own usage policy, but it shows that the program may have errors and it rejects something of its own. In that case, Osmani says, they can write to show support.
why. We have already said the reason: intellectual property. And the problem is, as PC Gamer pointed out, Opus 5.5 is extremely good at reverse engineering code. This has fueled everything from a wave of repackaged console games (rebuilt to run natively on PC) to shameless clones that steal original game content. Even those who were not released.
the problem Before I talk about the Steam Demo Festival, something called Steam Next. It was an event intended for developers (both big and small) to release demos of their games in hopes that they would stand out and catch the attention of players. If someone played a demo of your game and liked it, there was a chance they would add it to their wish list, which could turn into future sales once the game goes live.
And the problem with recent versions is not the amount of garbage created with AI, but that there are developers who work “by hand” who have not released demos for fear that someone else with AI will come along and copy their game. This is not fear lightly:
- Alliance Arts cancels ‘Drunken Goddess Reflux’ demo out of fear that AI copies will appear before the game’s release. This has been replaced with a closed beta period via lottery.
- Digital Sun Games canceled testing of ‘Revamp’ for the same reason, claiming that a public demo was too risky.
- Studio Bitdot has ‘Needle in a Haystack Simulator’ and an obscene number of clones have appeared, to the point that in the Steam listing, the original carries an “Original” label.
The door to the countryside. There are developers who are even considering delaying trailers so as not to show off the mechanics, artistic style, or ideas that make their games special for fear that someone with AI will shamelessly clone them, and that’s a big problem because demos and intense promotion are key for small studios to be able to get a foothold. ‘GTA VI’ didn’t need a single piece of gameplay to explode reservations, but ‘Cairn’, for example, needed all the meat on the grill to be interesting.
“We are concerned about recent news of games being reverse engineered, cloned and released before the originals are sold” – Digital Sun
Valve itself, responsible for Steam, acknowledged that this was a problem and two of those responsible for the business team noted that clones predate AI and do not want to be guardians. Recommend? Games that don’t just rely on easily copied mechanics are much easier said than done.
And the problem is that it covers Claude Code in Opus 5.5, a single tool that yes, might be the most capable at the moment, but the rest of the big AI companies have their own programming arms and the more capable they are, the more clones and ‘slops’ will appear in the digital stores. And then it remains to be seen whether, indeed, changing these lines of code will serve any purpose… or whether anyone who wants to copy something will be able to turn the request around to continue doing so.
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