Digital Sun Games has a new game in the works, and it's skipping the usual open playtest song and dance. ReVamp will get its early testing behind closed doors — specifically, a limited playtest hosted inside the studio's own Discord.
The reason isn't server costs or spoiler control. It's cloning. The Moonlighter developer says generative AI has made it too easy for others to lift what a public build puts on display, and a wide-open playtest hands over the blueprint for free.
"We know we're not the only developers feeling this way," the studio told PC Gamer.
That line is doing a lot of work. It isn't a complaint about one bad actor; it's a studio saying the calculus around public testing has quietly flipped. A demo used to be pure upside — free feedback, free word of mouth, a wishlist bump. Now it's also a head start for anyone who wants to reverse-engineer the loop.
Digital Sun isn't hiding the game. A Discord playtest still means real players, real feedback, and a smaller pool of people who can screenshot everything. It's a hedge, not a lockdown.
Whether this becomes the norm is the open question. Indie teams live and die by word of mouth, and closed tests trade reach for protection. But when the cost of copying drops toward zero, that trade starts looking less like paranoia and more like arithmetic.
ReVamp follows Moonlighter, the shopkeeping dungeon crawler that put Digital Sun on the map.