Digital Sun, the studio behind the roguelike Moonlighter and the real-time strategy game Cataclismo, has postponed the public Steam playtest for its next game, ReVamp, over the risk that the build could be copied before release. The developer set out the decision in a post on the game's Steam page, which Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun both reported.
So many of you signed up for ReVamp's first playtest here on Steam (thank you!), but we've decided to start with something more contained on our Discord, with the public playtest coming a bit later.
The studio attributed the change to "news of games being reverse-engineered, cloned and published before the original is even out." With the game's launch still months away, it said, sharing a build with tens of thousands of players felt like "too big a risk."
A Discord test from October 29
In place of the Steam test, Digital Sun will grant access in waves through its Discord server starting on October 29, and it said it hopes to open the public playtest around January. ReVamp is due to launch in full on March 25, 2027. The studio apologised to players who had already requested Steam access for the change of plans. Rock Paper Shotgun describes ReVamp as a rearrangeable modular tower defence game in which the player takes the role of Dracula; Eurogamer reported the studio's own framing of it as a "Tower Defensevania."
Digital Sun also addressed the platforms it depends on, saying that showing games early is how independent developers get seen and find the players who sustain them, and that it hopes platforms "keep strengthening protections for original work." Rock Paper Shotgun noted that the studio did not specify what form those protections should take.
The delay follows a comparable decision by another developer. Alliance Arts cancelled a planned Steam Next Fest demo for its anime-styled Russian roulette game Drunken Goddess Reflux the previous week, saying it was concerned that works imitating or replicating the game's presentation and gameplay could be produced quickly with AI or other tools and released ahead of its own launch. Rock Paper Shotgun reported that Digital Sun cited that case when it contacted the outlet about the ReVamp decision.
