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Manuel Sánchez
Latest Post: AI Slop, Stolen Demos and Games in a Browser Tab: How Long Can We Hold On?

AI Slop, Stolen Demos and Games in a Browser Tab: How Long Can We Hold On?

Steam Next Fest drowned in AI slop, developers are pulling their demos, and AI agents are porting GTA V to the browser. What changed, what we can still protect, and what we can not.

Manuel Sánchez
Manuel Sánchez
9 min read
A dark grid of thousands of gray squares with a single white square in the middle, and the text: 8,000 demos. One of them is yours.

This October, Steam Next Fest had around 8,000 demos. Mine was one of them. At the same time, other developers were cancelling their public demos, and someone put GTA V in a browser tab with the help of AI.

I want to write down what changed, what we can still protect as developers, and the question I keep asking myself: how long can we hold on like this?
🎮 I made my first professional game with Godot: Dimenshaper, a precision platformer where switching dimensions reshapes every room. Try the free demo on Steam

A Sea of 8,000 Demos

The October 2026 edition of Steam Next Fest had around 8,200 demos, according to Time Extension. The June edition had about 4,300. The number of games almost doubled in four months, and a big part of that growth is what people now call AI slop: games built mostly from generated art, generated text and very little care.

You could see it in the reactions. The lead developer of Selaco wrote on Bluesky that it was “the most depressing Steam Next Fest I have ever seen”, and players started asking Valve for a filter to hide games that disclose generative AI.

And honestly, a lot of it is very obvious right now. You see so many simulator games, there are tons of Claude plugins and skills out there, and there are still covers made with ChatGPT in that hyperrealistic style.

For us, Next Fest felt strange. We put a lot of love into Dimenshaper as a team, in the design and in the code, and now we are working on the music (we left that a bit for the end). Then you see some games doing amazingly well, going past 30,000 wishlists, while Dimenshaper was getting around 30 or 40 wishlists a day. Hey, that’s not much, but I am super, super grateful. It’s our first game, and you don’t give up or throw in the towel. Still, I think it’s very, very hard with your first game, as a small studio, if you don’t make something that goes viral. But we are going to keep going.

The problem for a small studio is simple: Steam shows your demo next to thousands of others, and the player only gives each capsule a second. When half of the list looks the same, players stop looking, and that hurts the games made with care just as much as the slop.

Now Developers Are Afraid to Show Their Games

The second problem is worse, because it changes what we are willing to share.

In the same week, Alliance Arts cancelled the public demo of Drunken Goddess Reflux. They said they feared the demo could be used to “quickly imitate or replicate the game’s presentation” and that copies could appear before launch. Digital Sun, the studio behind Moonlighter, moved the playtest of ReVamp to a small Discord group because “a large public build of ReVamp felt like too big a risk”, as Aftermath reported. The same article mentions Holy Wow holding back screenshots and videos, and Bearwaves deciding to shadow drop its next game.

Think about what that means. Demos, playtests, devlogs and trailers are how small games find players. If the safest option is to show nothing, the indies lose the only marketing they can afford.

From Cracked Photoshop to GTA V in a Browser Tab

Reverse engineering is not new. People have cracked Adobe and Figma licenses, dumped console games and rebuilt them for years. Fans decompiled Super Mario 64 into readable C code back in 2019, and the re3 project rebuilt GTA III and Vice City until Take-Two hit it with a DMCA takedown in 2021. In the Godot world, tools like GDRE Tools can turn an exported game back into a project you can open in the editor.

What changed this year is the cost.

In October, an open-source project called Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) went viral. It connects AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor or Codex to disassemblers like Ghidra, IDA Pro and Hopper. It is not an official Anthropic skill, but it plugs right into Claude Code, and a lot of people started pointing it at games.

The results came fast:

  • On October 6, a WebAssembly port of GTA V ran in the browser, with multiplayer, for a few hours before it was taken down. The person who shared it said it was made with AI (Tom’s Hardware). Gizmodo points out that the GTA V source code had already leaked in 2023, so AI was probably not the only ingredient.
  • A week earlier, Bethesda sent a cease-and-desist to Fallout: New York, a browser fan project reportedly built with Claude Opus 5.5.
  • Kotaku listed browser ports of Halo: CE, GTA: Vice City, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Skate 3 and The Simpsons: Hit and Run, some of them “decompiled or vibe-coded”.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 now has a native PC port whose README says it “was made with the help of AI” (you need your own ISO), and browser versions of the game went viral on X.
  • Kotaku also found AI-assisted PC ports of Metroid Prime, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Odyssey and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The OECD even added it to its AI incident monitor as a case of AI accelerating game piracy. That is the moment when this stopped being a niche topic.

What I Can Do for Dimenshaper (and What I Can’t)

So I looked at my own game with the eyes of someone who wants to copy it.

The first thing I found was embarrassing: my demo builds contained every level of the full game. The demo only showed the demo levels, but the files were there, and anyone who unpacked the demo could have played everything. That was not an AI problem, it was a build problem, and it is now fixed: the demo exports leave the full game out.

The next step is encrypting the PCK, the file where Godot packs all the game’s data. You compile your own export templates with a secret key, and the exported game can only be read with that key. It helps, but I want to be honest about it: the key has to live inside the executable, because the game needs it to run. Tools like gdke exist only to pull that key out. You can hide it as well as you can, and someone a bit determined, with an agent on their side, will still find it.

What actually protects a small game: keep content that is not public yet out of your public builds, check anything competitive (leaderboards, speedrun times, uploads) on your own server, and use encryption as a speed bump against one-click rips. None of these make copying impossible.

The Other Side of the Argument

There is a real counterargument, and I don’t want to skip it.

Decompilation projects are also how old games survive. Ship of Harkinian made Ocarina of Time playable on modern PCs, and many of these ports ask you to bring your own copy of the game. When a publisher stops selling a game, fans are often the only ones keeping it alive.

I agree with that, and I don’t think the answer is to make reverse engineering illegal or impossible. The difference I see is timing and intent. Preserving a game from 2002 that nobody sells anymore is not the same as cloning a demo from this year’s Next Fest and shipping it before the original.

So, How Long Can We Hold On?

I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does. Nintendo and Sony have lawyers and can play whack-a-mole with DMCA notices, one clone at a time. A small studio can’t.

What I am sure about is that hiding everything is not a solution for us. If indies stop sharing demos, screenshots and devlogs, the slop wins by default, because it never needed any of that.

So this is what I am going to do: protect what is reasonable to protect, ship demos with less content, and put more of myself into the game and around it. A model can copy my code and my sprites. It can’t copy the devlogs, the person who answers your comments, or the updates that keep coming because someone cares.

And if I could ask Valve for one thing, it would be some kind of check when you upload your game: is this a copy of a game that already exists, or an attempt to make one? I know we have to be careful here, because a check like that can quickly turn into censorship. But something along those lines would help the people who make their own games.

FAQ about AI Slop and Reverse Engineering Games

Around 8,000 to 8,200 demos, according to Time Extension and posts on X. That is roughly double the June 2026 edition, which had about 4,300.

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