Freya Holmér says AI clones followed her Tetris prototype in days

A Unity tools maker named Freya Holmér posted a 50-second prototype of a rotating Tetris variant in mid-March, and within days there were up to four AI-generated clones of it, 404 Media reports. One of them, Rotris, was built by a self-described vibecoder named Charlie Greenman in about a day. That is the compressed timeline the story is really about: the gap between 'here is an idea' and 'here is a shipped copy of your idea' is now short enough that named indie developers say they have stopped posting works in progress.

The more industrial side of the same trend is a Moldova-based studio called Midnight Works, whose former employee describes the playbook to 404 Media as recreating a trending game as a 'stripped down clone' in a few months, using AI at every step from banners to 3D models. An archived version of the company's site says it has grown to employ 300 people, and Midnight Works itself has reportedly claimed that 80 percent of the games it publishes pass $1 million in revenue and 15 percent make over $100,000. Take those figures as the company's own marketing rather than settled fact, but the operational shape, small-clone factory with keyword-stuffed listings, is what the reporting documents.

The stakes for solo developers come through most clearly. Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope said on a podcast in April that he no longer shares work publicly for fear it gets 'slurped by AI,' and Holmér describes the same anxiety about posting anything unfinished. If that becomes the default posture, the open share-in-progress culture that made a lot of indie games discoverable in the first place gets quieter, and platform curation and rankings start to matter more. Nintendo, per the article, has already retooled its Best Sellers ranking to weight revenue rather than downloads to reduce visibility of low-cost clones.

The honest caveat is that most of the piece's operational claims about Midnight Works, the 300-person headcount, the revenue splits, the 'at every step' AI use, trace back to a single former employee and an archived website; the reporting does not put a dollar figure on how much cloning actually diverts from originals. What it does not resolve is whether Steam and the mobile marketplaces will act at the listing level the way Nintendo has, or whether the burden will keep landing on the developers being copied.