The Pandora’s box that is the game dev AI toolbelt appears to have empowered an ouroboros of plagiarism on the Roblox platform. That’s according to some first-hand reportiong out of Eurogamer, which calls attention to a host of “experiences” (to use the platform’s own parlance) that wholesale copycat multiple games like some kind of back alley knockoff market.
One of the games in question is listed by user Takeoff Interactive as “inspired by Counter-Strike” that the article says “looks and plays exactly like Counter-Strike,” including the shooter’s bomb defusal mode, and while CS clones are certainly a dime a dozen on the platform, it is noted that it looks nearly identical to Valve’s shooter without Valve’s consent.
Another highlight is a PlayStation Experience game that not only recreates the original PlayStation 4 dashboard, but also has multiple fully licensed games that can be played, including Superhot, Undertale, The Simpsons Hit and Run, and PaRappa the Rapper among them. The article shares experience with the Superhot and Hit and Run games and, once more, finds them mostly indistinguishable from the real thing beyond some visual oddness and glitches.
While the article does not provide direct links to the copycat games in question, it does provide several screenshots from time spent in the titles. Our own searches proved to be fruitless in relation to the Counter-Strike game specifically by the user Takeoff Interactive, which may mean that this one has already been nuked from orbit, while the PlayStation Experience does appear to be still functioning, assuming it’s the same one (it does note that it added Undertale in its recent changelog). Eurogamer has reached out to Sony and other developers for comment but received none so far.
It’s not specifically explained how these knock-offs came to be, but we can make a fairly educated guess that the proliferation of AI-powered decompilation of games is likely a major culprit. Either way, it would seem like Roblox may have yet another legal-based reason to look over its shoulder if this keeps up.
