The Clone Economy

Here's the scene. March 2026: developer Freya Holmér posts a 50-second clip of a Tetris prototype where the whole board rotates. A neat idea, shared the way good ideas have always been shared — here's a thing I'm playing with, isn't this fun. Within days there are clones. Charlie Greenman, a self-described casual "vibecoder" who can't write code, builds his version — Rotris — in about a day off "several prompts." Someone else ships Blockfall. Holmér's reaction is the part that matters: "It disincentivizes me from posting." Anxiety anytime she shares anything, because someone will finish it for her and monetize it first.

The word doing the heavy lifting is vibecoding: you describe a game to a generative model, it writes the code and builds the interface, you iterate until it looks done. No programming, no design, no craft. And this is the point where everyone wants me to say the AI is the villain. It isn't. It's the accelerant. The arsonist is the incentive structure, and it's been standing there the whole time.

Listen to Jeremy Morris at UW–Madison: "the incentives and the infrastructure is built to encourage this kind of overproduction." App stores take their cut whether a game is a labor of love or asset-ripped keyword slop. Quantity is the business model. So you get Midnight Works — a Moldova studio of 300-plus people running clones through shell companies — and Voodoo, a $1.4 billion publisher that turned an unreleased indie called Donut County into Hole.io. Steelkrill Studio found their horror game copied "almost in its entirety," down to the personal family VHS tapes baked into the original. The architecture is fine. The incentives are broken. But everyone will blame the AI.

What AI actually changed isn't the friction — it's the link between copying and creating. Cloning used to cost something: you needed the skill to rebuild the thing, and rebuilding it usually meant changing it. 2048 came from 1024 came from Threes! — each one transformed what it inherited and kept the lineage visible. Open Hexagon was a fan's love letter to Super Hexagon, and the original developer was "basically alright" with it. The skill wasn't just a throttle on speed; it forced a passage through understanding, and understanding tends to add something. That's the link AI severed. You can now ship a faithful 1:1 rip at the speed of an homage, without ever passing through the part where you'd have made it your own. Strip that out and you don't get more inspiration. You get extraction at the speed of a screenshot.

This is enclosure — but notice where the fence actually goes up. Not at the moment of copying; at the moment of silence. The commons of shared play — post the fun thing, watch people build on it — only works while building on it is participation rather than extraction. When a 50-second clip is enough raw material for a shell company to beat you to your own store page, the rational move is to stop sharing. Holmér already has. Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope is watching his work "slurped by AI." The chilling effect isn't a side effect — it's the whole enclosure: the commons closes not because the clones exist, but because the originals go quiet.

Nintendo's fix was to rank its store by revenue instead of downloads — a small tweak to the environment that beats any amount of scolding, because you don't solve an incentive problem by asking the incentivized to be nicer. It's the one lever with any evidence behind it. But it only reaches the shelf. One floor up sits the deeper extraction: the vibecoding model is itself built from the pooled labor of every developer who ever shipped, which makes the clone doubly strip-mined — the 50-second clip on the surface, the training commons underneath. Nintendo can reshape its store. It can't touch the brain being rented one level above, whose owner profits from both. Reshape the store or watch the makers stop making — and know you've only fixed the floor you can see.

The clone economy is running fine. It's the originals that are going extinct.