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Jordan-117 2 hours ago

I ran into something like this a few months ago. There was this new indie game, Idols of Ash, that had just released and was blowing up on streaming. I googled it and found what looked like a legit site, idolsofash.fun. It had detailed strategy guides, screenshots, and even an embedded copy of the game. But the embed was buggy, so I searched for the game's itch.io page and left a comment.

Turns out the "fansite" was unaffiliated, and after playing the real game, it became clear the whole site was AI slop. It got gameplay mechanics subtly wrong, the screenshots didn't always relate to the captions, and the embed was a shoddy decompilation pulled from the game's files (easy since it was built with the Godot engine, and presumably where the site's knowledge of the game came from). It's apparently something afflicting a lot of indie devs -- somebody uses Claude or similar to rip your game and spin up a detailed site where you can play it for free. Not sure what the angle is, though, since the site says it's unofficial in the footer, links to the official Itch storefront, and doesn't insert ads or malware. Could just be an overzealous fan, but the whole thing struck me as very strange.