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For Glass Gecko Games, the developers of fishing game Scale the Depths, blowing up wasn't all good news. After winning a game jam in 2024 the title became the victim of countless AI rip-offs. The official version released this May, and its creators say it may have to thank the clones after all.
The game's lead artist, Serpexnessie, took to Reddit and laid out the highs and lows of development. The story begins in an almost dream scenario for developers. Scale the Depths won the 2024 GMTK game jam. Serpexnessie explains that honor was probably because of the core gameplay loop, "It was incredibly addictive," they write, "and we pretty much hit gold with it." Following the jam, Glass Gecko Games made a browser based version of the game (this is important), saw two to three thousand views a week on itch.io, and surpassed 7000 wishlists by the end of the year.
That's when things went south.
While some unofficial versions begin popping up the real problem arose when the team noticed clones were ripping the browser-based version of the game in its entirety then running it through AI filters. The number of clones became so large that, "It eventually became unrealistic for us to try to take all of these down without significant effort and taking time away from development," writes Serpexnessie.
The clones even ran ads that used the real version of the game's gameplay, pulled from YouTubers playing Scale of the Depths. The only silver lining, according to Serpexnessie, was that the clones were poorly rated because they were crammed with ads and microtransactions.
While the AI clone problem continued, Glass Gecko eventually secured a publisher. A demo was released on Steam in 2025, which raised interest but also led to even more clones. Right before release, Scale of the Depths had about 175,000 wishlists on Steam says Serpexnessie.
Funny enough, Serpexnessie partially credits the AI clones with the game's popularity. "Those stolen copycats ended up becoming advertisements for our game," they write, "This was quite literal sometimes, because some of them paid for ads that featured gameplay from OUR ORIGINAL GAME."
Serpexnessie ends the Reddit post with some main takeaways from Scale of the Depths development. Most of them are genuine pieces of advice for developers, but it does end with the evergreen statement, "AI SUCKS."
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