Family Time, an upcoming game about raising thousands of children with your wolf girl wife, was recently listed on Steam after the Itch.io release of a demo version of the game became the obsession of some corners of the internet. On October 6, it was the 66th most-wishlisted game on Steam. As of October 16, it’s ranked 46 on the wishlist charts and is still rising rapidly, according to SteamDB. This virality has now earned Family Time a Steam marketplace classic: a near one-to-one ripoff with the exact same name.

Family Time (the genuine article) is the latest release from developer sgthale. The short Steam blurb for the game will tell you most of what you need to hear: “Build a family of thousands of wolf children with your own wolf partner!” So far, it’s getting a lot of mileage out of animal ears and a central gag which I’d describe as competitive childcare.

A ravenous “Wolf Mama” is almost constantly adding children to your family, which is good, since you can command them to help hunt animals or build shelters. However, if you fail to adequately take care of potentially thousands of little wolf kids, you’ll lose the game. It seems like a balancing act of resources, which can loosely be described as a casual colony sim, though judging from the response online, much of it is also an excuse to hear little anime wolf children say “mama” and request “uppies.”

Let us now turn our attention to Family Time by developer Hilly Games. Sgthale says this ripoff has already received a DMCA notice, and even looking past the name, it’s not hard to see why. The copycat’s Steam description reads: “You and your friends crash your car and find yourselves in the wilderness with a fox mama. Raise a family of thousands of fox children with her, and teach them how to farm, build, hunt, and more! 1-4 player experience.” Even its Steam page layout is ripped off.

Hilly Games seems to have hatched a plan to combine the power of co-op with the virality of Family Time to generate infinite money, hiding behind the bulletproof shield of, ‘Nuh-uh, it’s a fox.’ So far, it has only earned scathing criticism. Its Steam discussions page is almost nothing but threads exclaiming “blatant plagiarism” or “hey bro, let me copy your homework.”

Amid a boom in AI-powered ripoffs and recomps, more and more game developers, particularly indies with little to no legal footing or funding, have become wary of having their games copied wholesale, to the point that some devs advise withholding details to make them harder to steal.

Last month, self-explanatory game Needle In A Haystack Simulator had to machete its way through a jungle of copycats that quickly flooded Steam like ants swarming a dropped sandwich. Needle In A Haystack Simulator creator Studio Bitdot apologized for the absolute state of the slop pouring in after their silly little game received more attention than expected.

The copycat Family Time doesn’t disclose any sort of AI use on Steam, but the genuine game actually does. “AI is used for creating concept art, prototype textures, and quick mesh tests that are eventually replaced with real artist graphic designs and hand-tailored models,” says sgthale.

Sgthale’s previous Steam release, the chatbot sandbox game MyRobot, attracted some criticism for its “optional AI features,” though the dev insists “you can host your own AI models for complete privacy. Alternatively you can use our online AI services or mix and match!” The developer’s Patreon, which brings in over $49,000 a month, offers “AI tokens” for MyRobot at two membership tiers.

Why so many game developers don’t want to use generative AI.