Lookalike games are officially turning on each other. The developer of Needle In A Haystack, a co-op game clearly based on viral game Needle In A Haystack Simulator, claims that the developer of A Game About Needle In A Haystack, another would-be trend cash-in, not only copied the same idea as them but also literally stole their code line for line.
This stems from a now-deleted Steam discussion post for A Game About Needle In A Haystack. This post is gone because the whole game was seemingly removed from Steam about nine days ago, according to SteamDB's update history. An archived version of the store page is still viewable via Wayback Machine.
Fortunately, a post on the videogames subreddit captured this forum message, which was written by Steam user Jahvin, whose profile confirms that they're in a group with Needle In A Haystack developer NoGlyph and are also part of the SteamWorks Development page.
"Stolen code from our game," the post reads. "This game stole our code and thought nobody would notice. I'm the developer of Needle In A Haystack (NoGlyph), another game in this genre, so weigh this review with that in mind."
A brief pause: I wouldn't call finding needles in haystacks a genre, or even a subgenre. It is, at best, one funny idea now surrounded by so many flagrant ripoffs that the creator of the original game joked about adding a mode where you sift through stacks of boxed copycats instead. You can call Vampire Survivors-style roguelikes a subgenre, for example, whether that's Survivors-likes or bullet heaven. But even if your game shares that genre, you wouldn't put Vampire Survivors in the name of your game, or at least not without deserved ridicule.
NoGlyph says "this game ships code copied from our game without our permission," to the point that "our own error messages were left in word for word."
"The copied code matches our demo builds from 20 and 21 September 2026," the message specifies. "This game came out on 16 October. Judge for yourself whether you want to support that."
Two truths coexist here. Cobbling together a copycat game with the same name and then rushing it out before the original can launch is just gross. But there is also a big difference between copying someone's idea and outright stealing their work, though with the accused game nuked from orbit, we can't confirm NoGlyph's claims. Really, the moral of this story comes straight from NoGlyph: "Judge for yourself whether you want to support that."
Clone games, and especially AI-aided clones, are becoming such a problem on Steam that famously quiet operator Valve has been forced to acknowledge the wriggling scourge. Valve business team members owned up to Steam's growing AI slop problem following a Steam Next Fest even that was not short on AI slop, at one point advising devs to make games that are harder to copy.
