Indie dev accuses Golden Horn Studios of cloning his potato peeling game with AI

Indie developer Rado Klasa went public on September 21 accusing Golden Horn Studios of ripping off his game 1,000,000 Potatoes — a first-person, physics-based potato peeling game set in a Soviet military warehouse — after a trailer for the studio's nearly identical title Potato Please surfaced the same day.

Klasa originally built the concept for the GMTK game jam and posted about it back in July, deliberately holding off on a Steam page to polish the mechanics. When game consultant Indie Game Joe shared the Potato Please trailer on September 20, Klasa immediately flagged the similarities: both games are first-person and physics-based, both involve peeling potatoes, both are set in a Soviet-style military environment, and both carry a horror-adjacent tone. "I held off on my Steam page to obsessively polish the mechanics... and it just got cloned and shipped. Probably mostly with a simple AI prompt," Klasa wrote on X. He called it "every indie dev's worst nightmare" and vowed to keep going: "The original version will always have the quality players actually deserve."

Golden Horn Studios pushed back directly on X, denying any knowledge of Klasa's game before the accusations went public. The studio claims Potato Please originated independently from a potato meme and video circulating in their own community, and offered to share project files and development documentation to prove it. "Similar concepts are not evidence of copying," they wrote, adding that real developers spent significant time designing, modelling, and coding the game. The overlap here is striking enough that the independent origin story is a hard sell — potato peeling games set in Soviet military barracks are not exactly a crowded genre, and the visual and mechanical similarities go well beyond a shared premise.

Steam curators are already tagging Potato Please as an "AI imagery Rip off of 1,000,000 Potatoes," and the community has largely rallied behind Klasa, with players promising to wishlist his game. Players remain unconvinced by Golden Horn's explanation, with the coincidence of the Soviet setting, physics peeling, and horror tone proving too much for most to swallow. Whether Golden Horn follows through on releasing their development files could determine how this plays out — but for now, the court of public opinion has already delivered its verdict.