Meccha Chameleon is already drowning in AI-assisted ripoffs on Steam, Fortnite, and Roblox

Meccha Chameleon, the indie hide-and-seek painting game that launched just over a month ago, is already being cloned across multiple platforms. The most blatant offender is Scribble Bunny on Steam — a game that copies the core concept almost beat for beat, swaps the clay figures for bunny-eared models, and even replicates Meccha Chameleon's UI. Its Steam page carries an AI disclosure, which explains how a near-identical game materialised so quickly after the original.

Scribble Bunny isn't alone. Chameleon Hide and Seek has appeared in Fortnite, and Roblox — reliably the fastest platform for this kind of thing — already hosts a small fleet of clones: Paint to Survive, Paint and Seek, Paint or DIE, and the memorably named Paint or Oof. All of them lift the same premise: hide by painting your character to match the background, while hunters with paint guns try to flush you out. None of them appear to meaningfully improve on the original.

This is a pattern that keeps repeating. REPO had a clone surface on the Nintendo eShop, and Peak's developers got so fed up they publicly said they'd rather players pirate their game than touch what they called a "microtransaction Roblox slop ripoff." The economics are straightforward — when a small indie game breaks through on Steam, it becomes a template for anyone willing to copy the concept and ship fast, especially now that AI tools compress the turnaround time dramatically.

Meccha Chameleon has reached 15 million players despite the noise, so the original is clearly doing fine. Still, the speed at which these clones are appearing — some within weeks of a game's launch — makes it harder for players to find the real thing and harder for developers to own the moment their game actually hits.