32
votes
Indie dev baffled after acquaintance clones his game, puts it on Steam, and acts like it's no big deal: 'Happens every day homie'
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- Authors
- Tyler Wilde
- Published
- Jun 5 2024
- Word count
- 622 words
Seems scummy on a personal level, but since the assets are original there’s not much of a copyright claim for the original dev.
Copyright law is more nuanced than "did you literally copy the code/assets", as evidenced by the Pac-Man and Tetris lawsuits and a bunch of others. If you recreate a game and recreate the look and feel of that game, and you tell the original developer you cloned their game, you probably don't have a great defense against a claim of copyright infringement.
There are tons of books about kids who go to magic school, but if your book is just the same plot and the same details as Harry Potter you're going to be in trouble even if you rewrote the whole thing.
The court of public opinion is probably the best route for the original dev since lawsuits cost money small time indie devs probably don't have too much to spare to risk it.
And that seems to have worked to a degree. The copycat game's dev is currently at least getting some flack on their other release by the way of review bombs, people are calling them out with the reviews. There's a demo also apparently out and what I quickly gathered people are also mass reporting that. But it might just be a few vocal individuals, you never really know.
Anyway, I find this a healthy topic to share every time this happens. With indie devs it just sucks that design can be so easily copied and I get it, that's how it should be. But it's probably impossible to be an upcoming "legit" indie dev where you should keep your designs under wraps until it hits 1.0 or otherwise you risk getting sidelined by a copycat. And how do you grow as a game dev since you kinda also need feedback to get better.