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[Idleyes]

Just came across a crazy post on Reddit, an indie dev had their entire game stolen by a shady company. They outsourced some work, and the contractor ripped off everything and released it as their own. This isn’t just an asset flip; it’s a full-scale theft of months/years of work.

The dev is now struggling with legal action, and it raises serious concerns about outsourcing, contracts, and protecting your work.

What do you think? Have you heard of similar cases? How can devs protect themselves from this kind of shit?

Here is the post, forgive my ignorance if copy pasting the entire post breaks some sort of rule. I just thought it best that users don't have to leave NeoGAF to see the content.

Hey guys,

Hope you are all well. So recently I have released The Backrooms 1998 on Playstation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo switch. I was pretty happy with myself and all that, you know? Been in development for quite a while and being a solo developer and having my game finally on consoles is always awesome to see haha.

Anyway .. Someone commented on one of my videos and violently (big thanks to him!) asked me why am I releasing the same game with it's name changed on consoles and I got a little bit confused. I explained that this game was never on consoles before and I have just released it now and they provided a link to a video - and behold ... long story short this company called "COOL DEVS S.R.L" stole my whole game, ripped it, pasted some bad AI crap on it as a cover, literally made a BAD version of it and just published it on consoles and sold it to trick players into buying it.

They stole the whole game as it is alongside the music, sounds, voice lines and everything else. They only changed the monster and the picture on the frame lol..

Video Link to the fake game:

Video Link to my game:

Also, this is a link to their Nintendo Page so you can see what kind of "games" they do: https://www.nintendo.com/us/search/#cat=gme&f=softwarePublisher&softwarePublisher=COOL DEVS

EDIT: For anyone that's not seeing a difference, sorry I should have provided these images comparation a bit earlier. The reason it feels a bit different is because post processing, and because they made a worst version of it but everything is literally stolen.

EDIT 2: Doing further research and it seems they have also a couple of posts here and are known in the PS5 community. One mentioned is the company that actually approached me. I think they are all basically the same one, but I am not going to point any fingers.

EDIT 3 (Latest): Thank you all for your kind comments, help and everything else. I am currently still seeing what can be done and in contact with my video game lawyer so I will try to keep you updated. We have already submitted a DMCA and working with my publisher on this one - and for now the game is taken down from PlayStation and Xbox but it's still up on Nintendo Switch. In the meantime ... If you can report the fake game, that would be awesome. If you bought it by mistake, please see if you can refund it. If you can share this, that would be awesome as well so more people will know about this and not get tricked. I will try my best in posting this to other subreddits to make more people aware. From what I uncovered, this is a whole big scam where they open a bunch of companies (mostly around the S.R.L) and upload fake games/scam games in order to trick buyers to buy them. Heck, I don't even want the money they stole I just want them to refund them back to the buyers if we can somehow catch them. This ain't right and I think more people needs to be aware of this. It seems they have additional companies (4, 5 or maybe even 6+) that are maybe tied to this scam... This is not fair on developers and not fair on the players. I still can't believe that someone as big as Sony, Xbox and Nintendo are letting this slide. It's sad.

The funny thing is I saw this game before on the store and I LITERALLY spoke about how these scam devs are mostly stealing popular games on steam and uploading them consoles .. and I had no idea it was one of my own game that they stole. I do not understand how consoles platforms allow these type of scams going on and rub it under the carpet. This is hurtful to smaller indie developers, and hurtful to players that gets scammed by buying these games thinking they are real games.

Also, they are doing this with other games.

We have already working on finding out more info about them, and submitted a DMCA request to remove the game off the stores, right now it's down from PlayStation and Xbox but still up on the Nintendo store unfortunately. Hopefully they will also remove it soon as well.

Another important detail that may have ties or not: I got contacted last year by a VERY sketchy publisher wanting to publish my game on consoles. I declined. They were sketchy and after checking their games they had very similar games to this fake company. They are both registered in S.R.L and they got banned from consoles recently.

Could this be the same guys? Stole the game right after I refused to publish it with them. Not sure, but hopefully we can find out.

 

[Idleyes]

Looks like Alanah Pearce talked about it as well.

 

[Soleil rouge]

Hope the dev finds justice. I can only imagine how frustrated he must feel. The game looks pretty cool. I'm actually gonna get a copy thanks to this post since I wasn't even aware of it, and to show support.

 

[FeralEcho]

Looks like Alanah Pearce talked about it as well.

I thought gamers were the worst ones

I feel bad for the dev and I hope they manage to find justice and these thieving scumbags get what they deserve.

Also wtf are the storefronts quality control doing on these platform holders. They should be ashamed and brought into the spotlight just for something like this happening in the first place.

How fucking hard is it to verify the stuff YOU allow on YOUR OWN store???!!!

 

[Idleyes]

I can't Imagine what it feels like breaking your back doing all that work just to have someone else take credit and treat you like you put in no work at all. … Oh wait.

 

[Arachnid]

That is wild. Poor dude.

How does this shit happen on console? I'd get idiocy like this on PC/Steam with it's endless shovelware, but are console quality control guys background checking publishers/devs at all? Apparently this isn't even the first time this publisher has done this.

 

[Idleyes]

Relevant video.