Apple's seemingly deleted a selection of suspect iOS games from the App Store, which look to be duplicating popular game designs.
Many of the clones were developed by indie coder Anton Sinelnikov, who's now had 61 of his 70 creations deleted.
Some of these plagiarised apps had managed to sell their way to the top of the App Store chart, it's claimed, though there's no explanation from Apple on how they managed to get approved in the first place.
The issue of game 'cloning' on the iPhone and iPad store was raised last week, when a pair of developers accused mobile giant Zynga of copying their successful titles.
Comments
14 comments so far...
TheMopFromMars on 6 Feb '12 said:
I wonder if they will delete some of Zynga's games.
FixBeatGames on 6 Feb '12 said:
exactly what i was thinking lol. they do realize angry birds isn't the first game which involves throwing things at constructions to destroy them, right?!!
BenThomasFoster on 6 Feb '12 said:
I don't know if this should be allowed really. if that developer made the games from scratch and not plagerised any code then it should be OK even if "his" ideas are sleaze and un-moral. I like the analogy of the recent Maserati Cars and Jaguar Car. they look the same on the outside but they are very different on the inside, yes maserati copied off jaguar but at end of the day jag also copied aston martin(usually a flash game online)
gmcb007 on 6 Feb '12 said:
Emm why haven't they kicked out Angry Birds then?
jm3811 on 6 Feb '12 said:
Right now I'd like to be able to add my wife as friend in my smurf village but she has an iPad and I am on Android and this stupid game is not cross-platform apparently so why the hell did they ask for my Facepalm account and who's gonna water my plants? The neighbor?
dicky1993 on 6 Feb '12 said:
next they will pull their rip off products?
TheMopFromMars on 6 Feb '12 said:
No idea. Angry birds is a clone of crush the castle, I remember playing that before angry birds was released.
gmcb007 on 6 Feb '12 said:
Exactly. AB may have been copyrighted but they make their money from copying. A shallow profit if anything and it's unfair that others who make a similar game are branded as rip offs instead.
TheMopFromMars on 6 Feb '12 said:
I see what you mean. I bet the makers of crush the castle are kicking themselves. Angry Birds has reached 500 million downloads, the most downloaded game of all time and it's a clone with a different art style. Wikipedia says it "took inspiration" from crush the castle, but did Zynga take inspiration from the games they cloned? Nope because they were not going to develop those games anyway, they just made a clone because the original game got popular.
jm3811 on 6 Feb '12 said:
Personally I would welcome a series of I crush the castle. And I'd keep playing AB despite their ads on Android.
silent moose on 6 Feb '12 said:
reads article, quickly halts production of cut the string and infinity fork
TheLastDodo on 6 Feb '12 said:
Because AB makes them s**t tons of cash silly
MysticR on 6 Feb '12 said:
Pretty much every product in the world is simply a newer version of something that came before. Dyson may have patented bagless technology (among other things) in vacuums, but did they invent a device to suck up dust? No.
Angry Birds as a vague concept is not original, but Rovio have made it into their product; it has its own personality, if a game can have such a thing. At least Angry Birds tries to be as different as it can; Angry Ninja Birds fails at the first hurdle.
billysastard on 7 Feb '12 said:
so, they are putting gameloft out of business then?
no, thought not.