Hi! Two years have passed and Eve of Impact is still being enjoyed by lots of people around our lovely planet. To celebrate I'm sharing Eve of Impact's source code with the rest of the indie community. I learned a lot in the two years I worked on the game and hope to give others the same opportunity by showing what's under the hood. Starting today the code can be found at: github.com/rikschennink/eve-of-impact Cheers and keep on rocking!
Today I found out there's a blatant copy of Eve of Impact roaming around on the AppStore. So, should you be thinking about 'open sourcing' your app, that's something to consider. I've contacted apple using the iTunes Content Dispute page and hope to hear from them soon. Has anyone got any experience with this?
Sorry to hear it. I haven't had it happen to me personally yet (I don't keep source code online for very long and my code is thankfully trash anyway), but I've seen it happen to plenty of people who open source their projects. I've entered the uDevGames contest a few times, which requires you to release your source code online as part of the submission process. Recently someone took the source for SEVERAL entries and uploaded all of them to the Mac App Store. I know one of the developers contacted Apple about it, but it's almost a year later and the games are still up on the store. It also happened to Lugaru. David Rosen (another uDevGames vet) open sourced Lugaru, and the same thing happened. They were able to get it removed and replaced with their own build, thankfully. They talk a bit about it here: http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/02/Counterfeit-Lugaru-on-Apple-s-App-Store-developing. It happens so often that I'd personally never release a game's source code in its entirety. It sucks to have to think that way but that's just where we're at now.
Thanks for your detailed reply, I've contacted Apple and the Dev. I was expecting maybe some form copying but this is just a nearly 100% clone.. It's missing certain functionality (like game center for instance), so I'm wondering how thorough Apple's review process is these days.
Quick reply, might be useful for someone else in the same situation, after contacting Apple it took about a week for the clone to be taken down.
Thats good. I am not surprised someone put it up since you made it available. They probably thought open source = do what you want. I wonder what happens to any revenue they made. Do they get to keep it? I am assuming you aren't getting any.
Arent these clones just reskins of other apps? I dont see whats the fuzz since many apps on the appstore are clones of other apps. Flappy Bird has already many clones.
In this case it was an exact copy, not so much cloning the idea (which is fine) but just duplicating the game and rereleasing it under a different name, which in my opinion, is not fine.