Ripoff : http://itunes.apple.com/app/ultimatewar/id382546428?mt=8 ULTIMATE WAR Thread : Iphone and Ipad . Yesterday i saw the game has been featured at Itunes ( US ) Chart . Original game which release April 2010 BUG WAR 2 Sadly i am the developer of BugWar2 which plan to be port at iphone early 2011 Ultimate War has been ripoff totally our game from concept, race, mechanics, and the worse is LEVEL DESIGN. I have post reply to ultimatewar iphone and ipad version at TA forum, to ask developer give some clarification. But they never reply . Im not surprise when knowing gamedeveloper is come from China which Bugwar2 was very phenomenal there ( played more than 5million in chinese onlinegameportal ).
it's not really an original concept-- this was done in Ant Wars, and before that, Galcon. People copy ideas all the time. I do think that the level copycatting is bad though.
I think this is even worse than copycatting... This can be considered Intellectual property theft. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out they disassemble the code from the flash version, port it to C++ / Objective C. Otherwise there is no point to do the level designs exactly the same as the original.
@skymuffin: its okay to copy or cloning the game. Even bugwar is inspired by civilizationwar ( flashgame ) and mushroom war. But the one make we mad is they(idreamsky ) copy our level design , mechanics . Ican say they make reskin games. We should have some share revenue here , lol. Seriously they are robber. They found bugwar2 is have a good score at 4399.com ( chinese biggest online game portal ) . And from there they might start to stole bugwar2. Because they are from china also. @haho: yeah , agree with you bro.
Well, I dont see apple at fault here. There is no way for them to find out that ultimatewar is 'supposedly' a rip off of Bug War unless you report it to them. But ya, considering the dev is from china (where you say its been a hit), and the obvious similarities in the two games, this does look like a ripoff.
Speaking of rip offs, Arn must be furious at these devs for stealing his logo that he invented himself with no help from anyone else, especially not Taito.
While my heart goes out to you, since the level design seems like a ripoff, however the rest of the artwork seems like it qualifies as just another clone. Unless you're a copyright lawyer, it's really hard to know what true copyright infringement is unless and what isn't. I think I heard that changing something about 15% percent makes it your own somewhere but how can you quantify something like that? Anyway, the way to combat this I guess is to make your game better! Good Luck.
Nothing new here... pretty much every single gameloft game is a ripoff popular console title... They even kind of copy the name ..
Moral objections aside, and correct me if I'm wrong but I thought that if you copy a game's idea, mechanics, even level designs, it is still legally acceptable as long as you don't use someone else's source code, or infringe on other IP (graphics, sounds etc) or trademarks (character's names, game name). In terms of software, surely copyright law only protects tangible assets and source code, not ideas or mechanics. So I think Apple can do nothing about this one. I could go and clone Insect Battle 3 tommorow, but use all my own code, graphics, sounds and there would legally be nothing you could do about it. I don't think any of those items can be protected in terms of intellectual property. See Fruit Ninja vs Veggie Samurai. By the way if the copied level design was complex as say the first level in Super Mario World, then perhaps that is contestable, but looking at your game, your actual level designs seems very abstract and it's not inconceivable that someone *could* come up with the same design by pure coincidence. Not to say that this is what happened, but it certainly isn't impossible.
As others have said, copying the game concept is fine. If they didn't copy your art, music, sounds, source code or binary code then there isn't much you can do except be offended (or flattered -- your choice). If you are really interested in crushing them, you could inspect their ipa file and see if they copied your level design files or any other assets from your original game.
