A few weeks ago I was a bit surprised to see an older game of ours posted to HN, in an iOS version. Except we never developed the iOS version because it was never much of a commercial success on PC.
The pirate developer had copied the whole game wholesale, using the assets from the PC version, and presumably hoping to trade on the name recognition of it. He'd done a pretty good job too, it was getting good ratings. I suppose it was making a bit of money from ads and in-app purchases.
I had to remove links from Wikipedia and I used the forms Wordpress and Apple provide for copyright and trademark infringements. He took it down from the app store following that.
Many of my older games have been cloned in gameplay and in almost exact copies of graphics, musics, and title, but this was the first time someone made a pretty legitimate looking port to a different platform.
I love seeing old games I've played on different systems come to newer platforms, whether that is phones, PC, newer consoles etc...
As I wane nostalgic for this titles I have often wondered if I could convince X developer to let me port their old game to a new platform in agreement for a profit sharing agreement. All of the risk would be on me for putting in the work, but I'm not sure how to go about this.
I certainly would not just copy someone else's game wholesale though. As someone who creates games myself that is just a shitty thing to do.
It's worth asking. In the case I'm talking about it would have been simple since we own all the rights, but for previous game I didn't do as good a job at negotiating, and gave the publishers some contractual rights that would probably make it too complicated.
Especially since the publisher has been sold to a megacorp who no longer care about me.
The pirate developer had copied the whole game wholesale, using the assets from the PC version, and presumably hoping to trade on the name recognition of it. He'd done a pretty good job too, it was getting good ratings. I suppose it was making a bit of money from ads and in-app purchases.
I had to remove links from Wikipedia and I used the forms Wordpress and Apple provide for copyright and trademark infringements. He took it down from the app store following that.
Many of my older games have been cloned in gameplay and in almost exact copies of graphics, musics, and title, but this was the first time someone made a pretty legitimate looking port to a different platform.