Ketchapp stole my iPhone game | Hacker News Reader

Ketchapp stole my iPhone game

medium.com

88 pointsmu_killnine25 comments

Are Ketchapp really "the 2048 guys"?

My memory of the situation was that 2048 was a Web game, which took off among a large group of people that Threes didn't reach (people without iPhones, people who weren't going to pay for a small puzzle game, and people who just wanted to play a quick game on the Web).

And because it was open source and had an incredibly untrademarkable name, a bunch of app developers made mobile clones of it. I assume that Ketchapp was one of them and that the creator of 2048 was entirely uninvolved. Correct me if I'm wrong. It seems to me that the title should be "Some guys who cloned 2048 also cloned another game".

I'm dismayed that someone making a fun, free Web game and expecting nothing in return can turn into a symbol of evil cloning in the mobile game industry. Are we returning to the mindset where open source is seen as maliciously undercutting commercial software?

You are absolutely right. 2048 is not by ketchapp, but by a guy called Gabriel Cirulli [1]. He did later make an official 2048 app.

[1] http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/

I think they were the first to put it on the App Store, and if not they were at least the most popular. If you search 2048, they are the first app.

The author notes on his r/gamedev post that actually he got the name wrong. Ketchapp isn't the original 2048 guys but rather a group that knocked off the concept (a foreboding allusion to what happens to the author). That said, a lot of folks knocked off the threes concept. Still, I found it ironic in this context.

> The author notes on his r/gamedev post that actually he got the name wrong.

Great, but he should correct it in the post, so as not to bring innocent people into his scuffle.

The timing is suspect and the response of "it just isn't fun" followed by them publishing the same exact game is also shady.

Media, games included, using the same sounds isn't unheard of. How many "bwwrrrrr" sounds have you heard in movie trailers? You know the one [0]. The typography is also different. Though the button colors and icon set are the same. How popular is that icon set though? I don't know enough about app dev. to judge on that.

I'll give my benefit of the doubt to the author because of [1] though. That gives off a bad smell - stolen game or not. Kudos for turning it into motivation to try and educate people and fix a problem.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=830I9w7I7wM

[1] Rejecting a game for concept then publishing that same concept.

I can't comment on them stealing it - your evidence hinges on them being "app cow"? - but the concept predates you all by years, it's possible ketchapp have nothing to do with similar games - http://www.kongregate.com/games/Gnomlab/pong-360.

You can't deny that both games look very similar. Coincidence, maybe, but if App Cow truly has a connection to Ketchapp and if they did have a "placeholder" app that they patched over, it at least looks fishy.

No, but if it's a different implementation of the same concept then I'd say that's a time-honored tradition in the game industry. Ideas/concepts for a game are not that valuable in and of themselves.

Both games also look similar to this one published months before them - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.wastelands..... If pastels were 'in' when that flash developer made that version it would look very similar too. I have a friend who made a completely different game that looks similar too - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.net.papers....

I think better evidence is still needed to connect ketchapp and app cow, without that this could just be developers piling onto a simple mechanic + popular aesthetic.

You should have just published the game yourself. Flappy bird didn't use any game publisher.

If that had happened, I wonder if we'd have seen this post being made by the creator of Pongo Pongo instead? The tangled, twisted world of app development, eh?

You never know what can happen in the internet world.

Ketchapp had nothing to do with creating 2048 game, other than publishing it to the App Store. It was created by Gabriele Cirulli. Here's his blog post re: the aftermath: http://gabrielecirulli.com/articles/2048-success-and-me

Ketchapp just published it to the app store (maybe with some customizations).

The title is completely unfair to the original creator of 2048.

The article doesn't exactly make this clear... is the claim that they stole his code, or that they just used the same concept to make their own similar game?

To me it sounded like they stole his concept and design. He added them on Test Flight which will share an app for testing so it may be possible to reverse engineer it (I don't know) but I imagine they built their own game based on what he shared with them. Be careful what IP you share with others.

Well if his "concept" was "pong, but in a disc" I'm not really sure there's all that much to defend there.

Looks more like he is advertising his "course" and have an email list to market his games.

"Matt Akins is the founder of Tapped, an online community built around iOS game development education. Learn how to rapidly design, develop, and distribute iOS games without making the same mistakes he has like getting his game stolen by the assholes who cloned Threes."

The author comments here on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3466i9/the_2048_guy...

In particular, he misattributed Ketchapp as the "2048 guys."

What is the point of any publisher in the 21st century anyways?

The difficulty of cutting through the noise in the App Store, I'd guess. It's really hard to find things you might like outside of the "most popular" and recommendations (which obviously also is biased toward popular games).

Visibility and connections. Review sites will look at apps form top publisher first, and publishers have the connections that can get you featured on the app stores.

I'd be DMCA'ing the shit out of anyone and everyone i could, make their life a living hell.

i'm sad this isn't on the frontpage

Why? It's a personal sob story rather than an article on how to protect your IP (questionable in this case) while attempting to market your software.

Rule #1? Never show anything to anyone without a non-disclosure.

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