Cloning in the mobile market has moved to a new level, turning into theft. And, what is especially curious, theft from large PC projects. The Armed Heroes Online scandal may be the first alarm bell.
The essence of the story is as follows: this week, the developers from Runic Games quite unexpectedly discovered textures, models and sounds from their game Torchlight 2009 release in the Chinese mobile MMO blockbuster Armed Heroes Online.
So a few days after the release of Armed Heroes Online, the development of which was led by EGLS, which had previously also released a cute role-playing game Adventure of Monkey King, Travis Baldree, president of Runic Games, rather mildly stated that the Chinese MMO is very similar to Torchlight.
Baldry also noted, just as gently and intelligently, that this similarity goes somewhat further than typical “cloning” on iOS and Android. As proof, he presented a comparative tablet, in one column of which the characters of his game, and in the other the characters of Armed Heroes Online. Many of the assets presented by the Chinese project are not just similar, but identical to those that were in the Runic game. Moreover, the sound files, which Baldry also presented as additional evidence, were not even recompiled.: they were called, sounded and weighed the same as similar ones in Torchlight.
There have been no official statements from EGLS in response to these accusations for a long time. However, on gaming forums, one of the users, who introduced himself as a representative (sorry for the tautology) of EGLS, created a whole thread on Touch Arcade, in which he accused Baldry of baseless statements.
Moreover, this representative noted that Runic Games itself is no stranger to plagiarism. According to him, the authors of Torchlight stole the project from the developers of WildTangent, known for the Fate role-playing game. A funny statement, since the same Baldry was one of the leading developers of this game, and WildTangent is still distributing Torchlight. Whether the mysterious representative knew about this is a big question.
Anyway, today ELGS removed Armed Heroes Online from the App Store and announced that it plans to “modify” part of the game to resolve this “controversial” situation.