I will not be sharing the name in the post because I don’t want to start any drama
The Problem
Heyo, so I recently came up with a name for my game but I failed to realize that there’s a game that already uses that name. To make matters worse, the existing game has a very similar theme to the game I plan on creating. I really want to use this name because I’ve already started creating certain assets that use the name and I don’t want to recreate them. Also, I believe that the name suits the game well.
Is this moral?
The game in question has between 20 and 35 current players; with a total of almost 384k visits. Their game was created by a small team of developers. I’ve never played their game because you have to be a member of their group and they haven’t accepted my join request. From looking at their thumbnails and from the game play I’ve seen on YouTube, I can tell that either the game was either rushed or that the developers are inexperienced.
Here’s where the question of morality comes into play…
Although I’m a solo developer, I’ve been dabbling in game development since 2013. Not to sound condescending but I believe my building and scripting abilities objectively surpass their dev team collectively. I also have ties with excellent GFX artists and a large sum of robux that I can throw into marketing the game. So essentially, I can create an objectively better game, with better GFX and I’m assuming I have enough robux to have my game surpass theirs in popularity. Would that be morally wrong though? What if they’re just a group of hobbyist that came together and tried their best to create a game. I don’t want to be the guy that swoops in and ruins what they have going on. At the same time I’m passionate about this project, I’ve came this far in development; I can’t just throw all that away.
It’s possible that I’m just overthinking this. I want to hear how the dev community feels about this, please leave your opinion!
As a developer who has had someone “steal” my game name and concept, I urge you to please just come up with a new name. Even if the concept is the same, just make the name different. If you have to recreate a few assets, it’s not the end of the world. When the group stole the game name from me, I felt very sad and lost a lot of motivation for developing for a couple of weeks.
Imo, its hard to tell if a game outright stole your game name. And even if it is easy to tell, its hard to know the moral standpoint from it.
If we’re going to be real, no game is original.
Among us is inspired by mafia (was literally called space mafia once)
Minecraft Hunger Games is well, inspired by hunger games?
Apex Legends to another game, etc etc.
Valorant to CS:GO-
You get the point, games are gonna get similar at times, and games might even have similar names.
It only gets into legal territory when you outright steal their ideas/property.
Example, games that take CS:GO assets are very much at legal to illegal territory.
Same goes for games that steal model/texture assets (take for example among us copies).
That is similar to my thought process. I believe that since the name’s of the games are the same that lends to the fact that the gameplay would be similar also.
Example:
If two developers created two different games that were both called “Rainbow Obby” you could assume that both games would be about completing an obby that has rainbow colors.
If the idea is generic, it can be basically written off as a coincidence.
Example:
Murder Mystery
Twisted Murder
Murder Madness
All of them got murder them in the game.
(lets not forget that all 3 of those games aren’t actually original-, no hate towards creators, but gmod is a true lad indeed-)
Same goes for obby games.
However, the way the idea is portrayed is how it can be told from the difference of gameplay.
For example, murder madness has a sort of different mechanic to twisted murder and murder mystery with a heavy focus of throwing and precision.
Twisted murder gives a lacy daisy attack with various skills and purchases to choose from to enhance and change gameplay.
And murder mystery, the good ol classic stab and slash that lasted through it all
However, if the ideas are outright similar, same style, same gameplay, same everything, you’re in a tough situation of legal issues.
I know this sounds a little cheesy, but maybe something like “The Open World”, or “World of Wonder”, or something similar. My ideas aren’t too good but I definitely don’t mind if you take them.
