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I'm a dev who has been working on my game for 2 years and my game title got stolen on Steam and they plan to release before I do. What should I do? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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I have been working for over 2 years on my game and 4 months ago I finally released my demo. Yesterday, while searching on Steam I found a game with EXACTLY the same title and very similar premise. The page was created in May or June 2026 and they aim to release in August 2026. Here are some of descriptions I use on my Steam page:

  • A first-person psychological thriller with a heavy atmosphere and elements of liminal horror.

  • Uncover the stories of your subjects by studying their personal items and darkest secrets before making life-or-death choices.

  • Will you sacrifice your own beliefs to obey HIS authority?

For comparison here is how they describe their game:

"Will you obey orders, or resist? In this first-person psychological horror game, you sit across from subjects and must investigate evidence to determine who is telling the truth, and decide their fate."

My game is planned to release in October or whenever it's completely playtested and polished. I'm not sure what I can do as this has never happened before, what do you think is my best course of action here?

For reference my game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2719670/The_Milgram_Experiment

And the copy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4777470/The_Milgram_Experiment/

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[–] 61 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

During development, PUBG's developers worked closely with Epic for technical support of the Unreal Engine. At the time, Epic was developing a multiplayer sandbox game that focused on building fortifications and area defense. It was a little-known title called Fortnite.

PUBG launched into early access in March of 2017 and was an immediate massive success. Only half a year later, Epic launched Fortnite Battle Royale, which was a massive departure from the original Fortnite concept. It had the same genre as PUBG, it had the same game rules, the gameplay was nearly identical; and it retained barely anything from the original core gameplay loop of fortification-building. You'd have to be willfully ignorant on the level of flat earthers to think it's all just an innocent coincidence.

I don't think Epic directly stole any of PUBG's works, but I am absolutely certain beyond doubt that they took "inspiration" from PUBG the same way Richard Wagner took inspiration from Germanic mythology when writing his opera. Whatever abhorrent eldritch abomination Fortnite may be today, it started its life as a complete rip-off.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago*

    What was unique about the PUBG / Unreal Engine situation is that Epic had only used the Unreal Engine for things like Unreal Tournament. They have a large set of customers who license their engine. When PUBG, which was originally created as an Arma mod (like DayZ), was moved to a standalone company by PlayerUnknown, they began looking for engines to rapidly rebuild what made Arma special. The bullet physics, look of the engine, environment and so on. They chose the Unreal engine.

    PUBG took off as soon as the demo was released. There was an ongoing business relationship where PUBG developers worked with the Unreal engine developers to add features to the developer tools, and changes to the engine, to support features that PUBG needed. These changes of course were merged back into the main Unreal engine branch, and this allowed Epic to take the work for a battle royale game from the business association with PUBG, and rapidly cash in on the battle royale craze with Fortnite. It probably only took them 14 days to create it with all the work that PUBG had funded with modfying the engine too.

    That's what is different about this, versus just a company creating a clone. It was a dangerous thing to do from Epic's point of view too because I'm sure there could be cases where other customers could see the engine company help them create an initial product, and then use that work to rip them off with a clone.

    From a business practice standpoint, this is similar to what Amazon did with Amazon Basics. Where Amazon became the main, or only, online marketplace for many products. They ran reports and data to find which third party products were selling well on their site... And then they set up stuff like Amazon Basics to essentially copy them. Eventually due to the price and shipping advantage, and the Amazon name, the original products get replaced. And it feeds into Amazons profits.

    Now with AI, all someone has to do is find out which games are popular and then drop some money on tokens to try to vibe code a competing game.

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  • [+] -8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Pubg wasnt the first or only battle royal game. There were others that were blowing up before and during. Fortnite season 1 wasnt at all a rip off. They implemented a simple game type popular in several games at the time. Pubg got greedy and thought they owned the entire genre because they were blowing up. Theres no evidence that fortnite battle royal was released due to snooping by epic staff.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Name a battle royale game that released before PUBG

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I’m curious how they’d respond to this… as far as I know, there were a handful of mods for other games that kinda did the concept but no actual games, certainly not the way any games do BR after PUBG’s release. H1Z1? But not really, as PUBG’s creator did a lot of that…

    the closest things would probably be last-man-standing shooters but those aren’t BR games.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Minecraft hunger games, h1z1, the culling. Just going through a few shooters and search hunger games or battle royal brings up game modes from way before pubg for quite a few games, arma, half life, runescape. Hell theres even a movie with the same concept.

    Then you look at pubg and you see how many battle royal games released in the same few months and you think they copied pubg? Thats impossible. You cannot copy a game in a few months. Its more likely they were all looking at h1z1 which was very popular and topping twitch with all the major streamers playing it. Then most of the following games put some kind of spin on the formula and made it something completely different.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Minecraft hunger games, h1z1, the culling.

    These were all created after the original PUBG, which was an Arma mod created similar to DayZ. This existed as what we know of battle royale before any other clone, and it was also created by PlayerUnknown.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago

    Not true Minecraft was earlier by a few years and blew up a few years before the arma mod. But reading more of the lore it does seem like Brendan greene was involved in battle realistic style royals since very early days and was heavily involved I'm all the major genre hits. But that still doesnt make fortnite a copy.

    Reading through the lore player Brendan Greene worked on h1z1 but ultimately the company that decided to make pubg say that they saw how popular h1z1 was and decided to reach out to Brendan Greene to work on the game that became pubg.

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