SkyFar developer harassed for allegedly ripping off Vlambeer

SkyFar, a dog-fighting warplane game released recently on the App Store, has caused some problems for two studios. But this isn't the first time that indie developer Vlambeer has dealt with the issue of cloning.

A couple years ago, Gamenauts launched Ninja Fishing — a clone of Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing, which was released in an earlier form as Radical Fishing — on the App Store before Vlambeer had a chance to enter the market.

Understandably, Vlambeer is taking this suspected attack even more seriously, and so is Twitter, whose members have defended Vlambeer and criticized opposing developer Rubiq Lab in tweets. The team says it's being harassed by the community.

Vlambeer's Rami Ismail told Polygon that Rubiq denies that its game is a clone of Vlambeer's Luftrausers, which is coming to PlayStation 3, PS Vita, PC, Linux, and Mac this spring. Rubiq said "we really dont think it links your game at all [sic]."

Ismail said, "This time, however, it's not 'just' the idea of the game that has been cloned, but also the visual style. This gives us much more room to fight the whole thing, and we fully intend to."

He continued, "We're more than happy to see games inspired by our works, and we encourage anyone to practice game design and development by recreating personal favorites — but the clones of both Ridiculous Fishing and Luftrausers take 'inspiration' a step too far [into] the marketplace.

"We're extremely exhausted from dealing with cloning, and even though this is an important issue to stand up against, we had hoped that we could just release a game without the cloning debate happening for once."

Ismail has contacted both Apple and Google to work out a solution and avoid "yet another clone war."

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