Vlambeer to fight latest cloned game release

Ridiculous Fishing developer Vlambeer has approached Apple and Google about removing a game from their app stores that apparently clones its game Luftrausers, currently in development for the PlayStation Vita.

Rubiq Labs released mobile title SkyFar on April 10 on Apple's App Store, a game that looks visually similar to Vlambeer's Luftrausers.

"We obviously endured a bit of a scare when news arrived of Luftrausers being cloned and released ahead of our own release schedule by another developer. 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," said Vlambeer in a statement to Eurogamer.

"We simply can't deal with the stress of another cloned game, so we've gotten in touch with Apple and Google to see if there is a way for the issue to be resolved without us getting involved in yet another clone war. 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 and into the marketplace."

Vlambeer's Flash game Ridiculous Fishing was cloned before the developers could release an iOS version of the game. While the team accepts that products in the games industry see a lot of iteration, there's a difference between being inspired by a game and shamelessly ripping it off, they said.

"Ultimately, we refuse to accept this as a part of our industry. We believe that showing our games to our fans early is a better way of developing Vlambeer games than keeping secrets and just dropping the final result on people when it's done.

"Now that we've got the chance, we'd also like to take a few seconds to use the clone as an argument towards why Luftrausers is almost certainly not coming to mobile - we just can't find a way to make it work as well as it should on touchscreen devices. Luftrausers is still hitting PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 3 and Playstation Vita - with the latter being the most interesting device for those of you who would like to play Luftrausers on the go. We've been wrapping up development and we are on schedule to release the game later this spring."